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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexandra: Wow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexandra: Hehe.

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

Alexandra: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexandra: Yes

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

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

Karen: God no!

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

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

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

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

Alexandra: Now based through Bard University.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen: Absolutely. Yeah, any time.

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

In this video, I discuss the example of bilingual signage in Nanning City, China. I ask who recognises the Zhuang language that’s found on some public signage there, and some of the varied responses which people – even Zhuang speakers – have had to it. Then I explain what this case study can tell us about multilingual signage policies more generally, and about language policy research. I hope this helps you teach Linguistics, or learn Linguistics, or even do your own ‘linguistic landscape’ research!

Related resources:

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’. Chapter 8 in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. (Full text available)

Grey, A. (2024) ‘Using A Lived Linguistic Landscape Approach for Socio-Legal Insight’, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies’ Methodological Musings Blog, Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

‘Language rights in a changing China: Brynn Quick in Conversation with Alexandra Grey’ Language on the Move Podcast, New Books Network (1 January 2025)

Transcript:

Alex and Kristen in the studio, 2024

[Opening screen shows text: Making Zhuang Language Visible, by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, 2024.]

[Narrated by Alexandra Grey:] In 2004, the local government in Nanning, a city in South China, began adding the Zhuang language to street-name signage to preserve Zhuang cultural heritage. The Zhuang language, which originated thousands of years ago in this region, had largely been overshadowed by Putonghua, a standard form of Mandarin Chinese and the official language of China.

However, the public response to this initiative, including from Zhuang speakers, was not as positive as intended. In this video, I will share insights from my research in the 2010s on Zhuang language policy, including a case study of its implementation and reception in Nanning.

China officially recognises the minority group called the Zhuangzu, who have traditionally lived in south-central China, particularly in the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region, where Nanning is the capital. There are millions of Zhuang speakers, but China has such a large national population that these Zhuang speakers constitute only a small minority.

The Zhuang language can hardly be read even by Zhuang speakers themselves. This is due to the inaccessibility of the Zhuang script; most people do not have access to formal or even informal ways of learning to read Zhuang. This has significant implications for the region’s linguistic landscape.

My research aimed to understand the impact of local language policy. I met with 63 Zhuang community leaders and Zhuang speakers for interviews, including interviews in which we walked and talked through the linguistic landscapes. I also found and analysed laws and policies about Zhuang language, from the national constitution down to local regulations. One important set of regulations were interim provisions introduced in 2004 and formalised in 2013 through which the local government added Zhuang script to street signs in Nanning.

This script these street names used was a Romanised version of Zhuang using the Latin alphabet, and it was always accompanied by Putonghua in both Chinese characters and its own alphabetic, Romanised form. The Zhuang script, which uses letters identical to English and also identical to Romanised Putonghua except for the additional letter ‘V’, was never displayed alone and was always in smaller font on the street name signs. In some cases, the signs contained additional information about nearby streets, but only in Putonghua.

In the broader linguistic landscape, these Zhuang street names were a visual whisper. Most public writing in Nanning is in Putonghua, with occasional English. Only a few public institutions, like the regional museum and library, have prominent bilingual signage that includes Zhuang. Otherwise, Zhuang is absent from common public texts such as road directions, commercial signage, transport maps, and safety notices.

From the community’s perspective, this new bilingual signage caused confusion. Newspaper reports from 2009 indicated Zhuang language was mistaken for misspelled Putonghua, leading to complaints. In my interviews, even some Zhuang speakers had been unaware of any Zhuang script in their environment, often mistaking it for English or Putonghua until it was pointed out to them, or until they started learning to read Zhuang as young adults, if they had that opportunity. Some were not aware that the Zhuang language could be written at all:

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

A university student interviewee: Because it is Pinyin script, no one pays it any regard, they can’t read it. In the recent past, people even thought it was English or [Putonghua] Pinyin, something of that nature, but it is not Pinyin, so they could not conceive of it being Zhuang script. 

Interviewer: Right. 

Another university student interviewee: To look at, it looks the same as English, I think.

In my article, I argue that the invisibility of the Zhuang script is partly because people need to learn to read it, even if they speak Zhuang. My research, which includes reports and census data in addition to the interviews, shows that access to learning Zhuang literacy is very low. Additionally, people are not accustomed to seeing Zhuang as a public language, or as a written language.

Why is this the case? Besides its limited presence in public spaces, Zhuang is also largely absent from educational settings and from the media. There was an irregular newspaper in Zhuang and a bilingual magazine in print when I began my study, but by the late 2010s, that magazine was only printed in Putonghua. This lack of exposure to written Zhuang in everyday life affects the recognition of written Zhuang, even when it is displayed in Nanning today.

Two key themes emerged from my participants’ reactions to Zhuang in the linguistic landscape. Some Zhuang people appreciated the Government’s effort to include and preserve their cultural heritage, but they doubted the policy’s effectiveness; since they couldn’t read the script themselves, they wondered how anyone else would learn anything about Zhuang language or culture from these bilingual signs. Others viewed the policy as tokenistic. They highlighted the lack of accessibility to the Zhuang script and the frequent errors in its display.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: But I’ve heard it’s often written wrongly.  

A community leader interviewee: That’s right, it’s often written wrong but no matter how erroneously those sorts of things are written there is no-one who can pick that out, because Guangxi people have no opportunity to receive a Zhuang script education; who can read and understand?

Another point of dissatisfaction was that the way Zhuang has been standardised, which has made it more similar to Han Chinese – more similar to Putonghua – which felt like a reminder of the marginalisation of Zhuang speaking people in Nanning.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Another student interviewee: This Zhuang writing, frankly, this grammar is in my view a really erroneous usage. It’s completely Hanified Zhuang language. Our Zhuang script must have as its goal opposing that, Guangxi’s so-called Standard Zhuang, which is not endorsed. It doesn’t stick to the grammar of our mother tongue, so we feel relatively disgusted.

For these readers, the bilingual Zhuang street names in the landscape were a visual reminder of other aspects of Zhuang language policy that they felt did not adequately support the language.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: So, when you see those signs, what do you think?

A community leader interviewee: It’s simply a joke, to use Chinese it’s “to hang up a sheep’s head and sell it as dog meat”, so it’s on the façade, but in their hearts there is no respect.

These perspectives suggest that efforts to include minority languages in public spaces can be perceived as futile or even offensive if the community cannot engage with the script. The Zhuang case study highlights the importance of accessibility and education, not only display, when policies are aiming to support minority languages, but it also highlights the importance of policy responding to the habits and expectations about that language which people will have already developed from childhood onwards from the way they experience the language being absent or devalued in all sorts of places and activities. People bring those habits and expectations and value structures with them into the linguistic landscape.

Broadening our perspective from Nanning to consider the policies for marginalised or minority languages in general, this case study challenges two common assumptions about display policies.

First, there’s the assumption that displaying a minority language increases its visibility in the linguistic landscape.

[Screen shows text: Is the Zhuang language on display in public actually visible as Zhuang?]

Second, there’s the belief that when a powerful entity, like the government, includes a minority language in public spaces, this symbolises the inclusion and valorisation of the speakers of that language, or more broadly the people who share that linguistic heritage.

[Screen shows text: Does the display of Zhuang language symbolise the inclusion of Zhuang speakers?]

These assumptions are foundational in linguistic landscape research, but this study encourages us to question them. The findings suggest that public display policies need to be integrated with other language policies to be effective. In the case of Zhuang, literacy and script policies undermined the efficacy of Zhuang language displays, making them almost invisible.

[Closing screen shows text:

Making Zhuang Language Visible, produced by Ed Media Team at the University of Technology Sydney, 2024.

Narrated by Dr Alexandra Grey.

Interviews dubbed by Kristen Martin.

Script by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, based on Grey (2021) Full text

Thanks to Dr Laura Smith-Khan for content consultation.

Thanks to Wei Baocheng for singing his translation of the song ‘Gaeu Heux Faex’ into Zhuang, from Qiao Yu and Lei Zhengbang’s 藤缠树. Full rendition at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WO0-biO5xJI ]

The talk brings together three of my studies, as follows:

Study 1 (Grey and Severin, 2021)

Focus: legislation and policy about the decision-making framework and standards which might underlie multilingual government communications in Australia’s largest state, NSW.

Summary: The NSW government’s public communications are not made within a clear or informed decision-making framework as to choice of language, and do not consistently acknowledge, plan for, or manage the public’s actual linguistic diversity.

We developed a typology of laws about language choices. The most common type (40 of the 91 relevant laws) protects people by requiring that rights, obligations or information are explained to vulnerable types of people in language that they understand. Not being an English-speaker and/or literate in English is not generally recognised as a vulnerability in these laws.

Most of these require that certain government representatives communicate in an understandable way, but the standard is unclear and variously phrased: ‘plain language’, ‘ordinary language’, ‘simple language’, or ‘language likely to be understood’. There is no mention that this language may need to be a language other than English.

Another type of law that we found (merely) acknowledges linguistic diversity. The key example is the Multicultural NSW Act, which contains NSW’s Multicultural Principle that ‘all individuals and institutions should respect and make provision for the culture, language and religion of others within an Australian legal and institutional framework where English is the common language’.

Based on this Multicultural Principle and a few policies that we could locate, we conclude that there is enough of a framework in NSW that the question, how do government language choices differentially affect different language groups? should nowadays be asked when decisions about the NSW Government’s public communications are being made.

Study 2 (Grey and Severin, 2022)

Focus: web communications of 24 departments and agencies of the NSW government.

Summary: The study identifies that the NSW Government makes some effort to publicly communicate in LOTEs but also identifies problems: we found no consistency or predictability across websites in relation to the range of LOTEs used, the amount of LOTE content produced, or the steps by which it could be accessed. The image shows a table of 64 languages other than English which appeared at least once: how many of them, and for what, varied widely across the NSW government’s websites.

Overall, the actual NSW Government website communications practices we analysed did not appear to meet the standard set in the Multicultural NSW Act from which I quoted above, because provisions are not reliably or thoroughly made for non-English dominant speakers and readers.

We argue that the NSW government should not necessarily spend more money on multilingual public communications, although that may help, but rather that it should spend money on multilingual communications in an informed, strategic way, and in a way that is accountable both to policy and to the multilingual public.

Study 3 (Grey, 2023)

Focus: Covid-19 communications from the NSW government and the Australian national government.

Summary: This study finds weaknesses in multilingual Covid communications much like we found in the first two studies about general government communications, and about which I gave a preliminary report on Language on the Move.

In its final form, this study also reviews of the commentary of international organizations as to how to take a human rights-based approach to pandemic communications to fulfill certain international law obligations upon Australia (and other nations). It found expectations are emerging that governments’ multilingual health communications will be not merely partially available, but rather produced without (unreasonable) linguistic discrimination; produced with minority communities’ involvement at preparatory stages; and produced after strategic planning, which bolsters our calls in the prior studies.

The international commentary also stresses that multilingual government communications should be effective, not merely exist. In explaining what more effective multilingual communications could entail, I advocate assessing government communications’ Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Adaptability — that is, the ‘Four As’ recognized by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, crisis communications scholars and applied linguists (for example, Piller, Zhang and Li, 2020).

Recommendations

I conclude the webinar by suggesting ‘3 Rs’ in response to recurrent problems with how government communications reach, and represent, linguistically diverse publics:

1. (further) Research (preferably with government collaboration because important data is not publicly available / governments are best placed to collect it);
2. Redesigning communications and their access routes (for example, redesign the ‘monolingual logic’ of government websites, to use a phrase from Piller, Bruzon and Torsh, 2023); and
3. Rights-based Regulation (to uphold standards and to strategically plan communities’ input).

References

Grey, A. (2023). Communicative Justice and Covid-19: Australia‘s pandemic response and international guidance. Sydney Law Review. 45(1) 1-43
Grey, A., & Severin, A. A. (2021). An audit of NSW legislation and policy on the government’s public communications in languages other than English. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 122-147. doi:10.1080/10383441.2021.1970873
Grey, A., & Severin, A. A. (2022). Building towards best practice for governments’ public communications in languages other than English: a case study of New South Wales, Australia. Griffith Law Review, 31(1), 25-56. doi:10.1080/10383441.2022.2031526
Piller, I., Bruzon, A. S., & Torsh, H. (2023). Monolingual school websites as barriers to parent engagement. Language and Education, 37(3), 328-345. doi:10.1080/09500782.2021.2010744
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis. Multilingua, 39(5), 503-515. doi:https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2020-0136

(Image credit: Tingey Injury Law Firm, via Unsplash)

The Griffith Law Review has just published a thematic issue on ‘Linguistic diversity as a challenge to legal policy’, which Laura Smith-Khan and I initiated and guest edited over the last two years.

Legal rules and policies about languages can have diverse, serious effects in the judicial system and beyond it, in administrative processes, in law-making (legislative) processes and in seeking to control the way people communicate in various aspects of public life, as we’ve discussed before on the Language on the Move “Language and Law” section.

Interdisciplinary law and linguistics research has emerged in response to a growing curiosity to better understand the potential inequalities and injustices, as we’ve discussed here before.

Yet until this thematic issue, the Griffith Law Review had never devoted an entire issue to language-based problems in laws and legal processes, and nor had it been a focus of legal scholarship more generally. We are hoping that our thematic issue opens readers’ eyes to language – particularly linguistic diversity – as a core concern of legal systems and legal scholarship that has been hiding in plain sight, and constructively links the resolution of concerns to legal policy reforms.

We include within ‘legal policy’ policies of differing form and formality, from court rules to ministerial guidelines to statutory regimes.

Our 11 contributing authors are almost all early career researchers from around Australia. They have diverse academic and professional backgrounds, spanning social sciences, humanities and law as well as professional experience teaching, practicing law and translating law, but they raise shared concerns.

The unifying concern to create better, more just legal policy is relevant to domestic and international audiences because linguistic diversity is part of the context in which most (if not all) legal systems operate. This diverse reality comes into conflict with monolingual processes in state institutions, entrenched beliefs about the value of monolingualism, and legal reifications of the essential linguistic identity of peoples and nations.

Our thematic issue includes the following research on linguistic diversity as a challenge to legal policy in legislative, administrative and judicial processes, with case studies mainly from Australia but also from overseas:

Griffith Law Review: Thematic Issue, ‘Linguistic diversity as a challenge to legal policy’ 2021, volume 30, issue 1.

Editorial

• Alexandra Grey & Laura Smith-Khan ‘Linguistic diversity as a challenge and an opportunity for improved legal policy’ (Fifty free copies here; please only use this link if you do not have institutional access).

Our editorial proposes that more should be done to incorporate linguistic research within legal education. As future legal practitioners and law-makers, law students are an essential audience for this scholarship. Many of the policy suggestions across the research articles would be supported by corresponding reforms to legal education. We suggest that a workable first step could be for legal academics and linguistics academics to work together to develop, teach and share a unit. This is a timely discussion, given that the 11 compulsory subjects across Australian law schools (the ‘Priestly 11’) are currently under review.

In support of this proposition, our editorial reports on a sample inquiry we made into current offerings for university students in New South Wales (NSW) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Overall, this small study found that while a range of subjects appear to touch upon one or more intersections of linguistic and legal scholarship, there are few that offer this intersection as a focus. Across 11 public universities in NSW, we identified only three university courses on language and law offered within law degrees, at the University of Technology Sydney, University of New England and Southern Cross University, while in the ACT, the Australian National University (ANU) offers a forensic linguistics minor in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics. We also found (just a few) other university subjects touching on aspects of language and law while having other primary focuses. For example, the ANU offers ‘Literature, Law and Human Rights’ as a law degree elective. And we know from our teaching experience that most law schools offer a foundational subject in which characteristics of legal writing may be covered.

Courts and the justice system

• Alex Bowen ‘Explaining the right to silence under Anunga: 40 years of a policy about language’ (Fifty free copies here; please only use this link if you do not have institutional access).
• Jinhyun Cho ‘“That’s not how we speak”: interpreting monolingual ideologies in courtrooms’.
• Ben Grimes ‘Judicial reliance on the executive: tensions, discrepancies and recommendations for court interpreter service delivery models across Australian jurisdictions’ .

Administrative rules and processes

• Laura Smith-Khan ‘“Common language” and proficiency tests: a critical examination of registration requirements for Australian registered migration agents’ (Fifty free copies here; please only use this link if you do not have institutional access).
• Alexandra Grey & Alyssa A. Severin ‘An audit of NSW legislation and policy on the government’s public communications in languages other than English’ (Fifty free copies here; please only use this link if you do not have institutional access).

Law-making in legislatures

• Imran Ahmed ‘Not Islamic enough?: Bangla, Blasphemy and the law in Pakistan’ . (Fifty free copies here; please only use this link if you do not have institutional access).
• Julian R Murphy ‘Expanding the law’s vocabulary – Indigenous-language legislation and multilingual treaty interpretation’ .

Book reviews

• Ana Sofia Bruzon ‘Shallow equality and symbolic jurisprudence in multilingual legal orders’ (reviewing Janny H C Leung’s 2019 OUP book; fifty free copies here; please only use this link if you do not have institutional access).
• Gareth Lloyd ‘Researching forensic linguistics: approaches and applications’ (reviewing Georgina Heydon’s 2019 Routledge book).

Open Space

• Bill Mitchell (2021) ‘Communication and human rights within speech pathology’ [public lecture] (Fifty free copies here; please only use this link if you do not have institutional access).

The Griffith Law Review is unusual in having an ‘Open Space’ section for non-traditional pieces. We’ve filled it with Bill Mitchell OAM’s 2020 speech on the just-commenced Human Rights Act 2019 (Qld), ‘Speech Pathologists as Human Rights Defenders’. Bill explains that ‘communication rights’ are ‘cross-cutting enablers of other rights’, including legislatively-enshrined rights to freedom of expression, recognition of equality before the law, cultural rights, freedom from cruel and inhuman or degrading treatment in institutional settings, and rights to education and health services. This emphasis on language practices and language rights as gateways to full and fair legal participation and protection echoes the thematic issue’s research articles.

We are proud to have assembled these contributions revealing current, specific issues of linguistic (in)justice as well as thoughtful and practical paths forward; we hope you enjoy reading about them!

Language on the Move

That English has spread in Asia is well-known, and the peer-reviewed editorial, five research articles, and a book review enrich the sociology of language literature with new case studies. The focus is on investigating how socially constructed East-West binaries interact with language ideologies about English and other languages.

Our contributors identify and analyze ideologies which map international Orientalist hierarchies onto socially salient hierarchies on more local scales, particularly in relation to language. The specific Orientalist ideologies that our authors analyze include Self-Orientalism, Internal Orientalism, and Internal Colonialism. The five contributions could each be summarized with a phrase that Brook Bolander uses to describe her own findings about the indexicality of English amongst Ismaili Muslim communities in Pakistan and Tajikistan: “ownership of English [is] polysemous”.

The articles also cover varied time periods. To start, Cho uses fascinating 19th century data from the diary of Korea’s first professional Korean-English translator, Yun Chi-Ho, to explore his participation in and reproduction of a process of self-Orientalization. He sought to identify with both the West and the East but became despondent in response to the exclusionary racialisation of English speaker identities which he experienced while living in America. Later in the Special Issue, Michiko Weinmann and her co-authors bring us right up to the present moment with their study of shifts in the sociolinguistic environment of Japan in relation to the 2020/2021 Olympic and Paralympic Games that some of us just had the chance to watch.

My own article, happily co-authored with Gegentuul Baioud, as well as Xiaoxiao Chen’s article examine forms of orientalism and colonization in China in recent times (Internal Orientalism and Self-Orientalism, respectively). Baioud and I foreground minoritized peoples’ experiences. You may have read about our two separate sociolinguistic studies of Chinese minority languages previously on Language on the Move (here and here). This time, we’ve come together to compare our studies and draw out similarities, showing how binary East-West ideologies are reproduced but not necessarily as Foreign language–Local language ideologies. Rather, English and Mandarin are both becoming constructed languages of East China, which further marginalizes minority languages.

This research on the sociology of language has been an intellectual pleasure to edit, research and write. Loy, Jean and I wish you happy reading!

Ideologies of English in Asia: Table of Contents

• Ideologies of English in Asia: an editorial (by Alexandra Grey, Loy Lising and Jinhyun Cho)
• Constructing a white mask through English: colonized consciousness and racialized identities (by Jinhyun Cho). This article is Open Access, i.e. free for all to read online.
• English as Eastern: Zhuang, Mongolian, Mandarin and English in the linguistic orders of globalized China (by Alexandra Grey and Gegentuul Baioud)
• Language ideologies and self-orientalism: Representing English in China Daily travelogues (by Xiaoxiao Chen)
• Voices of English: Language and the construction of religious identity amongst Ismaili Muslims in Pakistan and Tajikistan (by Brook Bolander)
• English language education reform in pre-2020 Olympic Japan: Educator perspectives on pedagogical change (by Michiko Weinmann, Ryo Kanaizumi and Ruth Arber); and
• a book review, It Is Never a Language Itself!: Language Ideologies of English, Gender, and Embodied Capital in South Korea (by Juyoung Song, reviewing Cho’s (2017) book, English Language Ideologies in Korea).

(Image credit: Grey & Smith-Khan, 2021)

Together with another Language on the Move regular, Laura Smith-Khan, I have just published a new article about ‘bringing linguistic research into legal scholarship and practice’. It is an effort to redress the lack of recognition within the law of relevant linguistic research. The article forms part of our pursuit of an alternative and more collaborative approach to legal scholarship and law reform that addresses issues of communicative barriers and linguistic injustice.

In the article, Laura and I propose a cohesive articulation of the shared basis upon which the interdisciplinary research field of law and linguistics is developing. We do this because:

The lack of a cohesive articulation of how (or whether) there are shared bases upon which this interdisciplinary field is developing also creates challenges for collaboration and for the accessible and impactful dissemination of findings. There is, therefore, a need to apply an over-arching critical analytical perspective to the emerging field to more cohesively articulate its shared basis, to make it more accessible and to identify pathways forward for research.  (Grey and Smith-Khan 2021: 2).

Specifically, we propose an organisation of the research literature around the familiar three branches of the state: the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. This, we hope, provides a map of the research literature for non-linguists and legal practitioners. This tri-partite organisation of the field also invites interdisciplinary scholars to critically reflect on future directions for law-and-linguistic research. It may therefore spark discussion and debate from a range of perspectives, leading to refinement.

The idea of dividing the research literature into these three branches – or around these three nodes if that metaphor works better for you – came to us from Professor Peter Gray. Peter was the discussant on our panel ‘Linguistic Diversity as a Challenge to Legal Policy’ at the Australian Linguistics Society Annual Conference just over a year ago, in December 2019. His use of these three themes to organise the discussion of that panel caused Laura and I to rethink the tentative conceptualization of the field which we had proposed at the 2019 (inaugural) Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Symposium at Sydney Law School, then developed in a speech at the symposium dedicated to Sharing Knowledge in the Spirit of Humboldt. and an article based on that presentation (Smith-Khan and Grey 2020).

Our earlier proposal had been to organise the burgeoning language and law research field around three main subject matters/research questions. The first was ‘language in legal or bureaucratic processes’, the second ‘language-related social justice’; and the third ‘regulation of language’. There were a few reasons to replace this heuristic with the legislature, executive, judiciary tri-partite structure. Not only is the newer structure more familiar and navigable for lawyers and legal scholars, but we also found once we started organising the literature around the three original themes that most of the research related to the theme of ‘language-related social justice’, and much of it split out of the categories of ‘language in legal or bureaucratic processes’ or ‘regulation of language’ as well.

The three branches of the state is, we accept, also a heuristic and so, as in our former model for organising the research literature, not every study will fit neatly into just one branch. Nevertheless, “We believe these three branches, based on the field’s major concerns, organise the research literature’s connections and complementarity in ways that may not otherwise have been obvious” (Grey and Smith-Khan 2021: 6).

Parliament House in Canberra

It was important to us, in developing this proposal, that we model how to organise the research literature in a way that does not categorise studies by their methodologies or theories, because that, we thought, would reinforce the disciplinary boundaries which already limit the engagement between linguists, on the one hand, and legal scholars, legal practitioners and policy-makers, on the other.

In the article, we explain the theoretical gap between a social constructionist view of language which is common in Linguistics and a static, objectifying view of language, as well as the real-world high stakes of this gap. We illustrate this with the murder conviction, then acquittal of Mr Gene Gibson based on a guilty plea that resulted from mistaken assumptions about language, which Language on the Move has covered, and with some of Helen Fraser and her collaborators’ work on the misuse of covert audio recordings in criminal trials. (You can read more about such work on the website of the new Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence at the University of Melbourne.) Then we describe the research concerns of each of the three branches, as follows, and cite examples.

The judiciary: Research around this branch is concerned with identifying, understanding and resolving unequal or simply inefficient court processes where the way language is used, and/or the beliefs people have about how language is used, are problematic. //Problems in judicial settings are especially common starting points for studies in the sub-field ‘Forensic Linguistics’. This research almost always analyses court processes, most often criminal proceedings. It includes research about preparing and giving expert linguistic evidence (eg, about who is likely to have written a particular ransom note or how consent might be expressed in a particular dialect). It also includes research on how mis-interpretation, mis-translation, priming, and racialised or prejudicial assumptions about language can affect justice. […]

The executive: Non-court legal processes – the executive/administrative/bureaucratic processes of the state, including pre-trial processes – form a significant portion of people’s interactions with governments, and disputed executive processes are often litigated. These processes are consequently another significant subject of interdisciplinary law and linguistic research. Thus, judges; barristers; socio-legal scholars; public and administrative law scholars; educators in courses on civil and criminal procedure, ethics and professional practice; migration lawyers; and even political scientists are likely to be professionally interested in legal processes of governance beyond courts, and language-related problems/injustices within them. //Linguistics-related research about administrative processes problematises, among other topics: intercultural communication; the role of interpreting and translation; the language and discourse of bureaucratic texts (decisions, procedures, submissions, application forms, etc.) and the interpretation and application of laws or guide- lines about bureaucratic processes. […]

The legislature: The most obvious topic here may seem to be language use within parliaments. While this is not actually a prolific area of research, there is an emergent strand of research in Australia about the equally emergent practice of using Indigenous languages in parliaments. The language of legislative drafting is a more prominent focus in research about language and legislative settings; this branch is therefore the home, in our model, for the well-established research strands on Plain English legislation, and on legislative translation between jurisdictions. //There is also significant empirical and philosophical research examining what constitutes a linguistically just state. Other such research is more applied, for example studying actual policies about Indigenous, minority or migrant languages and those policies’ impacts on inequality. //This branch is also the home for research about laws which govern language use. (Grey and Smith-Khan 2021: 4-5)

Of course we could not fit all the law-and-linguistics research out there into our article. The Alternative Law Journal runs 4,000-word articles and its editors were rightly aghast when we turned in a 7,000-word draft at one point, so some of the footnotes had to go! Therefore, we welcome responses to our proposed three branches by way of publications or emails, or as comments below.

References

Grey, A. and Smith-Khan, L. (2021), ‘Bringing linguistic research into legal scholarship and practice’, Alternative Law Journal, 46 (1), 64-70. doi:10.1177/1037969X20962830

Smith-Khan, L. and Grey, A. (2020) ‘Reflections on developing research collaborations across law and linguistics’, Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of NSW, 152(3). https://royalsoc.org.au/images/pdf/journal/152-3-07SmithKhanGrey.pdf

Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network

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Background

My contribution is a study of 72 feedback questionnaires completed in 2011 and 2012 by participants over two courses of an English-Mandarin bilingual legal education program in the People’s Republic of China that my team and I designed and ran. The program was called the Yilian Advocacy Training Tournament (YATT), or in Mandarin “义联杯”公益倡导竞技性训练项目(i.e. ‘Yilian Cup’ Public Interest Advocacy Training Project), and it was run by the legal aid centre where I then worked, a place called Beijing Yilian Legal Aid and Study Centre for Labor (北京义联劳动法援助与研究中心; Yilian Centre). I’ve previously written for Language on the Move about the tension between aid work and English teaching during my time at the NGO.

Members of the 2011 YATT team

What makes the YATT program worth studying is its atypical context: this is a Global South, civil-society-led, publicly interested, practical legal education program for university students. YATT thus provides a case for investigating important questions as to how novel forms of legal education are experienced and evaluated by participants, and whether civil-society-led legal education can extend our ideas of alternative forms of ‘clinical legal education’ (CLE), especially forms that may be adapted to contexts beyond the Global North. It is worth noting that participant experiences of CLE, particularly in the Global South, are under-represented topics in the CLE research literature.

An unexpected emphasis on language in the results

Particularly interesting from the interdisciplinary law and linguistics viewpoint is my finding that the themes of legal learning and language learning emerged together and as interrelated skills. Some of the skills which participants nominated as valuable may appear at first blush to be language rather than legal skills, such as speaking with both style and confidence, speaking clearly, organising ideas, responding quickly, using facial expressions and gestures, and adapting to being on stage or to being nervous. But lawyers (especially advocates) also rely heavily on these skills, in whichever language they use. It appears that YATT participants were particularly attuned to noticing improvements in these skills and providing feedback about them. I have suggested in the paper that this may be because YATT was offered bilingually and, for many, undertaken in their second language, and so language was on the participants’ minds.

Whatever the reason, these results can help illuminate something that seems to be somewhat invisible yet in plain sight: that the integration of communication skills with legal skills is one way most CLE around the world already distinguish themselves from lecture-based legal education.

The students and professional volunteers who participated in YATT in 2011 and 2012 perceived it not only as educational, but as practical and legally-relevant education incorporating real-world activities and personnel. The practical learning was what the participants valued most about YATT. The high value on the language learning aspects of YATT is part of this overall evaluation of practical learning within the YATT program.

The emphasis on the language learning theme in the participant responses also highlights the methodological value of seeking insider perspectives. This is an approach that my sociolinguistic studies, rather than my legal studies, have taught me. Because the literature on CLE rarely foregrounds language learning, there could be no content-directed theme about language learning arising from the research literature and then applied to the data analysis; the theme had to emerge from the data itself.

Learning to communicate is language learning

This YATT feedback serves as a reminder that legal practice is in many ways about communication, not only legal know-how, and furthermore that language and communication skills are a facet of a legal education that practice-based learning, more than doctrinal learning, can develop. Learning to communicate appropriately is at the core of practical legal training because communication practices are embedded in lawyering in “real world” contexts. An improved ability to express one’s thoughts, to be confident (authoritative, even), clear and quick off the mark, to effectively emphasise or clarify a message through body language and many of the other language skills that the YATT participants noted are “soft skills”, which law students should hope to develop. I argue that this holds even if CLE is undertaken in the students’ first language, in order to improve their ability to work with various clients and in court.

I therefore argue that practice-based language learning should be recognised and researched as an important part of experiential legal education and vocational legal training generally, and specifically of CLE. Communicative and linguistic skills are surely key aspects that CLE educators around the world hope students will learn through interacting and doing lawyering (for real or in mocked-up scenarios), all the more because these skills are not studied or practiced much in the law school classroom.

Nevertheless, when reviewing the literature I noted that legal education scholarship does not foreground this aspect of CLE, in contrast to the foregrounding of the language aspect from the internal perspective in my study. The relative invisibility of language and communication skills in CLE theory is not necessarily because these are unimportant in reality; the communication skills which the YATT participants felt they had beneficially practiced are recognisable as the stock in trade of good legal advocates and advisers. I suggest, rather, that the relative invisibility of language in legal education scholarship is the product of a disposition well-known in the sociolinguistic literature, namely, that non-linguists often mistakenly regard language as something that is simply there and “naturally” learnt and known.

This study gives an illustration of why there is a benefit to making language learning and linguistic research much more visible in legal education. Here, the context is clinical legal education, but there is surely value to be found by increasing the visibility of language learning and linguistic research across legal education. Dr Laura Smith-Khan and I have made this broader point before on Language on the Move, e.g. when noting Prof Janet Ainsworth’s call at IAFL 2019 for scholars to deliberately communicate our research where it is most likely to influence positive change, and we have a related paper just out in the Alternative Law Journal.

References

Grey, A. (2020) ‘The value of participant feedback: Insights from learners in a novel, non-university CLE setting in China’, International Journal of Clinical Legal Education 27(2) (2020), 5-67.
Grey, A. and Smith-Khan, L. (2020). ‘Bringing linguistic research into legal scholarship and practice’. Alternative Law Journal.

Exterior of a pub at an intersection in the shopping hub of Burwood, a highly diverse suburb of Sydney

Editor’s note: Do public health messages about the Covid-19 pandemic match the linguistic profile of Australia’s population? In this latest contribution to our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis, Dr Alexandra Grey, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney Law School, shares her submission to the Australian Senate’s Select Committee on COVID-19’s inquiry into the Australian Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The call for contributions to the series continues to be open.

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My submission is based on my current, still ongoing research project, ‘Good Governance in Multilingual Urban Australia’. This submission addresses the important question: How do you access COVID-19-related public health information in Australia in languages other than English (LOTEs)? It is based on preliminary results of my current study and provides recommendations about better reaching the linguistically diverse Australian public with official public health communications. 

The Committee will decide which submissions to put on the public record. However, Language on the Move is making a copy of mine available here, because we believe it will be beneficial to draw attention to, discuss and even debate these recommendations. Please read the submission (11 pages plus images) or simply my 6 recommendations, which you can find on page 3, and share your perspectives in the comments below.

The submission identifies these key problems with Australia’s official COVID-19 public health communications in LOTEs, which emerge from the study:

• There are barriers to the accessibility of official public health information for those in the community who are not confident reading/able to read the English-medium public health communications on display in their local areas or available (albeit often buried) on government websites
• State and federal governments have left it to local councils to provide LOTE-medium public health communications in public areas, without any requirement on local councils to actually take up this task, and with varying outcomes even in areas with similar multilingual profiles
• There is an under-utilization of the LOTE-medium public health posters which the NSW and federal governments have specifically produced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic
• Government health agencies’ Twitter feeds have not cultivated LOTE readerships before or during the pandemic and do not appear to be engaging the LOTE-using public; these feeds are haphazard, infrequent and unreliable in their LOTE tweeting as well as in their references to LOTE resources.

Amongst various possible ways of addressing these problems, my recommendations focus on:

• Research: improving the efficacy of both physical and online official LOTE public health communications by increasing the collection and analysis of appropriate data
• Redesigning online communications: improving the efficacy of online official LOTE public health communications through simple, practical changes to government websites and tweets, including increased and consistent use of LOTEs and their scripts
• Standard setting: improving both the quality and the reliability of LOTE public health communications across government agencies through legal requirements, at federal and state levels, for government bodies to plan for, execute and monitor the effective dissemination in LOTEs of official public health information, at least during times of emergency/pandemic, with associated best practice guidelines to be developed and implemented across government. I anticipate that this last will be the most controversial, but potentially also the most impactful.

Read the submission here.

Acknowledgement

I’d like to acknowledge Dr Allie Severin and Dr Hanna Torsh for their help with data collection in this project, and the Language-on-the-Move Reading Group for insightful discussions of language aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for our full coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis.

Indigenous Australians are imprisoned at much higher rates than non-Indigenous Australians (Source: Australian Law Reform Commission)

Note: This post was co-authored with Laura Smith-Khan.

Language on the Move mover-and-shaker, Dr Laura Smith-Khan, and I are just back from the 14^th biennial conference of the International Association of Forensic Linguists at RMIT University in Melbourne (1-5 July 2019; program and abstracts here). This association, which goes by the acronym IAFL, brings together academics, police, lawyers, judiciary and language professionals, and offers stimulating research from scholars around the world, much of it revealing how legal processes and justice outcomes could be improved by better understanding language practices and mistaken beliefs about language.

The presentations by researchers, translators and interpreters here in Australia working with and on Indigenous languages were especially fascinating, and follows on from last week’s overview of IAFL research about law reform.

For international visitors, conferences in Australia can be an introduction to the customs of acknowledgement and welcome to Country. Attending this conference, we acknowledged that the conference venue sits on the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

Amongst the many presentations relating to the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and specifically to Australian Indigenous languages, a highlight was Michael Walsh’s (University of Sydney) keynote. He spoke about his many encounters with the mistaken belief by non-specialists that, if an Indigenous person speaks any variety of English, then their participation in complex legal matters in English will be fair and unproblematic. Drawing on the extensive work on Aboriginal ways of using English by Diana Eades (who also presented at the conference), Michael talked us through a range of Englishes which are often conflated with Standard Australian English and Legal English. He also explained differing English discourses, making the provocative suggestion that sometimes ‘bad English’ can be to the claimant’s advantage and ‘good English’ to their disadvantage.

Also provoking reflection and discussion, Ben Grimes (Charles Darwin University) moderated a panel of speakers from the Aboriginal Interpreter Service, and presented his own ideas for timely advocacy by linguists to the judiciary. Linguistic evidence is highly relevant when assessing whether a defendant’s admissions were made reliably, as the new Uniform Evidence Act section 85 calls upon judges to consider. This could, and should, include greater and more technical consideration of the linguistic challenges faced by many Indigenous people in Australia who do not have Standard Australian English as their dominant language variety.

Aboriginal Ways of Using English, by Diana Eades

Some of those linguistic challenges – which become challenges in equal access to justice – were presented by Alex Bowen (ARDS Aboriginal Corporation). Alex examined transcripts of police giving the “right to silence” caution to Indigenous people (for the broader context of research related to this caution, see here). Police guidelines recognise a potential for miscommunication and therefore require police to give the caution in undefined “simple terms” and to ask people they are arresting to explain back what they have heard so as to check their understanding of the warning. This is important legally because the assumption that the right was understood then means any admissions are taken to have been voluntarily made. However, Alex’s analysis revealed a great variety of apparent mistakes about the caution having been understood. Problems included conversational sequencing affecting how suspects interpreted police language; chains of paraphrases producing confusion, especially relating to the meaning of conditional clauses; failure to add information; and police not providing clear feedback to suspects about whether or not they have demonstrated an accurate understanding of their rights. Alex made the plausible suggestions that it would help if police announced the topic, i.e. explained that what they were about to do was to give a caution and test whether it had been understood, rather than to start an interrogation. His recommendations included:

• That people who lack familiarity with mainstream legal culture and institutions be educated about the legal system outside the interview room
• That police start with a clearer text in plain English if they are going to explain the caution (see CORG 2015 recommendation 1)
• That police develop and evaluate a process for explaining and testing the caution in arrest conversations

Problems with the police caution underpinned years of litigation relating to manslaughter for which Mr Gene Gibson, an Indigenous man from Kiwirrkurra in the Gibson Desert, was arrested in 2010. After years of imprisonment and legal appeals, Mr Gibson was finally released in 2017, when the WA Court of Appeal found there had been a miscarriage of justice. Mr Gibson’s first language is Pintupi and his second language is another Indigenous language, Kukatja. The court found that Mr Gibson’s initial guilty plea had not necessarily been “attributable to a genuine consciousness of guilt” but resulted from mishandled language barriers and mistaken assumptions about language.

It was encouraging to hear at IAFL that the expert evidence of Professor Diana Eades had been considered by the courts and played a key role in Mr Gibson’s eventual release. Diana’s presentation explained language problems which arose in the initial police interview. In this part of Australia (Western Australia), police investigations involving Indigenous suspects must include an “interview friend” to provide support. However, for Mr Gibson, the police misunderstood the difference between an interview friend and an interpreter, deciding not to call an interpreter and instead to rely upon the interview friend to interpret between Indigenous languages and Standard Australian English. Rather than relaying the information that Mr Gibson was free to choose not to answer police questions, and that, if he did, he risked incriminating himself unnecessarily, the interview friend advised Mr Gibson that he must answer the police questions. Not knowing the relevant Indigenous languages, the police officers did not pick up this problem at the time.

Diana Eades’ recommendations for basic linguistics instruction for police and lawyers

Diana used this case to illustrate two approaches to language: one in which meaning is (mis)understood as independent of context and one in which meaning is contextual. The de-contextualised approach is the source of many language-related injustices in legal processes, from taking simple words like “yes” on face value as consent or affirmation, to misunderstanding the different linguistic demands of an interview compared with a casual chat about the footy and therefore not arranging an interpreter. That Mr Gibson finally won his release was due to certain judges, unlike the police, understanding that meaning is contextual (see e.g. the 2014 judgment). Diana concluded with the recommendation that the points listed on the slide be taught to police and lawyers (see image).

Widening out to look across multiple cases of unreliable admissions of guilt, David Moore (University of Western Australia) reaffirmed that there are high-stakes linguistic “false friends” between Central Australian Englishes and Standard Australian English, e.g. “kill” and “rape”, which can lead to false confessions from Aboriginal defendants.

Natalie Stroud (Monash University) focused on another type of court, the Koori Court of Victoria, which is designed to provide a culturally sensitive forum for Indigenous offenders and give them a voice in the criminal justice system, including by integrating community Elders into “interactive sentencing conversations”. She highlighted that the introduction of video conferencing is impacting on their inclusion, narrowing the conversation back to a Magistrate-defendant dialogue.

These presentations about legal processes were complemented by research on phonetics. For example, Deborah Loakes (University of Melbourne) has been building up the technical description of the phonetics of two Victorian varieties of Aboriginal English, and the variations within them, which could better assist decision-makers in the legal system to identify speakers of these varieties and specific inter-lingual communication issues such as mistaken identification of a speakers’ background.

Attendees also heard from experts from beyond linguistics, for example lawyers from the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency presented the case for using cultural brokers instead of legal interpreters in Government service delivery to remote Indigenous communities. Similarly, Dima Rusho (Monash University) described the innovative collaborations of legal professionals and Indigenous community members in the Northern Territory to develop translations that draw on Indigenous conceptualizations to improve the understanding of key terms in legal processes.

In this International Year of Indigenous Languages, these researchers are helping us all think through the links between the minoritisation of Indigenous languages and the systematic inequalities faced by Indigenous people in Australia’s (and other nations’) legal systems, providing ideas and impetus for reform.

References

Bowen, A. (2019). ‘You Don’t Have to Say Anything’: Modality and Consequences in Conversations About the Right to Silence in the Northern Territory. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 39(3), 347-374. doi:10.1080/07268602.2019.1620682
Eades, D. (2013). Aboriginal ways of using English. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Eades, D. (2018). Communicating the Right to Silence to Aboriginal Suspects: Lessons from Western Australia v Gibson. Journal of Judicial Administration, 28(1), 4-21.
Smith-Khan, L. & A. Grey (2019). Lawyers need to know more about language. Language on the Move.

The Language-on-the-Move team proudly celebrate the graduation of Drs Alexandra Grey and Gary O’Neill

Editor’s note: This week the 20th and 21st PhD students I have supervised to completion graduated from their degrees. You can read the theses of Dr Alexandra Grey about language rights in China and of Dr Gary O’Neill about multilingualism in Dubai through our PhD Hall of Fame. Dr Alexandra Grey, who also received a Macquarie Vice-Chancellor’s Commendation for Academic Excellence and an Australian PhD Prize for Innovation in Linguistics for her thesis, delivered the graduation speech on behalf of the graduating group. It is with immense pride in her achievement and that of all our PhD students that we share her speech here on Language on the Move. Alternatively you can watch the ceremony here (Alex’ speech starts at 1:13:35).

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Chancellor, members of the University, guests, and especially my fellow graduates here in fantastic hats; hello! I am delighted and deeply honoured to give voice to the gratitude that I’m sure most of us feel towards our guests, and to reflect briefly on my own personal path towards today.

Today, I celebrate the completion of a PhD. Let me tell you a little about it. My own PhD is 100,000 of my very best words, four years of intense work and learning, and a childhood dream achieved.  The chancellor was right in saying that when you see a parent graduating it inspires you. I collected most of my PhD data in China, interviewing young adults and looking at how policy protections for one particular minority language work in practice. In preparation for the PhD I learnt Mandarin. The Linguistics Department supported me to go to China for fieldwork in four provinces. I remember one day in 2015 in South China, when I hopped onto smaller and smaller vehicles – trains, then buses, then minibuses – to get to a village in the rural, rice farming fields. Eventually, the bus conductor informed me:

Zài zhèlǐ xià chē. Shāo děng yī huǐ’er. Zhè liàng chē bù zuǒ zhuǎn…

He was saying I had to simply get off on this small winding road. His explained that his minibus was turning right at the fork in the road, but if I waited 20 minutes another minibus turning left would pass by. zhen de ma?! Had I understood that right? My little suitcase and I sat by this fork in the road, alone for once in such a populous country, and I remember thinking “I may not feel certain about where I am on a map right now, but I know for certain that I’m in the right place in my career.” I loved doing my PhD. Most days.

But doing a PhD involves a lot of independent work, which can feel lonely. And I felt even more alone when my husband fell seriously ill at the start of my final year. We passed a very difficult eight months juggling his health and my PhD. Luckily, I had a caring family, and my supervisor, Prof Ingrid Piller, had developed a great peer support group around me. Ingrid’s many years of experience has only strengthened her passion for supervision.

I am sure my success comes in part from having this bunch of boffins, this support network. Now, we can become the supporters! Isn’t it exciting for us graduates to know that, now we have this university experience under our belts, we can be sounding boards and sympathetic listeners for friends or siblings who undertake university studies, or perhaps one day even support our own students! Being able to give back to my research team, not just to take their willing support, has added so much meaning to my PhD journey.

Despite the scale of my project, and the personal pressures, I nevertheless finished my thesis within the four year limit, then won a Vice-Chancellor’s Commendation and a national thesis prize, and I’ve just started a job running my own exciting project at Sydney University. So it is with an unashamed sense of triumph that I am graduating today.

I hope very much that every graduate here at every degree level feels triumphant, too, as each has surely overcome their own obstacles. I couldn’t be more proud to represent us all in thanking the community here today who have fostered us in our achievements and, I hope, fostered in us a lifelong love of learning.

“This is English”, a shop assistant told me.

Language is literally “on the move” in the writing on clothing. We’ve all seen it but may not have taken much notice. It deserves attention as an increasingly visible and fashionable type of “banal cosmopolitanism”, which “refers to mundane discourses that enact globalization in everyday life”.

Wearable text was certainly part of everyday life in Wuhan, China, where I lived the last half year. Alphabetic letters on a garment, in particular, jumped out from the wearer’s surrounding linguistic environment, which consisted mainly of Mandarin written in simplified characters, and standing out from the crowd may have been exactly the reason the wearer chose letter-emblazoned clothes. This was articulated by one garment itself, on a breast pocket I saw when I looked up from my noodles over a cafeteria table one lunchtime, which read: “Fascinating//CROSSD CULTURAL HERO//96”

The wearer of this textile text literally becomes more “fascinating” (or distinct, in Bourdieuian terms). Wearing “foreign” language is an archetypal example of the “consumption of spatially distant places, [and] signifiers of cultural diversity, and opening up of lifestyles to new experiential spaces and horizons”, which is how Adam Jaworski (2015, p. 220) describes banal cosmopolitanism.

Wearing language is a personal, but often banal, embodiment of cosmopolitanism and I am interested how distant places and cultures are transformed into graphics, printed onto textiles, bought and worn in China. Of all the scripts and languages I saw on clothing, the alphabetic script, and recognizably (if not always 100% correctly spelled) English words predominate.  Wearing English is vastly more popular than wearing any other foreign language in Wuhan, but also vastly more popular than wearing Mandarin. For months, I took note of what I saw on sale in shops and worn in classrooms, restaurants, buses and trains. When I saw a textile bearing a Chinese or other non-English text, I then kept a rough count of how many items of clothing bearing English I saw until I next came upon a Chinese or other non-English wearable text. Never were the numbers even close: I saw many more English-emblazoned clothes every day.

Scattered letters on a jacket

The types of textile texts I observed can be subdivided for analysis:

1. Brand names (both foreign and Chinese) and trade-marked slogans;
2. Stand-alone messages that are not readily connected to any one brand;
3. Decorative use of writing without forming words

English predominates

In all these categories, English was more popular than any other language, although I saw some Chinese, French, Russian, Latin (Carpe Diem and Veni, Vidi, Vici, so arguably English borrowings from Latin), a little Korean and Dutch, and some non-languages, which I will come back to. As one of my students observed, the language her peers wear is “usually English. It looks more fashionable. But some extremely popular [Chinese] characters will be printed on clothes”.

Even Chinese brand names were often written on clothing in Romanized pinyin script instead of characters. For example, the puzzling ZYGW and PNADA on clothes or the pinyin brand name YUYUANPAI on a suitcase. This practice clearly positions Chinese brands within an international fashion of alphabetic brand names and logos, even if these Chinese brands are targeting the domestic market.

Examples in the second category ranged from short messages like TRENDY, Woosh! or fashion to whole sentences. For example, I saw someone wearing shoes with this long phrase printed on them: “Lets be [obscured] YOUTHFUL [obscured] LEADING THE [obscured] MORE CONFIDEN [obscured]”.

Texts on shoes, especially long texts like the sentence above, are uncommon on shoes in English-dominant places I’ve been to, but a more common sight in China. Similarly, work attire and men’s formal attire would not normally carry text in Australia, but I saw, for example, a middle-aged man wearing a work blazer embroidered with Autumn on a high speed train to Wuhan. The unspoken conventions about wearable text are of course different across cultures, and part of constructing locally-meaningful divisions and prejudices. I argue that in China, the local symbolic power of foreign languages affects the conventions about which clothes are appropriate for bearing text. English, in particular, is desirable enough as a mark of distinction to break into new micro-spaces (like a shoe or a work blazer), whereas foreign languages have less symbolic power and would therefore be less fashionable – maybe even inappropriate – if printed on similar garments in an English-dominant country like Australia.

Examples in the second category (stand-alone messages) abound as the butt of jokes on the internet because of the preponderance of language-like but incorrect or nonsensical phrases. I could add a belt I saw for sale shouting NANAN!!!, an overcoat reading Courtesy to a lady is a gentleman’s and pyjamas emblazoned with Slaap lekkeri (Google tells me this might be slightly off Dutch for “sleep well”).

However, I have long been intrigued rather than amused by these: are clothing manufacturers keen to identify their products with international fashion/culture/language but unwilling to pay for English language work in the design process? Are such language services difficult for designers and manufacturers to access for some reason other than cost? That is, do wearable texts reveal unequal access to linguistic resources, rather than differing aesthetics?

I asked a shop keeper such questions when I saw a top with the lettering “ADD SHE SSR ESSEG” in a relatively expensive women’s clothing store, which had correct English on other garments. I asked the shop assistant what this said, and she responded that it was English. Aware of my disbelief, she starting picking a glued-on letter off and explaining they could all come off. I said the top made no sense in English and she responded that it looked good, though. In a contrasting example, the assistant at a smaller, cheaper shop informed me that she was aware that a nonsense textile text was not English but, even so, it was selling well.

With its irregular spelling this “Vivienne” on a pyjama top is difficult to read (and its meaning even less clear).

Language play

Do designers and manufacturers simply not care about language quality assurance because they can sell the clothes regardless of language errors or oddities, and at a better price than clothes without any words? Or is “bad English” actually the design goal?

Playing with language can make it even more eye-catching. The brand Yishion is widespread in China and is a good example of such multilingual play: Yi is the pinyin of the Mandarin for clothes, and is combined with the English word fashion.

Whole playful phrases are rarer but include fun examples such as a female student’s overcoat, which read “Words//Boys//Empty words”; in another example, also observed on campus, a female student was wearing a jacket, which announced in French “J’ai perdu//Ma veste” (“I have lost my jacket”).

Adding visual value

Some of these fashion choices may cause you to ask “did the wearer know what the text said, or even that the text was (or was not) English?” That is, what if some wearable texts are worn for aesthetic or price-point reasons, and not “read”? The third category allows us to look at this further, as these are texts without an explicit meaning such as the scattered letters on the coat in the image.

Even so, these texts still have an indexical meaning as symbols of “English”, i.e. international, global culture. That is, these texts highlight the re-purposing of language into visual design resources; it is precisely the stripping back of meaning that makes this archetypal banal cosmopolitanism. To have no lexical meaning to wearers and viewers, and no desire for it, represents the ultimate indicator of language as bearer not of any one ethno-national identity; but of global consumer identity.

In certain markets like China, “foreignized, visual-linguistic forms” (Jaworski 2015, p. 217) are a more saleable commodity than local languages. As the “fascinating crossd cultural hero 96” in the cafeteria explained to me, he did not know the meaning of the text on his jacket but bought it because it looked 《好酷》(“cool”). In other words, the medium is the message, and the message is membership in the global. Or, as one of my students sighed: “sometimes people use the letters just because they worship foreign things”.

And readers, please feel free to tweet us further examples under the hashtag #wear_language (@Lg_on_the_Move).

Related content

• Banal cosmopolitanism
• More on banal cosmopolitanism
• Is English a local language in Berlin?
• Banal nationalism and the internationalization of higher education
• Halloween mystery

The conference was funded by the Research Office of UNNC and the “Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies” (MEITS) project. MEITS is an enviably enormous research project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Council drawing together researchers from the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Nottingham and the Queen’s University, led by Prof Wendy Ayres-Bennett. It seeks to establish the value of multilingualism and language learning, as part of government efforts to stimulate language learning within the British education system. One of the project’s six strands focuses on language standardization, led by Prof McLelland (cf. her earlier co-edited volume Standardization: Studies from the Germanic Languages, 2002). This conference offered MEITS researchers a window into experiences of language standardization across many multilingual contexts in Asia. It also offered researchers from different disciplines a rare chance to come together and talk about overlapping research questions, methods and findings. The conference consisted of four keynotes and nineteen presentations (abstracts here). The scheduling allowed all participants to hear all the presentations, leading to a high degree of engagement and building good foundations for future collaborations.

One key theme was the multiplication of standards of a language, as opposed to standardization resulting in just one monolithic standard. Our first keynote, by Prof Anvita Abbi, described Standard Hindi as “not a point but a range”; there are many regional Hindis which are treated by speakers as the standard. She explained how this fits within a society where multilingualism is both normal and valued. Another keynote, by Chinese language policy expert Prof Minglang Zhou, explained how Standard Mandarin (i.e. Putonghua), like Hindi, has developed into clear regional varieties, and asked how the standardization process, which is aimed at reducing linguistic diversity, can in fact reduplicate it. Prof Feng’s speech also dealt with regional variation in Putonghua; he framed this diversity within 《大华语》(The Big Sinitic Language Group) a concept which accepts the existence of local Putonghua varieties, as well as other Mandarin topolects, within a hierarchical linguistic order topped by the national standard.

Prof Abbi’s keynote introduced a second key theme: the problem of “excessive standardization”, where attempts to disassociate the standard from any particular dialect may lead to an official variety that nobody can understand, and which is therefore rarely used. Through various presenters we heard illustrative examples, including in my own presentation, which showed how standardization marginalizes the Zhuang minority language in China, especially under conditions of marketization. Prof Feng’s presentation put this kind of standardization policy in context, explaining that minority language standardization itself follows a standard (and not necessarily responsive) procedure in China. It is a three-step process of standardising literacy/script, vocabulary, and then digital rendering (i.e. creating a type-able Unicode).

How it is that top-down policies can reach this extreme, where standardization becomes the end in itself, rather than a means to create a useful lingua franca (or other goals), can be explained by recalling how ideological language standardization is, as Prof Imtiaz Hasnain reminded us in another keynote. He presented South Asia as a place where language is just one way by which social information is conveyed, and where both societal and individual multilingualism are not chaotic socio-cultural accidents but intended and desired. He contrasted this to the monolingual and colonial mindset of top-down measures to define and promote one standard language.

Developing a standard language is often intertwined with developing language examination regimes, and the fourth keynote speaker, Dr Luo Lian, gave a insight into these dual processes in China. She compared the two official streams for testing Putonghua, the 民族汉语考试 (Ethnic Groups Han Language Exam: “MHK”) by which the Putonghua of first-language speakers of China’s official minority languages is assessed, and the 汉语水平考试 (Han Language Level Exam: “HSK”), by which the Putonghua of foreign learners is assessed. She found not only that the standard of literacy expected of minorities was much higher than that expected of foreigners, but also that using non-standard albeit popular expressions in these exams could be treated as evidence of language proficiency rather than as mistakes, especially by HSK markers. Kerim Friedman discussed the last decade’s elaborate testing regime for indigenous language proficiency in Taiwan – there are now 168 tests – and the mismatch between “teaching to the test” and teaching useful, living Pangcah, one of the most widely spoken of these languages. We were reminded that standard-setting, and testing against official standards, are key means by which states are able to “see” language diversity (following Scott 1998).

Another key theme across the conference was standardising orthography and script. Prof Abbi explained how many Indian language groups have considered the development of a standard written form of their as language empowering and crucial for schooling, which is in turn crucial for language maintenance. Another senior researcher, Prof Premsrirat, explained her group’s efforts to facilitate communities across Thailand developing their own standard orthographies and scripts, and the enormous pride and expressive facility that can result from such efforts. However, we did not shy away from discussing potentially deleterious impacts of standardization, including orthographic standardization erasing language variety, the politicization of orthography and script choices and how prioritising written standards can exhaust funding at the expense of supporting spoken language. Nor did we shy from discussing the factors that can restrict the enduring impact of standardization policies, such as creating a written standard but not creating avenues for it to be learnt.

In this vein, the theme of standardization as a process that minoritizes languages was explored. For example, Hiroyuki Suzuki and Gerald Roche each talked us through the top-down and grassroots processes of creating a Standard Tibetan. Their research shows these processes are leading to discursive invisibility for many languages in the Tibetic group, as well as many non-Tibetic languages with long histories of being spoken across the Tibetan Plateau, as well as contributing to actual language shift for many of these languages. These and other presentations – including Nick Palfreyman on sign language varieties in Indonesia and Ying Ding on Shibe in North-West China – noted the dynamics amongst speakers themselves, where participation in formal processes of standardization can empower certain speakers, certain varieties and certain imagined communities over others.

Finally, we also considered that various identities may not be readily performed in a standard language, instead utilising features associated with other language varieties and registers. Hui Zhao and Xiaomei Wang explored China’s Beijing and Tianjin dialects, respectively, from identity construction perspectives, Hideko Abe explained the deliberate, context-sensitive use of features associated with Japanese language’s gendered registers in transgender speakers’ identity constructions, and Patrick Heinrich introduced us to “dialect cosplay” by young Japanese who use features mined from previously stigmatized dialects to stylize their “boring” standard speech.

In sum, this was a stimulating conference program and those embarking on any standardization policies have a feast of food for thought! I encourage you to read the conference abstracts, as not all presenters are mentioned by name above, and share your thoughts in the comments section below. Stay tuned in 2018 for details of an edited publication based on this conference.

References:

Linn, A. R. and McLelland, N. (2002) Standardization: Studies from the Germanic Languages. Amsterdam; Philadelphia, PA, Benjamins.

Scott, J. C. (1998). Authoritarian High Modernism. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (pp. 87-102). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Alexandra Grey proudly holding the physical product of her PhD research

My university will shortly require only a digital copy of each PhD after it has been examined and awarded, but luckily I snuck into the tail-end of the hard copy era. I say ‘lucky’ because my hard copy of my own hard work is a lovely, and hefty, thing to hold. And I’m not the only one who wants to hold it; having a physical final product has been meaningful to friends and family who buoyed me through the last four years.

When I collected the hard-bound copies I thought, ‘my work is complete’. Complete enough to celebrate, at any rate! My Language on the Move colleagues have warmly marked the milestone. But while the PhD is over the research doesn’t feel finished. I am still drawn to the subject of my thesis – how China’s minority languages policies operate today – because of (rather than despite) my years researching it. For the thesis, I chose a quote from Heller as my opening epigraph:

The globalised new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many different ways … Ethnolinguistic minorities provide a particularly revealing window into these processes. (Heller, 2003, p. 473)

These different transformations are ongoing; this window remains. So, I remain curious about sociolinguistics in the Sinosphere (and much else in the Sinosphere besides). Every time I write up a paper from the thesis I think up further questions to investigate. I’m working out how to share the findings with my generous participants and collaborators. And I’m preparing to return to China later in 2017 for a different project (on English and the globalisation of university education).

The thesis is not only relevant to linguists but also to Sinologists and political scientists. It’s an ethnography of language policy; that is, it’s about the lived experiences of state practices regarding a minority language. Rather than merely analysing what the minority language polices say, or what language practices everyday people have, it combines these angles. This makes for a lot of ground to cover, so I took a case study of just one language, Zhuang, the language of China’s largest official minority group, a group who have autonomous sub-national government over the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region. The thesis investigates what language ideologies are produced and reproduced in official language rights discourses and policies, and how social actors receive, resist or reproduce these.

Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica)

The research takes an ethnographic approach and draws on interviews with over sixty participants, texts collected from public linguistic landscapes, fieldwork observations and a corpus of Chinese laws, policies and official policy commentaries.

The analysis commences with a critical examination of the procedures of Zhuang language governance, finding that the language policy framework neither empowers Zhuang speakers nor the institutions tasked with governing Zhuang because authority for language governance is fractured and responsiveness to changing conditions is limited. Furthermore, the Zhuang language governance framework entrenches the normative position of a ‘developmentalist’ ideology under which Zhuang is constructed as of low value. Next, the analysis follows Zhuang language policy along its trajectory into practice. The thesis examines how language policy is implemented at different levels of government, and how Zhuang language governance is understood and experienced by social actors, concentrating on two key mechanisms of language policy: first, the regulation of language displayed in public space; and, second, the regulation of language in education.

With regard to public space, the thesis examines a municipal legislative intervention under which Zhuang has been added to public signage. It finds that Zhuang language is rarely displayed outside areas under Zhuang autonomous regional government, and that even within these areas Zhuang is almost exclusively displayed on government signage. The thesis then extends the linguistic landscape approach, analysing the various ‘readings’ of Zhuang landscape texts by viewers, including some who negatively evaluate the signage as tokenistic and many who simply do not ‘see’ the displays of Zhuang. This is one of the more surprising findings: it’s so easy to assume (as a policy-maker, an academic or a passer-by) that a bilingual street sign will be read and used by bilingual viewers who speak that language, that it will be seen as bilingual, that it will be seen at all. As my research discovered, these are not well founded assumptions.

Bilingual and triscriptual street sign in Nanning, GZAR

Finally, the thesis examines education policy under which Zhuang is introduced as a study subject at a limited number of universities after its near-total exclusion from primary and particularly secondary schooling. It finds that students who – against social norms and values – choose to study Zhuang at university nevertheless largely adopt the language ideologies of the pre-tertiary schooling system, namely the belief that Zhuang is not an educated person’s language and not useful for socio-economic mobility.

Overall, the study finds that Zhuang language rights and policies, despite being powerful official discourses, do not challenge the ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. Moreover, although language rights and policies create an ethno-linguistically divided and hierarchic social order seemingly against the interests of Zhuang speakers, Zhuang speakers may nevertheless value the Zhuang identity discursively created and invested with authority by this framework.

I’m now looking forward to reworking my doctoral research for publication, touching base with Zhuang participants, and getting started on my post-doctoral journey.

Alexandra Grey’s PhD thesis, “How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change” (Macquarie University, 2017) can be accessed through our PhD Hall of Fame.

Reference

Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473-492.

Alex spent a stimulating summer centered on child multilingualism away from the leafy Macquarie campus

Macquarie University campus seemed to sleep in the summer sun once the semester ended last November, but there has been lots happening off campus! These “stoking coals” for the summer mind were generally linked by a focus on young people’s multilingual practices and in their community-centredness; many of the research activities I’ve encountered in recent months pool together the experience and energy of academics, teachers, community organisers and young people themselves. They ranged in form from school workshops, to inter-organisation research-sharing meetings and online community platforms. I’m going to share two ideas developed across these activities, first in relation to child language brokering, and second in relation to universities/academics doing outreach projects.

From a couple of the activities and discussions I had at them, I formed the distinct impression that Child Language Brokering (CLB) is poised to emerge ever more strongly this year as a research theme in sociolinguistics and education/educational linguistics. For those to whom the term “CLB” is unfamiliar, Ingrid wrote about children as language brokers here last year, and the recent UK Child Language Brokering in School-Supporting Good Practice Guide explains the terminology this way:

“We talk about children and adults being language brokers when they act as an agent for one party in a conversation. A professional interpreter is independent, impersonal and detached; a language broker is there to support someone”.

CLBs are part of the everyday operation of many multilingual and multicultural communities, but there’s relatively little empirical and/or ethnographic research into Who, What, When and Why, especially in Australia. Ingrid’s blog gave examples of CLB mediators in medical and legal communications, mainly from European and US experiences, which are likely similar to the Australian context. The Supporting Good Practice Guides’ authors, Cline, Crafter and Prokopiou, did the first UK study of CLB practices in the school context; I haven’t found a comparable Australian school study. They found that CLBs do a range of semi-prepared and impromptu translation and interpreting in the school space, mainly to facilitate communication between their teachers and their parents, and also between new pupils and the school community.

The first event in my summer of off-campus inspiration was a workshop devoted to multilingualism in Sydney’s linguistic landscape at North Sydney Girls High School, a leading, selective state school, which Ingrid and I both participated in. Language brokering stood out as language practice both personally and academically interesting to the group of bright high school researchers we met at the workshop.

The workshop was a culmination of a month-long group research project which the girls had worked on, guided by passionate teachers. 2015’s group research theme was “Agents of Change – Hack Your City” and the students chose their research question from an array including sustainable architecture, local history and urban language.

The ‘urban language’ student researchers identified unmet needs amongst various types of multilinguals in northern Sydney: tourists, migrant families, and students who act as language and culture brokers for their parents, teachers and local communities. With regard to the latter, most of the girls themselves had experience as linguistic and cultural mediators, as over 90 percent of this school’s students speak a language other than English at home.

It was with this experience in mind that I seized upon another community-based linguistics event in January, when I temporarily left the sunny Macquarie campus for a warm but wintery library in London’s university district. I saw a notice for a meeting of the NALDIC South and Central London Research Interest Group, an assembly of proactive university linguistics and education researchers, English-as-an-Additional-Language school teachers, and community organisation staff. They had invited Dr Sarah Crafter, from the UCL Institute of Education, along to discuss her CLB research. Sarah is one of the authors of the Supporting Good Practice Guide I hyperlinked above. The NALDIC meeting proved to be a welcoming and stimulating discussion about young people’s multilingualism in London, including language brokering, and also about publications, classroom practices and collective input to current education policy debates. I came away with many ideas about community-engaged and community-based linguistics to follow up and share. First, relating particularly to CLB, Sarah has built these two sites:

• http://languagebrokering.org/ This is Sarah’s newer site and is intended as platform to build up a research community around CLB themes. It has a growing directory of researchers around the world and blogs on CLB research.
• http://child-language-brokering.weebly.com. This site offers for download journal publications reporting on research into CLBs in UK schools, and the Supporting Good Practice Guide.

To round out this review of a summer (and winter) of fine examples of engaged, invigorating activities about children’s language practices, I was especially inspired by the London-based linguistics-in-the-community activity, Translators in Schools (and the related Big Translate event). These workshops develop both monolingual and multilingual children’s language skills and encourage literacy. And they look so much fun! This terrific video explains “Translators in Schools” well enough to warrant me not paraphrasing further. Please comment below and tell me if you wouldn’t have benefited from such an activity yourself at primary school!

Voice of China Sydney 2015, Program Booklet

It’s a weeknight at the Sydney Town Hall, an ornate 19^th century building in the city centre. Almost everyone bustling in the entryway is of Chinese extraction, except the ushers (and me). They’re all ages, and as I pour inside with them I hear Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, and a little English. There are posters and flyers using simplified and traditional Chinese characters alongside English text. These scripts are not in-text translations but code-switching sentences working together within each ad to sell Australian Ugg boots or New Zealand throat lozenges. The ticket I hold and the banners on stage are also multilingual. They read “The Voice of China 中国好声音 澳大利亚招募站 Season 4 Australia Audition”. The tickets were free and ‘sold out’ days before this event. It’s the final audition – in a live concert format – for the upcoming season of a popular reality TV franchise, based on ‘Voice of Holland’, and available on a subscription channel in Australia. This is the first season of ‘Voice of China’ in which ‘Overseas Chinese’ can compete for the chance to be ‘The Australian Contender’ and flown to mainland China to film the series.

In-Group, Ethnicity and Language

The Town Hall this night is clearly a space where people operate within “multi-sited transnational social fields encompassing those who leave and those who stay behind”, as Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller (2004, p. 1003) have put it. These sociologists posit that migrants may simultaneously assimilate into a host society and maintain enduring ties to those sharing their ethnic identity, “pivoting” between the two. This is a useful lens through which to regard the event. What is most interesting with ‘Voice of China’ is the use of language to extend who counts as “those who leave”. The contestants have not necessarily actually left China, many are originally from Australia. Maybe their parents, or even their grandparents, once migrated. The audition’s winner [SPOILER ALERT!] is one of the few contestants without a Chinese first name: Leon Lee, a university music student from Sydney.

As these contestants pivot towards China – particularly through their use of Putonghua-Mandarin – so too does the Chinese community pivot towards the diaspora through the vehicle of this show, both by holding these Australian auditions at all and by incorporating Cantonese and Australian English. Together, the singers, hosts, judges and audience are constructing a transnational social field that incorporates both Australia and China; Sydney is not simply a city in Australia but an Asian migration hub located in reference to Beijing. All the fans sitting around me, who might watch other ‘Voice of China’ events in virtual spaces – online and on international pay TV – while living in Sydney, demonstrate the layers of place in one geographic space.

The use of language also reveals interesting dynamics in who counts as having a shared ethnic identity. In an adjustment invisible to the audience, one contestant did not perform in his first language, the Kam-Tai language Zhuang, which is an official ethnic minority language in China. The show’s producers had said he could choose only English, Mandarin or Cantonese songs.

There is a normative equivalence of language and ethnicity being reproduced here. The way in which language features associated with Mandarin, Cantonese and Chinese minority languages “index” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011) Chinese-ness (or do not index it) is shown to be more complicated as the auditions unfurl. It is a linguistic manifestation of a recurrent normative tension over what features are identified with the Zhonghua Minzu. On one hand, Chinese minority languages and common Chinese-heritage dialects in Australia such as Hokkien and Hakka are totally absent from stage. On the other, Cantonese, although it is officially deemed a dialect not a minority language, is used by the hosts, contestants and judges. Despite Cantonese’s status, until recently it, rather than Mandarin, was the language identified as “Chinese” in Australia. Cantonese is also the Chinese language historically strongest in Hong Kong, and after all it’s a Hong Kong station (TVB) organising and presenting these auditions. Cantonese is given equivalent official status in the Town Hall show, with hosting duties meticulously shared between a Mandarin speaking man and a Cantonese-speaking woman.

But there’s still an observable norm of language dominance. When Jessica and Deborah Kwong, two Melbourne sisters, use Cantonese to introduce themselves in their pre-recorded video, then sing a live duet in English, a judge doesn’t hesitate to give all his feedback in Mandarin. They nod as he speaks. It’s only when the next judge takes his turn that the girls ask to switch to “Guangdonghua” (Guangdong Speech, a colloquial name for Cantonese) that we all realise the sisters didn’t understand the first judge. There’s laughter all round, and the judges pledge to ask all future contestants which language they’d prefer. For all the deliberate announcements in Cantonese, not being fluent in Mandarin is not ‘normal’ in this context.

Leon Lee sings a lovely, English-language mash-up of rap, R&B and John Lennon’s Yesterday, ending with a modest xiexie (‘thank you’ in Mandarin). True to their recent pledge, the judges ask if they can comment in Mandarin. Leon explains – in Mandarin – that he speaks it imperfectly but understands it, and the judges proceed.

Only one contestant sings in Cantonese in the round, although many more speak Cantonese in their videos. Their practice again reveals the language expected by ‘Voice of China’s mainland producers and viewers. (While a Hong Kong station produces the auditions, it’s a mainland Chinese station, ZJTV, that produces and airs the series.) Sydney, being oriented to China but not actually in China, is a space where different linguistic norms can apply and so we get a slightly uncomfortable, simultaneous centralization and marginalization of Cantonese.

Translocal and Global

In addition to the associations between language and Chinese identity, tonight’s language practices happen under conditions of globalization. The singers at once use features associated with American English to link to the global scripts of reality TV song contests, and Australian-accented English to localize themselves. Their use of Mandarin can be understood as an additional attempt to localize, to differentiate from the global English language, global pop culture and global TV media.

Some contestants take on American accents in singing English-language songs, including Gaga’s Paparazzi, or employ the style of Anglo Pop music by inserting “yeah yeah yeah” into Mandarin songs. The judges also use features associated with American English – “Dude, your range is incredible,” says one judge – which functions to harmonise the show with the “international” American style of reality TV. However, when the contestants speak English to thank the crowd, they have unabashed Australian accents.

The contestant I’ve come to support, Wei Baocheng, linguistically localises in a different way. He makes his rendition of ‘The Sound of Silence’ more Australian than the American original not through accent but through prosody in his laconic rendition. The judges employ some translanguaging to describe it as “hen[很] laid back” and “hen[很] ’Strayan”. Hen is the Mandarin word for ‘very’, and ’Strayan is a jocular, colloquial term for “Australian”.

Localization is also achieved through song choice, amongst other things. For example, contestant Wang Chen sings the yearning rock ballad “Beijing, Beijing”, popular in China in recent years (and already on Voice of China in 2012). The pathos with which he performs it reinforces that, for him, Sydney Town Hall is oriented to China. Wang is singing about a city at the imagined heart of the community he (and the producers) imagine the audience to be.

Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. (2011). Language and Superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2), 1-22.

Levitt, P., & Schiller, N. (2006). Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society1 International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1002-1039 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x

Australia-China Youth Dialogue 2014

I recently returned from the Australia China Youth Dialogue in Beijing, my head buzzing with new ideas. The Dialogue promotes “more sophisticated cross-cultural understanding among Australian and Chinese youth…[and] seeks to enhance Sino-Australian relations by bringing together key people from both sides to forge deeper connections for the future.” Now in its 5^th year, it responds to an absence of – and a need for – more institutionalised dialogue between Australia and China, highlighted by the first Australian ambassador to the PRC in 2009.

While the Dialogue is not a conference specifically about languages, linguistics or just for academics, there were discussions at the ACYD about bilingualism, cross-cultural understanding and the role of universities in Australia-China relations, starting from the opening address by BHP Billiton Chair of Australian Studies at PKU, the historian Professor David Walker. He put current Australia-China relations in a long-view context and explained the breadth of Australian studies in China today: there are now a whopping 42 Australian studies centres and programs across China. Later that day, the current Australian ambassador to the PRC, H.E. Ms Frances Adamson, gave an impassioned speech about the role of the ACYD itself, and the broader context of Australia-China relations. She had great anecdotes to share, having just experienced a career highlight accompanying China’s leader Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan on a state visit to Australia, after the G20 summit in Brisbane.

From the opening speeches’ wide-angle look at Australia-China relations, the Dialogue then moved into three intensive days of seminars, Q&As and interactive scenarios looking in more depth at Australia-China relations, on topics from artistic exchange to climate change to entrepreneurship, business development, biosecurity and military relations (a subject on which I wrote a follow up article, wearing another hat!)

Both Professor Walker and the Ambassador drew attention to the Australian government’s New Colombo Plan, a higher education initiative under which about 60 young Australians per year will study or complete internships in the Asia-Pacific region, from 2015. (The ‘old’ Colombo Plan was a Commonwealth human resource exchange and development program in South and Southeast Asia which grew over time from the 1950s to eventually involve 27 countries.)

When launching the New Colombo Plan earlier in 2014, Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said “Our country will benefit enormously from having young ambassadors from Australia who have an understanding of and an insight into the region that only comes from living and studying and working there.” She’s right, and the calibre of the Australian delegates at the ACYD reflected how important and life changing living and working in China can be, for young Australians across so many sectors. Of course, of the 60 or so New Colombo scholars, only 10 are going to China in 2015, and this number needs to grow, as Professor Walker argued convincingly. He noted that Australia’s goal with New Colombo is so “unambitious” that we risk looking stingy in the Asian region. For my own part, when I first went to China to live and work it was through the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development program (scrapped in 2012), which allowed for more hands-on work in China for upwards of 30 young Australians per year.

This year’s Dialogue also involved a cohort of outstanding and diverse young Chinese people who are living and working, or have lived and worked, in Australia. Their insights, and their utility as ambassadors for both Australia and China, are as invaluable as the experiences of Australians going to China.

As Professor Walker reminded us at the start of the Dialogue, having “fly in fly out” Australians in China does not really work to build an engagement between the two counties. Relying only on Australians who grew up as Mandarin-English bilinguals is also insufficient. There is an additional value in having people learn Mandarin formally and in having Australians who are not from Chinese backgrounds understanding Chinese culture(s), history and language. As the University of Canberra’s Yuko Kinoshita has said,

Be it economics, business, politics, or defence, the basis of any relationship is the people behind it, who are driven by values and beliefs. Individual beliefs about cultural differences have a fundamental impact on our position in the region. Australia needs people who can face unfamiliar values and practices with a healthy respect and tolerance, not arrogance and fear.

For more significant engagement, and to create ‘Ausinophiles’, the Australian education system plays a crucial role. However, education has become demand-driven as well as being an instrument to serve the needs of the nation. Demand for high school subjects that increase Asia-literacy skills (including language classes) is low these days. One (of many) reasons I encounter in discussions with language teachers is that students are wary of taking language subjects for university entrance exams for fear their marks will scale badly. Matriculation from primary school to high school to university can also pose challenges for language students, as the streams do not run consistently throughout. (Australia is not alone in this regard; Livia Gerber recently wrote on this site about barriers to bilingualism for students in Switzerland).

Allowing high school demand to set the course is not good enough, from a macro perspective. As Professor Walker argued, we need to think about the national interest in changing to a more balanced and longer-term education system that will meet the demands not just of individual high school students choosing their subjects, but the demand for a labour force with strong ‘Asia-literacy’. And that requires incentivising Asia-literacy and having long term education investments in both teachers and students.

Elsewhere, Professor Walker has noted that “the first systematic case for the teaching of Asian languages in Australian universities dates from 1908.” Around this time, there was also a small push to reframe the discourse about the “East” to be about the “North”, given the actual geographic relationship between China and Australia (it’s not East-West!). This aimed to break away from looking at China through British eyes and from the perspective of the British Isles, given that Australia is much closer to Asia than Europe and (was at the time predicted) likely to increasingly integrate into Asia (a prediction borne out).

While momentum on this front waxes and wanes in Australia, the Dialogue at least is a dynamic and growing institution. It was and remains a non-government, youth-led initiative and was just named as a finalist in the inaugural Australia-China Achievement Awards. The Dialogue’s Executive Director, Fiona Lawrie, herself a Dialogue delegate from 2012, was included, along with government ministers, in this month’s inaugural High Level Dialogue between Australia and China.

The Dialogue was a great forum for Asia- and Australia-literate, mainly bilingual, young academics and professionals who excel in diverse fields and who have lived in both countries to share ideas and talk about the future of Australia-China engagement. Most delegates had used formal foreign language learning (Mandarin or English) and/or higher education opportunities in the two countries, to then launch into self-styled programs of further study, greater cultural immersion and dual-country careers. The Dialogue was, in fact, a great example of more ambitious engagement between the two nations, and continued to build upon the much longer history of Asia-literacy and Australia-China relations that Professor Walker reminded us we have.