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

Image credit: National Centre for Cultural Competence

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

Transcript (coming soon)

Sunjoo Kim (middle) graduating from her Master of Research

Whenever I write an email to a professor, there is one question lingering in my mind: Should I say “Dr + Last Name” or just “First Name”?

It might look like a simple question, but it exemplifies a deeper cultural dilemma to me.

When I was in university back in Korea, a professor from the U.S. asked us to call him by his first name, not the last name or job title. I understood what I had to do, but was it easy for me? Not really. It took me a while to get used to it. This is because the culture of address terms is quite different in Korea.

In English, first names can be used regardless of age and hierarchical dynamics in relationships without causing offense. This, however, hardly happens in Korean unless they are close friends of the same age. To be specific, addressing someone older and superior by their first name is impossible, unless I want to pick a fight. Likewise, age and social hierarchy are the core elements that have been deeply rooted in Korean society, playing a salient role in the choice of address terms.

Instead of first names, Koreans tend to choose alternatives including kinship terms and professional titles. Kinship terms, such as unni (older sister, 언니) and oppa (older brother, 오빠) are extensively used to non-family members. Professional titles are used as a generic way to address someone politely. For example, I can call someone sacangnim (CEO, 사장님). It does not necessarily mean that he or she is the head of the company. Rather, it is one of the most neutral and polite titles I can use. All choices depend on the nature of the interpersonal relationship.

The complexity of the societal and cultural characteristics reflected in the use of address terms poses a significant challenge in translation. The challenge gets exacerbated in subtitle translation, combined with spatial and temporal limitations. Multiple layers of relational dynamics and cultural nuances can easily get lost and simplified in translation. In relation to this, for my Master of Research, I explored subtitle translation of Korean address terms.

More Than Meets the Eye: Indexical Analysis on Korean Address Terms in Subtitle Translation

Abstract: Cultural references are one of the most significant challenges in subtitle translation. One example is Korean address terms due to their complexity and multiple dimensions reflecting societal and cultural values in Korea. In this vein, this thesis investigates the translation of address terms in English subtitles of one Korean drama, within the theoretical framework of indexicality as conceptualised by Michael Silverstein (1976). Adopting power, solidarity and intimacy (Lee & Cho, 2013) as an analytical prism, the thesis examines the complex interplay of each dimension to construct the non-referential indexicality of the address terms. The drama, Misaeng (Incomplete Life), which portrays corporate settings where Korean societal cultural values are well-reflected, was chosen for the data set. Thirty cases of address terms within a variety of interpersonal relationships from the drama were chosen to explore the formulation of indexical meaning and how it is transferred into the English subtitles. By adopting qualitative analysis focusing on both linguistic and multimodal elements, results from the study underscore the dynamic fluctuations of indexicality depending on the contextual dimension of the interaction, which makes the translation challenging in reflecting this whole range of indexical meanings. This leads to the inevitable indexical meaning gaps between the original and the subtitles. However, non-linguistic elements contribute to understanding of the indexical meaning, which mitigates the limitations of linguistic translation. The findings indicate that, although the translation of Korean address terms has been domesticated to be aligned with the target culture, this practice of domestication may change in a direction to keep the cultural references as much as possible. This study suggests the need for a subtitle translation direction that can preserve indexicality for global audiences to have a better cross-cultural experience, with relevance to the global attention to Korean cultural products.

You can download and read the full thesis from here.

Translation helps bridge language barriers. With the global rise of Korean culture, now is the time to move towards a translation practice preserving the original cultural depth as much as possible. This will open global audiences’ eyes to the unseen layers and help them genuinely enjoy the culture, as there is so much more than meets the eye.

References

Lee, K., & Cho, Y. (2013). Beyond ‘power and solidarity’: Indexing intimacy in Korean and Japanese terms of address. Korean Linguistics, 15(1), 73-100. https://doi.org/10.1075/kl.15.1.04lee

Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. Meaning in anthropology. https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/Courses/ParisPapers/Silverstein1976.pdf

Flag for autism rights (Image credit: Deviantart)

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the Nowruz traditions involves leaping over bonfires to rid oneself of pain and sorrow (Image credit: Borna News)

As people in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, India, Iran, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan prepare to celebrate Nowruz, there is a palpable sense of excitement and anticipation in the air. Nowruz, which literally means “new day” in Persian, marks the beginning of spring and the start of the new year for many peoples across the Middle East and Central Asia.

Nowruz is celebrated on the vernal equinox, typically falling on March 20 or 21, and lasts for thirteen days.

Rooted in the Zoroastrian tradition, Nowruz is a time of renewal, hope, and cultural celebration that transcends borders and unites people across the Persianate world.

Nowruz Down Under

Although in the Southern hemisphere Nowruz falls in the beginning of autumn rather than spring, still it takes on a special significance for Iranian Australians as we bring the traditions and customs of our homeland to this distant land.

The Haft-Sin table, with its seven symbolic items representing rebirth and renewal, takes centre stage in our celebrations. From sprouts symbolising growth to apples representing beauty and health, each item holds deep cultural significance and is a reminder of the values we cherish.

Spirit of Nowruz

Haftsin Table in the Victorian Parliament (Image Credit: Australian Iranian Society of Victoria)

Poetry and music fill our homes with joy and inspiration during Nowruz. Poets and writers have long captured the essence of this festival in their verses, expressing themes of renewal and spiritual growth. Music, too, plays a vital role, with traditional songs and melodies evoking a sense of nostalgia and connection to our roots.

At the heart of Nowruz is the spirit of unity and solidarity. As Iranians around the world come together to celebrate, we are reminded of the bonds that unite us as a community.

Solidarity with the people in Iran

Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran in 1979, the regime has suppressed the nation’s multifaceted and ancient culture under a theocratic dictatorship. However, for Iranians, both inside Iran and in the diaspora, Nowruz is not just a celebration of a new year. It is a celebration of our rich cultural heritage, resilience in the face of adversity, and hope for a brighter future.

So, this Nowruz, as an Australian-Iranian, deeply concerned about the future of Iran, I unite with my compatriots across the globe who embrace and celebrate Nowruz. For us, at this moment in history, Nowruz is more than just a cultural tradition. It is a unifying force and a symbol of Iranian-ness and unity, with a rich history that predates the current regime.

At the outset of Nowruz, we remember Mahsa Amini, and many other young people whose tragic deaths during the recent protests against the injustices in Iran have ignited a renewed sense of solidarity among Iranians both inside Iran and in the diaspora. Their memories remind us of the importance of standing together in the face of adversity and working towards a brighter future.

My music

This Nowruz, it’s fitting to dedicate to everyone two of my songs, that encapsulate the longing for freedom, love, and peace, “Hamseda” (Sympathizer) and “Eshghe-Bimarz” (Endless Love), which were created by a group of artists inside Iran and performed by myself.

Happy Nowruz! نوروزتان پیروز

Ramadan Lights on Coventry Street

Ramadan in London is exceptional in many ways. As the centre of a former Empire which still exerts a global pull on its former subjects and their descendants, London has been at the heart of a wave of migrations since the times of the British Raj. Initiatives inclusive of Muslims have normalised the Muslim presence. While there is no doubt that islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate is on the rise in Britain, too, the relative ease and acceptance of being a Muslim in the public space is manifested here in pragmatic ways, such as the widespread availability of halal food.

London’s Ramadan celebrations are in a class of its own. London’s Ramadan illuminations of 2023 were a testament to the diversity, inclusivity and vibrancy of London. When London’s first ever Ramadan lights were switched on by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the Lord Mayor of Westminster, Hamza Taouzzale, Muslims felt acknowledged in the public space generating a sense of understanding and promoting an equitable society.

Open iftars are another example. These have taken place for decades in Britain, and Muslims and non-Muslims break the fast together in public spaces. Sharing meals with strangers is a powerful experience for people of all faiths. Open iftars are incredibly important to get visibility and also to have communitywide engagement with each other, as is the essence of Islam. Some of the picturesque and breathtakingly beautiful environments where open iftars have taken place include Victoria and Albert Museum, Trafalgar Square, and Cambridge University.

Ramadan 2023 marked a particularly significant moment in British history as Muslim leaders were for the first time invited to the official residence of the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street for an iftar meal.

Corporate Europe is starting to celebrate Ramadan, too. Furniture retailer IKEA, for instance,  launched the GOKVÄLLÅ collection this year with clear connections to the Ramadan spirit.

My Ramadan

The visibility of Ramadan in public shapes personal experiences of Ramadan, too. For me, we start preparing for Ramadan months ahead by getting the house ready, shopping, and cooking. What I aim to do is complete mundane task before the start of the Holy Month, so that there is more time for spiritual reflection and Quran reading.

Ramadan lights in the streets and open iftars remind me of the beauty of our human diversity through these newly formed traditions in Europe.

As the Quran states, “Among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the difference of your languages and colours. There are indeed signs in that for those who know” (30:22).

I wish all who celebrate and observe the month of Ramadan a time full of divine blessings! Ameen.

Image 1

Like many parents of teenagers, I delightedly welcome any occasion to connect with a generation I don’t always understand and that doesn’t always understand me. As a Muslim family in Australia, this inter-generational exchange is often characterized by questions from my children about our Islamic practices and how we talk about these with our friends who are not Muslim. One of the most questioned of these practices is Ramadan, the month in the Islamic calendar when Muslims abstain from consumption of food and drink during the day.

So, when my children began texting me a range of Ramadan-themed memes, I was elated to find something that we could relate to and laugh at together. Image 1 has always topped the list of our favorites.

There are many versions of this meme, and it owes its popularity to the fact that across generations, we answer this question every Ramadan, without fail. In fact, the first time I showed this meme to a work friend, he exclaimed, “Hey, I asked you that, too!” We both laughed (at him) and then, spent the next half hour going through other Ramadan memes, like those in Image 2 and Image 3.

Image 3

Image 2

And once more, I shared not just a laugh with someone, but an opening for genuine intercultural communication and sharing. In the numerous conversations these memes inspired, most expressed that they had no idea that there was a ‘world’ of Muslim memes that entertained and explained.

For me, these memes have played two important communication roles: intergenerational and intercultural. In the Australian context, second and third generation Muslims communicate with each other and outside of the Muslim community in English. Many of their linguistic expressions relate to sarcasm, irony and wordplays based on English. Their cultural references are TV shows like Friends and The Hunger Games and there is no shortage of memes based on dialogues from popular TV shows and movies. The creative efforts behind Muslim-based memes have been written about in numerous places such as here.

The humor not only provides a platform for internal communication for Muslims but also a means to connect to non-Muslims, with whom they share these linguistic expressions and cultural references. Both my Muslim and non-Muslim friends always get a kick out of the memes in Image 4 and Image 5. By the way, iftar is the meal eaten at sunset to break the day’s fast and traditionally begins with the consumption of dates.

Image 4

Image 5

Humor – specifically, humor in a language and mode that we all relate to – connects us and provides access to the practices of a community often questioned and misunderstood. A few years back, the ABC offered a Ramadan explainer using a series of memes and tweets. There are also innumerable social media feeds devoted to Muslim memes, such as this Facebook page or this Twitter feed.

The volume of meme production on these platforms is indicative of the time devoted to this means of communication. In a study of young American Muslim women who engage in meme-making, Ali (2020) showed how these memes allow their creators to negotiate aspects of their citizenship in USA. For a community that is often subject to stereotyping, these memes offer a way to construct their own identity.

I think that is true, also, of me and my teenagers. We can rummage through our sociolinguistic repertoire, draw on the pertinent elements of our identities, and exercise some control over the way we present ourselves as Muslims. Many of these memes have been the starting point of deeper and more engaging conversations about being Muslim in Australia today.

Image 6

As we come to the end of Ramadan this week and look forward to the day of Eid to celebrate a month of fasting, I have been sharing the meme in Image 6 far and wide.

References

Ali, I. (2020). Muslim women meme-ing citizenship in the era of War on Terror militarism. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 106(3), 334–340.

Related content

Piller, I. (2009). Ramadan Kareem! Or: Urban Etiquette for Monolinguals. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/urban-etiquette-for-monolinguals/
Piller, I. (2017). Money makes the world go round. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/money-makes-the-world-go-round/
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2023). Lent, Language, and Faith Work. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/lent-language-and-faith-work/
Wehbe, A. (2017). Silent Invisible Women. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/silent-invisible-women/

Despite being ordinary and unremarkable, a little Persian preposition has caught international attention over the past three months: “baraye” (“برای”), which means “for, because of, for the sake of.”

What makes “baraye” special?

As you might have guessed, the sudden explosion of “baraye” onto the global stage is connected to the ongoing protest movement in Iran, and its brutal repression – similar to the stories of the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” and of pop stick paddle boats.

Baraye – the anthem of a freedom movement

“Baraye” is the title of a song by a young musician, Shervin Hajipour, released on his Instagram channel on September 28, 2022.

The lyrics of the song were compiled from tweets stating reasons why (“baraye”) tweeters are protesting and what they are protesting against (“baraye”) and protesting for (“baraye”): baraye dancing in the streets, baraye fear when kissing, baraye my sister, your sister, our sisters, and so on. The song culminates in “baraye woman, life, freedom, baraye azadi, baraye azadi.”

Shervin was imprisoned and forced to delete the song from his Instagram channel within 48 hours of its release. However, by then, the song had reportedly already been viewed 40 million times, and it had been posted and reposted on countless other platforms.

Initially restricted to Persian-speaking audiences inside and outside Iran, the song soon reached a global audience. How did that happen?

Baraye at protest rallies

First, the song made it from online spaces to the real world through global solidarity rallies. Played on large screens and over loudspeakers, soon protesters started to sing along, as in this example from Berlin.

Baraye covered by artists around the world

Second, more and more artists started to cover the song. One of the versions with the widest reach was sung by British rock band Coldplay during a performance in Buenos Aires, which was broadcast to 81 countries. Another major live performance by German-Iranian singer Sogand was broadcast on German national TV, where thousands of audience members were shown singing along to the final lines “baraye azadi.” Another popular performance is by a collective of some of the most prominent French artists.

It is not only celebrities who are covering the song. In a true testament to the song’s global inspiration, choirs have taken up “Baraye” for their performance projects. Students of a German high school, for instance, sang “Baraye” during their solidarity day with Iran on November 16. In a regional TV segment about their day of action, they were even shown practicing Persian pronunciation with a language teacher in preparation for the performance. Another version that has been widely shared on social media is the rendition by a choir in the small French town of Chalon-Sur-Saône.

The list could go and on. New cover versions are being released all the time, by artists from many parts of the globe. Only last week, a feminist art collective in Rojava released this haunting version.

Baraye in translation

Third, translation played an important role in making the Persian song accessible to global audiences. Many of the music videos floating around the Internet are fitted with subtitles in languages other than Persian. I’ve seen versions with English, French, German, Kurdish, Swedish, and Turkish subtitles. I’m sure there are lots more.

Beyond translated subtitles, the song has also inspired a wave of reinterpretations in other languages. Australian singer Shelley Segal has produced an English version. Other versions receiving a lot of attention include a Swedish version by pop star Carola Häggkvist, a German version by folk singers Lisa Wahlandt & Martin Kälberer, and a version in Iranian Sign Language by Maleehe Taherkhani. Again, the list could go on and on.

Baraye: the global struggle for freedom and justice

Slate Magazine has just declared that ““Baraye” is objectively the most important song of 2022.”

Singing “Baraye” is a way for the world to express its solidarity with the Iranian people and their struggle for freedom. Their struggle is our struggle, in a world where freedom is under threat everywhere. The most recent report on civil society by the German human rights organization “Brot für die Welt” shows that only 3% of the global population live in truly free societies. Another 8% live in societies with narrowed rights (Australia is in this category). The remaining 89% of the world’s population live in obstructed, repressed, and closed societies. Iranians find themselves in a closed society, along with over a quarter of the human population.

“Baraye” strikes a chord because we all need to ask ourselves what we are fighting against and fighting for on this broken planet that we share:

Baraye dancing in the street; Baraye fear while kissing; Baraye my sister, your sister, our sister; Baraye changing rotten minds.
Baraye shame of poverty; Baraye yearning for an ordinary life; Baraye the scavenger kid and his dreams; Baraye the command economy.
Baraye air pollution; Baraye dying trees; Baraye cheetahs going extinct; Baraye innocent, outlawed dogs.
Baraye the endless crying; Baraye the repeat of this moment; Baraye the smiling face; Baraye students; Baraye the future.
Baraye this forced paradise; Baraye the imprisoned intellectuals; Baraye Afghan kids; Baraye all the barayes.
Baraye all these empty slogans; Baraye the collapsing houses; Baraye peace; Baraye the sun after a long night.
Baraye the sleeping pills and insomnia; Baraye man, country, prosperity; Baraye the girl who wished she was a boy; Baraye woman, life, freedom.
Baraye freedom; Baraye azadi.

Memorial for Kian Pirfalak at Isfahan University (Source: Twitter)

In the Name of the God of the Rainbow, let’s today think about bilingual double vision. Double vision is a condition where you see two images of the same thing. The two images can be separate from each other but, more often, one overlaps the other, blurring the boundaries.

“Azadi” and “Freedom”

Learning a new language creates a new way of seeing, overlapping previous ways of seeing. The Persian word for “freedom,” for instance, “آزادی” (“azadi”), begins with the first letter of the Perso-Arabic alphabet (آ) and ends with the last (ی). This feature makes it a very special word. It symbolizes that freedom is essential, in the same way that Christians say that God is the alpha and the omega – the first and last letter of the Greek alphabet – to indicate the comprehensiveness of God. Like the Christian God, آزادی is all-encompassing and includes everything else. In the case of آزادی, that “everything else” is life itself, as the آ and ی frame the word for “born”, “زاد” (“zad”).

Once you’ve learned Persian “آزادی”, English “freedom”, too, takes on a different tinge, and comes to be seen as essential to life itself.

The double vision created by “آزادی” and “freedom” exists on the level of the language system. In fact, you do not need any level of bilingual competence to appreciate that different languages provide different perspectives on the world, as ever-popular trivia lists of supposedly “untranslatable” words demonstrate (see, e.g., “203 most beautiful untranslatable words” or “28 untranslatable words from around the world”).

The more powerful double vision effects lie well beyond the language system. Becoming bilingual is not only, and maybe not even predominantly, about learning another language system but about joining another discourse community. And what discourse communities are concerned with and talk about can be wildly different, even in our globalized world.

Pop stick paddle boats carried at Sydney solidarity rally (Source: Twitter)

“Pop stick paddle boat” is another word for freedom

Let’s go back to “freedom.” Another Persian word for “freedom” is “قایق پارویی چوب بستنی” (“pop stick paddle boat”). I’m not kidding, even if no dictionary will tell you so. “Pop stick paddle boat” also means “life,” “justice,” “peace,” “future for our children,” “end oppression,” “stop killing innocents,” and “we mourn the death of a 10-year-old boy.”

“Pop stick paddle boat” took on all these meanings only a few days ago when 10-year-old Kian Pirfalak was shot dead by anti-riot police. Shortly after his death, a short home video emerged of Kian, proudly showing off a pop stick paddle boat he had built. In the video, he explains how the contraption works, starting his explanation with “in the name of God,” the conventional formula that often begins educational events in the Islamic Republic. In Islam, God has 100 names, and the name that Kian chooses in the video is “the God of the Rainbow.”

Kian’s tragic death and the joyful video of a little inventor have since imbued pop stick paddle boats with grief and hope. The devices and their paper boat variations have become features at protest rallies and have inspired protest songs and videos.

The tears through which I have looked at these images have literally given me double vision. It is an apt metaphor for living a bilingual life. I’ll never look at a little boat nor a rainbow again without also seeing a murdered child and the Iranian struggle for freedom.

Related content:

Piller, Ingrid. (2022). “Women, life, freedom” – the slogan swimming against the global tide. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/women-life-freedom-the-slogan-swimming-against-the-global-tide/

Afghan-style mantu (Image credit: Wikipedia)

One of our family’s favorite dishes is mantu. Mantu are steamed dumplings filled with minced lamb meat and served with a spicy lentil sauce and yoghurt. Mantu not only make a delicious meal but also offer a fun family activity. To prepare the thin dough sheets, the mince filling, and the lentil sauce, to stuff, fold, and steam the dumplings, and to get the whole assemblage together requires all hands on deck: it is a family affair that easily takes up a few hours.

Because mantu are time-consuming to prepare, it’s not a regular food in our house but we like it well enough that we cook it as a treat for special occasions a few times a year – we’ve recently had it to celebrate a birthday, a graduation, and an anniversary. This suggests that mantu play a pretty important role in our family culture.

Despite this importance, I had never tasted mantu or even heard of them until I was well into my thirties. In other words, mantu are not an ancient family tradition for us but a relatively recent addition to our culture.

Encountering mantu in Sydney

I first encountered mantu on the menu of an Afghan restaurant in Sydney – the excellent Khaybar in Auburn that always deserves a shout-out. Afghan restaurants are today an inextricable part of Sydney’s highly diverse food scene. Indeed, its multicultural cuisine is always a bragging point in Sydney destination marketing. As as a tourist article gushes: “From Hungarian to Taiwanese, Ethiopian to Chilean, Sydney’s multicultural food scene is as diverse as it is delicious.”

Turkish-style mantu (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Most often diversity is indexed through reference to a specific place overseas – the cuisine of a nation or city. For instance, on the Macquarie University Wallumattagal campus alone, our food options include outlets that self-identify as offering Istanbul, Korean, Lanzhou, Malaysian, Mexican, and Việtnamese foods; and there is even the option to have food that is “a French love affair with Vietnamese flavors.”

These restaurant self-descriptions point to the fact that we conceive diverse cuisine as additive: many different national cuisines exist side by side.

Outside marketing discourses, however, cuisines are rarely kept neatly separate, as my family’s adoption of mantu demonstrates.

Who owns mantu?

As I first encountered mantu in an Afghan restaurant, I believed them to be an Afghan dish. When I said so during a party conversation, I was strongly corrected by a man who claimed that mantu are a Turkish dish (and should be called “manti”).

A subsequent internet search informed me that manti (Манты) are a Russian dish.

And when I turned to discuss the matter with my students, I was told that mantu (馒头) was a Chinese dish. Not only that but I was also kindly advised that I was using the term wrong: mantu were steamed buns. The dish I was describing was supposed to be called “baozi” (包子).

Chinese mantu (Image credit: Wikipedia)

It seems that several groups lay claim to the dish; and can, in fact, not even agree what the dish that goes under this name is. Do some of them have to be wrong or can they all be right?

Food chains

Food has been a key site for language and culture contact since time immemorial. The earliest trade probably was in food stuffs. Barter economies center on food. Some of the most universal words are food terms, as I previously discussed with reference to “chocolate.”

Beyond basic necessity, food has also travelled as a marker of identity, out of curiosity, and as a luxury good. The consumption of exotic foods has long served as a marker of distinction for the rich and powerful. In his study of foodscapes in the 19^th century Indian Ocean world, Hoogervorst (2018), for instance, introduces us to an Acehnese sultan with a penchant for Persian sweets and to Mughal court culture, where professional cooks with expertise in West, Central, and South Asian cooking were considered indispensable to the display of courtly sophistication.

In short, food travels readily across languages and cultures. In the process, both the dishes and their terms undergo modification.

Mantu probably originated in China, where the term initially may have been the general word for filled and unfilled buns and dumplings. Its meaning contracted over time although in some Chinese dialects it may apparently still refer to a filled dumpling.

The Mongols picked up the dish and word from the Chinese, liked it, and took it with them to spread it across central Asia all the way to eastern Europe. Along the way, the precise details of the recipe have passed through the hands of countless cooks and so changed countless times.

The way we make and like mantu in my family is one such variety. To think of the language and culture chains and webs through which mantu arrived with us is both exhilarating and humbling: via an Afghan restaurant in Sydney our food connects us all the way back to the Mongol invasions and ancient China.

Do you have a favorite food with an interesting story of linguistic and cultural connections across time and space?

Reference

Hoogervorst, T. (2018). Sailors, Tailors, Cooks, and Crooks: On Loanwords and Neglected Lives in Indian Ocean Ports. Itinerario, 42(3), 516-548.

Related content

Piller, Ingrid. (2021). Thinking language with chocolate. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/thinking-language-with-chocolate/
Wilczek-Watson, Marta. (2019). Eating, othering and bonding. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/eating-othering-and-bonding/

***

Adéṣínà Ayẹni [@yobamoodua] to Gerald Roche [@GJosephRoche] (2 Feb 2022): I will surely love to be a part of the global day. But one question, can I contribute in my language in place of English?

Gerald: My heart sank as I read this message on Twitter. I’d been messaging people all day, promoting Global Language Advocacy Day (GLAD22), the first ever global event dedicated to raising awareness about language rights. I was really proud to be part of this event, but reading this message suddenly filled me with doubt. Although I had assumed and hoped that people would use whatever language they wanted in participating in the day, I hadn’t really made that clear in how I communicated.

Claire: I responded to Gerald’s plea for personal stories of multilingualism for GLAD22, and in so doing, drew from my English resources to concretise the dialogue with Gerald, as a mediator to his (and my) followers. I wrote about my experiences as a multilingual that began with learning German. But, I wrote it in English to attend to the monolingual question-answer framework implicit in the Twitter reply function. This framework mimics social interactions, particularly in institutional settings, to see a dominant speaker lead a discussion towards certain personal, political and institutional aims. Interactants (like me) know that they are cut-off from doing this if we deviate from the lingua franca, limiting our combined reach. Thus, the replying function alone is structured by a monolingual bias.

***

In this piece, we interrogate the exchange that followed the question above to explore how I (Gerald) endeavored to uphold the language rights that are at the centre of our combined work with GLAD22 and the Global Coalition for Language Rights (GCLR). We interrogate the options made available by social platforms like Twitter and make suggestions for multilingual frameworks for communication that might be upheld in our future language rights work.

GCLR is a relatively young organization. It emerged in the early days of the pandemic when a group of organizations, based mostly in Europe and North America, came together to discuss the promotion of language rights. Founding members and co-chairs of the coalition were mostly representatives of non-governmental organizations and professional translation services. Membership in the coalition grew substantially throughout 2021, as GCLR expanded to include individual academics, activists, and advocates. The changing composition of the coalition, and its increasing size, began to see us nurture our definition of ‘global’ and its articulation through GLAD22.

For GCLR, being global means not just getting the message out as widely as possible, but also being as inclusive as possible, and working in a way that responds to the diverse challenges facing language rights advocates around the world. This global inclusion creates solidarity so we can act together, lending our support to those who face greater risks in their own advocacy.

The first GLAD22 used the phrase ‘language rights are human rights’ to nurture such solidarity. Modeled on Language Advocacy Day, GLAD22 aimed to raise awareness of the need to defend language rights, and to expand our network of solidarity, thus strengthening our capacity to work together in defense of language rights.

There were several approaches via social media to facilitate multilingual discussions but the majority of the engagement came through English language dialogue, which is where the question via Twitter was located.

A Twitter Exchange 

I (Gerald) responded to the request to participate in languages other than English with an enthusiastic ‘yes’. What followed was a post in Yorùbá, featuring a banner image with the phrase ‘Ẹ̀TỌ́ ỌMỌNÌYÀN NI Ẹ̀TỌ́ SÍ ÈDÈ’,—‘language rights are human rights’—alongside the GLAD22 hashtag.

Òní tí í ṣ'ọjọ́ kejìlélógún, oṣù Èrèlé ọdún; 22-02-2022 ni Àyájọ́ Ọjọ́ Àgbàwí fún Èdè Àgbáyé, àkọ́kọ́ irú ẹ̀ lágbàáyé. A ya ọjọ́ òní sọ́tọ̀ fún ìgbàsọ̀ láárí ẹ̀tọ́ èdè ẹni.
Àkórí tí 2022 ni Ẹ̀TỌ́ ỌMỌNÌYÀN NI Ẹ̀TỌ́ SÍ ÈDÈ.#GLAD22 #YORUBA #ETOSIEDE pic.twitter.com/wJbX3bSJtE

— ỌMỌ YOÒBÁ (@yobamoodua) February 22, 2022

The post featured a long thread covering existing language challenges in Nigeria and suggestions for improvement. Priorities included refocusing policy concerns for Indigenous languages as well as prioritizing Indigenous languages in the home and in education.

It received several likes and retweets, including by Gerald to his followers. This is important because Gerald’s actions demonstrated not only that he supported participation in Yorùbá, but also his institutional alignment. Other members of GCLR also engaged with the post, and in doing so, advocated for multilingual participation.

Later in the day, one of Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s mutuals, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (커라 투버순) [@kolatubosun], called out for a language rights group in Nigeria. Several of the key points of the first post were highlighted, especially those that pressure the government for language policy changes. This post was liked by several more users, who commented with their support for the group.

We need a language rights group in Nigeria. An organisation dedicated solely to advancing the rights of its languages. That supports language revitalisation and commits funds to supporting efforts in that direction; pressures government and policymakers on relevant issues, etc

— Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (커라 투버순) (@kolatubosun) February 23, 2022

This Twitter exchange provides some opportunities to ascertain the impact of Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s  multilingual interaction on the language rights values of GCLR and GLAD22. With the GLAD22 affiliation, users communicated their local barriers to language rights. They assembled to develop solidarity and organizing potential.

Importantly, these interactions were in contexts that GCLR has not yet managed to reach. As one observer pointed out on the day, GCLR had organized ‘no activities in or relating to Africa’ as part of the day. Thus, Gerald’s response helped catalyze meaningful discussion for Indigenous languages with strategies for implementation and, possibly, movement towards local organizing in Nigeria.

What if GCLR has real fit and capacity to do more? What if multilingual frameworks for communication were modeled by GCLR for use within platforms like Twitter, and beyond?

Initiating Multiple Moderators 

GCLR might mobilize the Twitter responses shown in this post, and others, to recruit them as moderators for future Global Language Advocacy Days. A series of starting points, methods for moderating in and to multiple languages might be developed amongst members.

These could include reaching out to key educational and government institutions listed in Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s post, to nominate individuals from their institution to speak on their behalf on the day within a nominated social media platform. GCLR members could act as moderators of these discussions in their languages, accumulating new communication hubs across several languages for GLAD23. These hubs could be observed to grow insight around multilingual designs for communication that may eventually be adopted by global north-based moderators such as us.

GCLR has the culture and capacity to do this. Throughout 2021, the coalition participated in a number of larger events, such as International Translation Day and RightsCon. Members’ presentations discussed the importance of language rights as a means of realizing linguistic justice, particularly in the digital realm. GCLR made this information available in as many languages as possible. We feel that it is a natural next step for GCLR to grow its member base meaningfully and initiate multiple moderators across several languages in GLAD23.

Redesigning Multilingual Frameworks for Communication

GCLR is also well-placed to improve decolonizing and multilingual frameworks for communication. Let’s say that Gerald offered to co-author a post with Adéṣínà Ayẹni that would be a thread between English and Yorùbá, linking with Australian and African institutions with power and reach. Such a post may invite comments in both languages (and varieties) that either moderator could respond to.

Such a post may invite language practices such as codeswitching to enter the dialogue because of an ease of intelligibility by the moderators. Users may draw from English resources creatively and as a tool for reaching wide audiences, defined by personal choices rather than monolingual biases. Such frameworks for communication may invite new language practices that emerge in digital spaces but rarely in English-dominated zones.

These frameworks go beyond the otherwise profit-driven knowledge generation in social media discourses as they redesign more socially and linguistically equitable interactions online.

There is great scope for testing such frameworks within Global Language Advocacy Day. On Twitter, the #GLAD22 hashtag received nearly 60,000 impressions with individuals contributing stories, ideas, and resources and language-focused organizations participating including the Linguistics Society of New Zealand, the PEN Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee, Cultural Survival, Tehlike Altındaki Diller, Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, and Hausa Language Hub.

Prefiguring Linguistic Justice

GCLR upheld language rights within several aspects of its communication in GLAD22, leading to 13 events in 6 countries in Asia, the Pacific, Europe, and North America and to the support of new debates such as those in Nigeria. We published about language rights issues in the UK and Bangladesh; New Zealand, Japan, the UK, Ireland and the USA, Australia, and Myanmar, organized a social media campaign on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and received attention in the media, such as this article in Kronos News that was published in English and Turkish. However, as advocates for language rights, we must discern ‘how’ we do this within the limited and often monolingual platforms that we are offered online.

We are currently working to create a set of multilingual principles and practices for the organization, which we aim to have in place before we begin planning Global Language Advocacy Day 2023. Doing so is part of the coalition’s prefigurative practices, i.e., those based on the idea that we should try to ‘create the sought-after forms of justice in the process of achieving structural transformation: to prefigure the world one wants to build.’

This work is also part of evolving organizational strategies in the coalition, which include the formation of working groups, modeled on processes that were used in the Occupy movement (among other contexts). These groups come together to undertake a specific task, without supervision, and then once that task is done, they dissolve. One of these working groups will develop the coalition’s multilingual principles and practices, which will undoubtedly evolve over time, while others address discrete issues raised by coalition members.

If you would like to be part of these language rights activities, and help to prefigure and work towards a world of greater linguistic justice, then we invite you to join us. Contribute your passion, ideas, and labor, your solidarity and commitment, to realizing our mission of language rights for all.

Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers

Academic interpreting often labors under the assumption that the profession was born in the early years of the 20^th century. Billions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, of course, know better. They first encounter an interpreter in the biblical story of Joseph, the favorite son of Jacob. Sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers, Joseph rises to become the deputy of the pharaoh by the grace of God. When the Israelites’ harvest fails, the brothers must travel to Egypt to buy grain. Joseph, who oversees the grain trade, recognizes them, but they do not recognize him. Joseph imposes a series of tests on his brothers to see whether they have repented. Eventually, he forgives them and the whole clan of Jacob moves to Egypt to share in Joseph’s good fortune.

One of the reasons the brothers did not recognize Joseph was that, as an Egyptian official dealing with foreigners, Joseph used an interpreter to communicate with foreign merchants. According to Genesis 42, 23 “[the brothers] did not realize that Joseph could understand them, since he was using an interpreter.”

Interpreting was institutionalized in the Egyptian bureaucracy

Trade was one of the domains that brought Egyptians into contact with speakers of other languages, as in the example of the Israelites. Diplomacy was another area and captive taking yet another. To cope with the intercultural communication demands raised by Egypt’s considerable external dealings in Africa and the Middle East, ancient Egyptians instituted the role of interlingual mediator in their bureaucracy (Kurz, 1985, 1986; Salevsky, 2018).

Some of the earliest evidence for Egyptian interpreting practices comes from the tombs of the princes of Elephantine, which date from the 3^rd millennium BCE. The princes of Elephantine were the governors of the Nubian border province in the south of Egypt. Their titles included “secret advisor for all business concerning the south of Upper Egypt,” “steward of the southern lands of Upper Egypt,” and “the one who has brought back the produce of all foreign lands for his royal lord and who spreads the fear of Horus in foreign lands” (Chrobak, 2013).

In short, the princes of Elephantine were in charge of what was essentially a colony and regularly led raids further south, into what they called “the land of Yam.”

To communicate with their non-Egyptian subjects and contacts, they employed interpreters, as is apparent from another one of their titles: “overseer of dragomans” (Gardiner, 1915). “Dragoman” is a fancy word for “interpreter” (Hermann, 1956), and one I will write about next time.

Whether “dragoman” or “interpreter,” the exact meaning of the hieroglyph “wa” remains a matter of some debate (Falbo, 2016). The hieroglyph is an abstraction of a loincloth that was only used by foreigners or by people speaking a foreign language (Salevsky, 2018). The Egyptologist who first deciphered the inscriptions had already cautioned that it might refer to any “speaker of a foreign language” (Gardiner, 1915). As such the duties of the “interpreter” were probably not restricted to linguistic mediation only but were quite wide-ranging in maintaining various forms of contacts with foreigners (Chrobak, 2013).

The interpreter relief in the tomb of Horemheb

The interpreting relief from the tomb of Horemheb. The interpreter (in the middle) mediates between Horemheb (left) and foreign envoys (right) (Image credit: Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden)

A striking depiction of the work of an Egyptian interpreter can be found on a bas-relief in the tomb of Horemheb, which dates from the 14^th century BCE. Horemheb was a general under the pharaoh Tutankhamun before he became pharaoh himself. The relief shows envoys from Libya, Nubia, and Syria prostrating themselves before Horemheb. According to the inscription, these foreigners are begging the Egyptians to send their armies and turn their countries into protectorates because the people there “live like animals in the wilderness” (Kurz, 1986).

One cannot feel but cynical about the age-old lies with which empires justify their exploits to themselves.

Between Horemheb and the envoys, we see an interpreter in action. It is a clever visual depiction of an essentially oral act: the interpreter is shown twice, once facing Horemheb and once facing the envoys. We can almost see him turn from one interlocutor to the other, as the image gives us a strong sense of the dynamism of the interpreting act.

Sadly, it is today impossible to get a full view of the complete interpreting scene because in the 19^th century the relief was broken up into pieces and sold to European tourists. The three pieces that make up the interpreter relief are today housed in museums in Berlin, Leiden, and Vienna (Kurz, 1986).

Training an interpreter corps

The records suggests that, for the longest time, Egyptians could not be bothered to learn foreign languages themselves (Hermann, 1956). In an eerie resemblance to today’s English monolingual mindset, they felt that for an Egyptian, speaking Egyptian was just fine. It was non-Egyptians who had to adjust and become bilingual by learning Egyptian.

Despite their strong sense of superiority, they did no want to leave the business of interpreting in the hands of foreigners. Therefore, they systematically created an interpreter corps of people who were not only bilingual but also Egyptian in culture and tastes. At least since the Middle Kingdom (2040 to 1782 BCE), they did this by bringing sons of foreign royal families to Egypt at an early age so that they could learn the Egyptian language and be socialized into the role of interlingual mediators (Kurz, 1986).

Only when the Egyptian empire began to decline, did Egyptians themselves start to learn foreign languages. From the 6^th century BCE, Egyptian boys were sent to live with Greek families so that they could become bilingual in Greek. The Greek historian Herodotus reports that, by the 4^th century BCE, their descendants had congealed into an interpreter caste, whose status ranked between that of merchants and seafarers (Kurz, 1986).

Interpreting gives way to multilingualism

By then, the power of the pharaohs had waned, and Egypt had become a multilingual polity. With the Persian conquest of 525 BCE, Aramaic replaced Egyptian as the language of the state, and with Alexander’s conquest in 332 BCE, Greek became the dominant language (Thompson, 2009).

Multilingual Cleopatra

When the pharaohs’ power had been assured, they could leave the pesky work of intercultural communication to others. Not so Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, with whose death in 30 BCE 5,000 years of Egyptian empire came to an end. In addition to Egyptian and Greek, she knew at least seven other languages. According to Plutarch’s Life of Antony (27, 3-4), “in her interviews with Barbarians she very seldom had need of an interpreter, but made her replies to most of them herself and unassisted, whether they were Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes or Parthians.”

References

Chrobak, M. (2013). For a tin ingot: The archaeology of oral interpretation. Przekładaniec: A Journal of Literary Translation, Special Issue 2013, 87-101.
Falbo, C. (2016). Going back to Ancient Egypt: were the Princes of Elephantine really ‘overseers of dragomans’? The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 21, 109-114.
Gardiner, A. H. (1915). The Egyptian Word for “Dragoman”. Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 37, 117-125.
Hermann, A. (1956). Dolmetschen im Altertum. In K. Thieme, A. Hermann, & E. Glässer (Eds.), Beiträge zur Geschichte des Dolmetschens (pp. 25-59). Munich: Isar Verlag.
Kurz, I. (1985). The rock tombs of the princes of Elephantine: Earliest references to interpretation in Pharaonic Egypt. Babel, 31(4), 213-218.
Kurz, I. (1986). Das Dolmetscher-Relief aus dem Grab des Haremhab in Memphis: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Dolmetschens im alten Ägypten. Babel, 32(2), 73-77.
Salevsky, H. (2018). The Origins of Interpreting in the Old Testament and the Meturgeman in the Synagogue. The Bible Translator, 69(2), 184-198. doi:10.1177/2051677018786366
Thompson, D. J. (2009). The Multilingual Environment of Persian and Ptolemaic Egypt: Egyptian, Aramaic, and Greek Documentation. In R. S. Bagnall (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of papyrology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199843695.013.0017

Diversity of international students is celebrated through images that map students onto nations represented by their flags

International education is often touted as a golden road to fluency in another language and the development of a global vision. However, ethnographic research into the language learning and settlement experiences of international students in a variety of national contexts has painted a less rosy picture, as the Language-on-Move archives devoted to international education show.

Such research has found many discontinuities between the promises of international education and students’ actual experiences.

One of the problems in the existing system of international education is the nation-based categorization of seeing international students of diverse backgrounds as a homogeneous group (Piller, 2017).

This categorization is further complicated when international students return to their ancestral homelands for their international education. Such “return migrants” may be positioned in often conflicting ways on the continuum of local and migrant, native and foreigner, as our recent research explores (Li & Han, 2020).

Ethnic Chinese students migrating to China for their international education

As one of the largest diasporas, ethnic Chinese constitute a population of over 50 million. The great majority of them live in Southeast Asia. Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia have been perceived as a powerful nexus between China and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, mostly due to their remarkable economic performance and their historical contribution to China’s nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. As China is emerging as one of the largest receiving countries for international education, ethnic Chinese may get the first admission ticket to higher education institutions in China.

However, the prioritization of ethnic Chinese migrating to China for their international education is not without problems. These students are confronted with several linguistic and cultural challenges.

Some of these challenges are similar to what has been reported in previous studies, and others are specific to this group and have to date mostly been overlooked in the existing literature on international education.

One big challenge relates to a conflict between students’ self-perceptions of their identities and the ways in which others perceive them. An ethnic Chinese student from Myanmar, for instance, expressed her shock and confusion since coming to China: “我以为我的根在中国，来中国我发现我没根了！” (“I used to think that my roots are in China. However, coming to China has made me rootless.”)

Like this female student, ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar used to be oriented towards China. Learning Putonghua in Myanmar was a top priority for their transnational empowerment (Li, 2017; Li, 2020; Li, Ai, & Zhang, 2020). However, once they move to China for their studies, their trajectories gradually gear them to identify Myanmar as their true homeland and as their land of opportunity. How is this possible?

Linguistic and cultural essentialism

To find out, we (Li & Han 2020) examined the learning experiences of 14 ethnic Chinese from Myanmar who were enrolled in Putonghua-medium degree programs at a Chinese university. We found that the language ideologies of speaking standard Putonghua and writing simplified Chinese characters challenged these students’ sense of being authentically Chinese. In the process, they were turned from proficient Chinese speakers in Myanmar to deficient Putonghua speakers in China.

Ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar are often made to feel weird for engaging in practices that are considered “Burmese”, such as putting on thanaka, a protective white-paste face mask

National essentialism was another ideological force that challenged their Chinese identity. In their classrooms and everyday interactions, the students found themselves positioned not as ethnic Chinese but as Burmese nationals. This “one nation, one culture, one language” mindset not only erased our participants’ Chinese identity but also reinforced an essentialist view of Myanmar as the country of the Burmese, the dominant ethnic group in that highly diverse country.

Neo-essentialist curriculum

Most research into international education is based in Anglophone countries, where a monolingual mindset prevails and exclusive use of English is promoted while languages other than English are devalued.

This is not the case in China. China’s promotion of Putonghua as an international language follows a reciprocal approach that also values the languages international students bring. Their bilingualism is regarded as an asset. In our case, both Burmese and Putonghua constitute desired linguistic capital to achieve mutual cooperation and promote the regional economy and integration between China and ASEAN.

However, this promotion of bilingualism is not unproblematic, either. Linguistic diversity is not unconditionally valued but rests on its convertibility in an international communication market – between the Chinese and Burmese state in this context.

This orientation to the nation as a market applauds bilingualism in Burmese and Putonghua but marginalizes bilingualism in non-standard Chinese varieties and languages that are not official to a nation.

In short, our research demonstrates that the neoliberal valorization of bilingualism is not in and of itself better than the monolingual mindset: it only reproduces the cultural superiority of essentialized linguistic icons while devaluing and erasing non-privileged cultural forms and identities.

The future of Chinese international education

While the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the language challenges confronting diverse populations worldwide (Piller, 2020; Piller, Zhang, & Li, 2020), it has also reconfigured the global economic and political order.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 early last year, China has shifted its global strategy by strengthening its regional connectivity with Asian countries. In 2020, ASEAN replaced the USA and EU to become China’s largest trading partner. A recent trade agreement, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) has reinforced the regional integration between China and its region. As the largest free trading zone covering 30% of the global populations and 30% of global GDP, RCEP will mark a new era for Asia-Pacific cooperation in various social dimensions.

Will the free movement of goods and people in this vast zone also lead us to a greater valorization of linguistic and cultural diversity? Will it open a space for embracing diversity and bringing greater equity and social justice?

Our research suggests that, as long as the ideological foundations of linguistic and cultural essentialism stay in place, the international education in RCEP may just be old wine in a new bottle.

References

Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD). Macquarie University.
Li, J. (2020). Transnational migrant students between inclusive discourses and exclusionary practices. Multilingua, 39(2), 193-212. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2019-0125
Li, J., Ai, B., & Zhang, J. (2020). Negotiating language ideologies in learning Putonghua: Myanmar ethnic minority students’ perspectives on multilingual practices in a borderland school. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41(7), 633-646. doi:10.1080/01434632.2019.1678628
Li, J., & Han, H. (2020). Learning to orient toward Myanmar: ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar at a university in China. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 1-19. doi:10.1080/07908318.2020.1858095
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural communication. Edinburgh University Press.
Piller, I. (Ed.) (2020). Language-on-the-Move COVID-19 Archives.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multilingua, 39(5), 503-515. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/multi-2020-0136/html

Diagram of the ‘radial definition routes’ of Panoptic Conjugation (Ogden 1930: 12)

A fascinating turn in recent Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) scholarship is the development of ‘Minimal English’, an international auxiliary language combining the best of Standard English and NSM. One of the earliest published mentions of this project is in Anna Wierzbicka’s 2014 Imprisoned in English, where she states that Minimal English ‘is, essentially, the English version of “Basic Human”‘ (Wierzbicka 2014: 195), the rendering in English exponents of the set of primitive concepts uncovered by NSM research. An example of Covid-19-related messages in Minimal English can be found here.

The idea of a simplified engineered language for international communication is by no means new, as Wierzbicka and her colleagues freely acknowledge. The specific proposal of creating a reduced form of English for this purpose has also found many advocates in the past.

The special characteristic of Minimal English that is supposed to set it apart from all prior projects is its culturally neutral standpoint. The use of Minimal English should preserve the existing investment of the millions of second-language learners of English in acquiring the formal shell of that language – its phonology, word forms, grammar and so on – while leaving the baggage of ‘Anglo’ culture behind. Any other language could be reduced in this way to serve as the medium for ‘Basic Human’, argues Wierzbicka, but in the context of present-day globalisation English is indisputably the best host:

[G]iven the realities of today’s globalizing world, at this point it is obviously a mini-English that is the most practical way out (or down) from the conceptual tower of Babel that the cultural evolution of humankind has erected, for better or worse. (Wierzbicka 2014: 194)

Wierzbicka (2014: 194) tells us that Minimal English ‘is not another simplified version of English analogous to Ogden’s […] “Basic English” or Jean-Paul Nerrière’s “Globish”‘ (cf. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2018: 8). But if we look at the particular case of Ogden’s Basic English we may notice many striking parallels to Minimal English. These parallels warrant closer inspection.

In the most detailed published treatment of Minimal English to date, the 2018 edited volume Minimal English for a Global World, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka dedicate a section of their co-authored chapter to comparing Minimal English and Basic English (as well as ‘Plain English’; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2018: 18–22). Goddard and Wierzbicka (ibid.: 19) note ‘enormous’ differences across ‘structure (words and grammar), intended range of functions, and in “spirit”‘ between Basic and Minimal English.

However, the comparison misses many significant points of contact between the two endeavours.

In terms of the differences in ‘structure’, Goddard and Wierzbicka point out that Ogden’s core vocabulary of 850 ‘Basic Words’ (see Ogden 1933 [1930]) does not respect the cross-linguistic primitives proposed within the NSM framework. In addition, a central grammatical feature of Basic English was the elimination of verbs from the language, a goal foreign to NSM thinking. These two differences between Basic and Minimal English are quite real, but focusing on them misses the more profound philosophical and methodological similarity between the projects: that both NSM and Basic English are centred around reductive paraphrase. Although not identical to NSM procedure, Ogden’s (1930) method of ‘panoptic conjugation’ sought, in very similar fashion to NSM reductive paraphrase, to strip down meaning to its fundamentals. From Goddard and Wierzbicka’s commentary we may get the impression that Ogden’s method was not much more than an ad hoc heuristic, but this is by no means the case: his method was grounded in contemporary analytic philosophy and even received monograph-length exposition in the 1931 Word Economy by Leonora Wilhelmina Lockhart, one of his close collaborators.

The ‘intended range of functions’ of Basic English is perhaps also not as far from NSM and Minimal English as Goddard and Wierzbicka suggest. Ogden and his collaborators of course indulged in very off-putting Anglo chauvinism, but this was in many ways an expression of a kind of universalism current in analytic philosophy of the time. While NSM explicitly rejects any claims of cultural superiority, it shares many of the same sources. The historiography of NSM typically looks much further back and conceives of the approach as a continuation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ (1646–1716) characteristica universalis (see, e.g. Wierzbicka 1992: 216–218; Wierzbicka 1996: 11–13), but NSM – like Basic – also has clear proximal predecessors in the language-critical thought of early analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. These connections are something that I have explored at length in my 2018 Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism (see also McElvenny 2014).

Finally, the difference in ‘spirit’ that Goddard and Wierzbicka highlight is another aspect of the comparison between Basic English and Minimal English that deserves deeper scrutiny. It is indeed true that Ogden and many of his collaborators – although by no means all – were quite hostile to multilingualism and saw Basic English as a means to the linguistic homogenisation of the world. By contrast, practitioners of NSM and Minimal English celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity and see their project as a means for facilitating cross-cultural communication.

However, the historical contexts of Basic English and Minimal English are very different in this respect. Ogden and his collaborators were working in a world that was much more multilingual than ours today: in Ogden’s day, many languages were used equally in science, business and international relations. At the same time, this world was deeply fractured, having endured by the middle of the twentieth century two World Wars. Whether right or wrong, many scholars of the first half of the twentieth century imagined a connection between competing national languages and international friction.

Minimal English, on the other hand, has been born into a world where Ogden’s dream has essentially come true: international co-operation in science, business and politics is today overwhelmingly mediated in English (see Piller 2016 for incisive discussion of how this plays out in present-day language scholarship). With the end of the Cold War, most people around the world live in an often uneasy but enduring peace – and let’s hope that there will never be a World War III. In this environment, Minimal English has the opposite mission of overcoming the de facto hegemony of English, which has brought with it a different set of problems.

The ahistorical juxtaposition of Basic English and Minimal English ignores these important points of intellectual and political context, which shape the outlook and design of the two projects. There is no shortage of current secondary literature that would help to illuminate this context. My own Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism, mentioned above, deals with this, as does Michael Gordin’s 2015 Scientific Babel.

This blog post is intended as a plea for greater engagement with intellectual history on the part of linguists. On the example of Minimal English, we can immediately see that there are significant parallels between this project and efforts pursued by scholars of only a few generations ago. Greater awareness of their work and the context in which it was undertaken may cast new light on our own assumptions and practices, and in the process enrich our own thinking and alert us to potential pitfalls.

References

Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (2018), ‘Minimal English and how it can add to Global English, in Minimal English for a Global World: Improved communication using fewer words, ed. Cliff Goddard, Cham: Palgrave McMillan, pp. 5–28.
Gordin, Michael D. (2015), Scientific Babel: How science was done before and after Global English, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lockhart, Leonora Wilhelmina (1931), Word Economy, London: Kegan Paul.
McElvenny, James (2014), ‘Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning and early analytic philosophy’, Language Sciences 41, 212–221. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2013.10.001
McElvenny, Jame (2018), Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism: C. K. Ogden and his contemporaries, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ogden, Charles Kay (1930), ‘Penultima (editorial)’, Psyche 10:3, 1-29.
Ogden, Charles Kay (1933 [1930]), Basic English: a general introduction with rules and grammar, London: Kegan Paul.
Piller, Ingrid (2016), ‘Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism’, Journal of Multicultural Discourses 11.1, pp. 25–33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2015.1102921
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992), ‘The search for universal semantic primitives’, in Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution, ed. Martin Pütz, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 215-242.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1996), Semantics: primes and universals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2014), Imprisoned in English: the hazards of English as a default language, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Poland in China (Artwork by the author)

Intercultural communication at work in multinational companies (MNCs) is increasingly common. Workplace communication in MNCs can be highly complex, as is the case when Polish expatriate workers of an MNC headquartered in Western Europe are deployed in China. What are the communication challenges they face and how do they overcome these?

To examine this question, my team and I conducted narrative interviews with six Polish professionals who had just returned from a three-year international assignment in China in late 2016. They had worked to build a Chinese subsidiary of the MNC together with 1,500 local and 150 international employees.

The company language in the Chinese subsidiary was English (and, practically, also Chinese) while in Poland the company language was French (and, practically, also Polish).

The findings of our research have recently been published in the journal Multilingua in an article entitled “Intercultural communication within a Chinese subsidiary of a Western MNC: Expatriate perspectives on language and communication issues”.

Interviewees reported a lot of miscommunication and communication problems, which they ascribed to both language and cultural barriers. In particular, they felt under-prepared when they first arrived and highlighted communication problems in the initial stage of their deployment:

We were sent there without… any preparation for working in a different cultural circle. China is far different from France, Romania, or Hungary. We have lots of factories in Eastern, Southern, and Northern Europe—but these are pretty much the same. We think in a similar way, we have the same working style. But what I saw there… I was completely unprepared for that.

One of my co-authors in China (Image credit: A. Gut)

All interviewees claimed that face-to-face communication with locals was problematic and that English as the company language was part of the problem. They found it difficult to understand the English spoken by their Chinese colleagues and the company jargon. They had to either translate the previously acquired terminology from Polish or French into English, or learn new company jargon, for example, abbreviations of products, company positions, or those used in production management.

In turn, because locals often communicated in Mandarin at work and during social events, expatriates’ lack of Mandarin proficiency prevented them from acquiring information from local superiors, learning about problems within a team, or from participating in decision-making processes. It also hampered integration with locals at lunchtime and led to social isolation and a feeling of not belonging to the work group.

To overcome these barriers, expatriates devised a number of ad hoc strategies such as asking clarifying questions, asking for confirmation, or summarizing the message by e-mail. One interviewee recounted how he simply imitated locals:

I often nodded back (…) and did what they did: nodded, smiled, and so on. Even when I needed something very much, and urgently, I knew it would be difficult to get it due to all the steps you need to go through with them. (…) Sometimes I had to ‘walk in their shoes’ and behave like them. That let me get many things faster.

Another interviewee related that changing the medium of communication from oral to digital worked for him:

One of my employees told me…, because I sent him a message via a chat program, (…) ‘You know what? Chatting with you is much better than talking, because I understand you better [this way].’ So they gave me such signals from time to time.

These communication strategies did not always help to alleviate ambiguity or uncertainty. In fact, they often were experienced as counterproductive, for example when their strategies threatened their Chinese interlocutor’s face, as was the case when they asked for clarifications at team meetings. By contrast, showing respect through simply nodding was felt to be more time-consuming but more effective in the long run.

Our research provided an opportunity for interviewees to reflect on their intercultural communication experiences in China. Their retrospective interpretations were in themselves beneficial as they enabled  them to understand, accept, and appreciate the cultural differences they had encountered in China.

Reference

Wilczewski, M., Søderberg, A.-M., & Gut, A. (2018). Intercultural communication within a Chinese subsidiary of a Western MNC: Expatriate perspectives on language and communication issues. Multilingua, 37(6), 587-611. doi:10.1515/multi-2017-0095

Yucky worms or yummy treats?

When I arrived in the UK from Poland in 2004, I did not know that prawns even existed. During our first dubious encounter, I categorized the not-so-aesthetically-pleasing crustaceans as ‘worms’ and refused to look at them, let alone consider eating them. Today, I devour these ‘worms’, and when I do, it is an occasion for my British husband to remind me that, over the years he, my ‘culinary superior’ from Western Europe, has raised my ‘impoverished’ Eastern-European palate to a totally new level. Squid, scallops, mussels, avocado, pomegranate, seaweed, lamb, haggis, sushi, Indian, Thai are some of the foods I encountered only in my adulthood thanks to my migration to Britain and my transnational coupledom that followed.

Like all couples, transnational couples like to talk. Food, as an ethnic marker and thus fertile ground for stereotyping, is one of their favorite topics, as I discovered in my research with Polish-British couples.

Food talk allows transnational couples to negotiate their divergent socio-cultural practices and customs. Ingrid Piller, who extensively researched transnational families, observes that in any relationship partners always bring in their own habits stemming from their individual preferences or family traditions. This is also true of endogamous couples but in the case of partners raised in different countries, the potential for difference talk is greater.

This is not to say that transnational partners endlessly draw divisions between themselves, experiencing what is known as a ‘cultural clash’. Rather, difference talk in transnational relationships has been shown in a considerable body of research as a positive phenomenon, entailing skillful negotiation strategies. Piller (2002), for instance, demonstrates how partners in English-German couples tend to downplay their socio-cultural differences by directly negating them, drawing out similarities or appealing to shared cosmopolitan identities. In a similar fashion, Kellie Gonçalves’s (2012) study shows how Anglophone and Swiss German partners portray themselves as harmoniously combining their divergent socio-cultural repertoires, from which they derive shared hybrid identities.

Can you imagine anyone calling this Christmas carp an “ugly-looking fish”? (Image credit: mdr.de)

In my recent publication in the Journal of Sociolinguistics (Wilczek-Watson, 2018), I build on this research by discussing other forms of difference talk in transnational families, specifically in relation to food, both in everyday and celebratory contexts. The interactive practices listed above are also present in the data the article is based on – video-recorded meal-time conversations in five UK-based Polish-British families and audio-recorded interviews with them. However, this particular paper focuses on another recurrent discursive strategy emerging across these transnational families, namely ‘culinary othering’ – the family members’ acts of representing the food habits of their partner as different, somewhat strange, or even abnormal.

Drawing an imaginary division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, othering constitutes a form of social distancing from a given individual or a group. This practice can entail stereotyping, derogatory evaluations, and mockery of the Other, often in an attempt to achieve a positive self-presentation. Despite its undeniable negative potential, othering has also been examined as a form of bonding, for instance, in the context of gossiping interactions (Jaworski and Coupland, 2005), when the gossiping parties derive solidarity from their joint mockery aimed at third, absent parties. What if the target of othering is present and is also a member of your family?

In the food-related talk of Polish-British families in my study acts of othering seemed to function in a similar, unifying way. While the othered party was physically present and directly faced culinary mockery, both sides seemed to skillfully navigate through their difference talk, displaying a cooperative spirit. This was exhibited for example by indicating in various ways that a given comment should not be taken as stigmatising: by exaggerating stereotypical evaluations to the point of caricature, or by mitigating them, through joint laughter, reciprocated othering or even through provocation of further othering by the targeted side.

To illustrate, when comparing hospitality practices in Poland and Britain, a British partner stereotyped Polish hosts as over-hospitable and mocked their pretentious hosting with an imaginary quote:

‘Here’s the entire quantity of our cupboards on our table, that’s how great a host we are!’ (Extract 1, p.553).

Using this hypothetical utterance of the Other (Polish hosts) with a hyperbolic expression (entire), and additional stress (entire; great), the partner signaled to his Polish wife (and the Polish interviewer, myself) that his statement was exaggerated, and while it could be received as discriminatory, we (the target) accepted its humorous undertone. Moreover, the Polish partner reciprocated this othering, showing an uptake of the strategy adopted by her British husband. The conversation continued and othering occurred multiple times between the partners throughout the interview, for instance, in relation to:

• the aesthetics of certain dishes (‘Oh God, that’s an ugly-looking fish.’ – about a traditional Polish Christmas Eve dish, carp, Extract 4, p.560);
• the quality of Polish wedding reception foods (‘they were good they were nice but …, the focus was on volume, wasn’t it?’, Extract 5, p.562);

Polish Easter breakfast (Image credit: wikimedia.org)

In cases such as these, neither side seems to take offence. Similar instances of mutual mockery and stereotyping in relation to food habits of the other recur across the participating Polish-British families. Arguably, othering comes more frequently from British partners (perhaps due to the fact the couples reside in the UK and thus Polish cuisine being ‘foreign’, becomes exoticised), some of whom also mock:

• Polish Easter dishes as monotonous (‘everything with gherkin’, Extract 2, p.555);
• everyday eating habits of their Polish spouses (‘all my family find it absolutely astonishing that Kuba will get all that milk, fill it right to the brim and sprinkle cereal on top’, Extract 3, p.557).

Nevertheless, the Polish partners likewise stereotype British culinary practices, as in this example about British Easter traditions: ‘the only English tradition we have is chocolate isn’t it? chocolate Easter eggs’, Extract 2, p.555).

These interactions demonstrate the families’ well-developed skills in manoeuvring through sensitive difference talk. The partners’ communicative collaboration reflects and further shapes their common ground, showing how othering resembles ritual mockery, which can in fact neutralise potential tensions in these transnational relationships and foster the couples’ bonding.

The above findings are limited to the Polish-British families I studied. However, culinary othering and its unifying potential is not exclusive to these relationships. As food acts as a salient indicator of class, status, wealth, and individuality, culinary othering is likely to be common enough. Can you share your own examples?

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References

Gonçalves, K. (2013). ‘Cooking lunch, that’s Swiss’: Constructing hybrid identities based on socio-cultural practices. Multilingua, 32: 527–547.
Jaworski, A. and J. Coupland. (2005). Othering in gossip: ‘You go out you have a laugh and you can pull yeah okay but like. . .’ Language in Society, 34: 667–694.
Piller, I. (2002). Bilingual Couples Talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wilczek-Watson, M. (2018). ‘Oh God, that’s an ugly looking fish’ – negotiating sociocultural distance in transnational families through culinary othering. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22: 5: 545–569.

Students at the German-Chinese College, ca. 1910 (Source: German Federal Archives)

The dichotomy of East and West is a recent phenomenon and associated with European industrialization. Yet, it is difficult to escape this dichotomy in contemporary thought, where orientalism continues to inform debates inside and outside the academy. The increasing construction of an opposition between East and West – rather than a view of Eurasia as a complex whole – can be dated back to the 19^th century, as social anthropologist Chris Hann explains in this 12-minute lecture.

Even when the divergence between East and West materialized in colonial contexts, it was by no means straightforward and clear-cut. Instead, the discursive construction of East and West was polyvocal and dialogical. A good example of these shifting discourses can be found in the fluctuation in European views of China. Since the Middle Ages, European views of China veered between Sinophilia and Sinophobia, as the historian George Steinmetz explains in his study of German colonialism, The Devil’s Handwriting, a summary of which is available here on Language on the Move.

In the 16^th and 17^th century China emerged as a highly positive model in European discourse. The Jesuits, who were the first Europeans to spend extended periods there and to seriously engage with China, described China as a stable state governed by learned men, the mandarins, in the manner of Platonists. They found a lot to admire in China: the practical philosophy of Confucianism as well as Chinese politeness, medicine and language. During that period, the Chinese were rarely regarded in racial terms. If they were, they were usually considered white. In short, Chinese civilization was viewed as equal to European civilization and in some respects, even as superior.

With increasing European colonial expansion, this changed from the late 18^th century onwards and another – negative – discourse began to emerge. The rise of Sinophobia was an “intradiscursive response to Sinophilia” (Steinmetz, 2008, p. 388). In this discourse, the traditional stability of the Chinese state came to be seen as stagnant, despotic and the sign of a decaying nation. The learnedness and politeness of mandarins became a time-wasting pretension. The Chinese state exam for the selection of mandarins was no longer seen as a meritorious system but was now perceived as breeding imitation and copying. Confucianism was demoted from admired philosophy to false religion. And, last but not least, the Chinese became racialized as “the yellow race”, which was considered semi-barbarian and half-civilized.

Opening ceremony of the German-Chinese College, Qingdao, 1909 (Source: German Federal Archives)

These opposing discourses and the polyvocality inherent in interweaving discourses shaped a distinct native policy in the German colony of Qingdao. For a general overview of the colony, see Ingrid Piller’s summary of The Devil’s Handwriting.

The forces of Sinophobia were resounding at the dawn of colonization and during the first periods of segregationist German native policy in Qingdao (1897-1904). However, the precolonial discourse of Sinophilia had never fully retreated from the scene and it resurfaced again after 1905 in German Qingdao. Against this resurgence, German-Chinese cultural exchange emerged in the second phase of the colony (1905-1914), which can best be described as “an open-ended joint cultural program” (Steinmetz, 2008, p. 487). A key expression of this joint cultural program was the German Chinese College.

It was one of the stated goals of the German Chinese College to share the best of the two cultures.

At the school’s opening ceremony in 1909, speakers from both sides endorsed the idea of combining the best of their two cultures. A toast was raised to the Chinese emperor, the “national anthem” of the Qing Empire was sung, and the school’s German director proclaimed that “all of the cultural peoples [Kulturvölker] are linked by a common bond” and should “share their discoveries.” Here the Chinese were unambiguously (re)inscribed into the dominant pole of the German racial-anthropological binary. The imperial German and late Qing dynasty flags flew side by side in front of one of the school’s provisional buildings. (Steinmetz, 2008, pp. 486f.)

The German colony has left its traces in photos displayed on the wall of a Qingdao backpacker hotel (Photo: Gegentuul Baioud, 2012)

One of the men who pushed forward this cultural syncretism was Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930). Wilhelm was a colonial officer who lived in China for 25 years and became a renowned Sinologist in Germany after World War I. His cultural hybridity was admired by many and Carl Jung lauded him as a “mind which created a bridge between East and West and gave to the Occident the precious heritage of a culture thousands of years old” (quoted in Steinmetz, 2008, p. 505).

In sum, European representations of the Chinese were highly polyvocal and linked to different forms of cultural syntheses.

This raises an important question for our conceptualization of Orientalism. Can a universal concept of Orientalism explain the diverse representation of non-Europeans by Europeans and the subsequent multiple forms of cultural engagement ranging from clashes to cooperation? To put it differently, is there one orientalism or are there many orientalisms? To reflect on the multiplicity of the discursive space that has put East and West in opposition is crucial for mutual understanding and transcending this artificial binary.

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