Ingrid Piller – Language on the Move

New Year’s Visit

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 14:48:13 +0000

Professors Piller and Dong

Gong Xi Fa Cai! All good wishes for the Year of the Snake!

The Chinese New Year holiday brought a lovely opportunity to receive a visit by Professor Hongjie Dong from Xi’an University and doctoral candidate Chenbai Luo from Charles University.

Hongjie DONG is a professor at Xi’an University, holding a Ph.D. from Renmin University of China, and was a visiting scholar at the University of York’s Department of Linguistics (2015–2016). His expertise lies in sociolinguistics, language policy, and international Chinese education. In recent years, he has led five research projects funded by the Ministry of Education and the National Language Committee of China. Professor Dong has published over 40 academic papers in leading journals such as the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. He is the author of the monograph Language Variation and Identity in the Hui Community of Xi’an (in Chinese) and serves as the chief editor for the Silk Road Chinese textbook series.

Chenbai LUO is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at Charles University Prague and a former academic staff member at Xi’an Peihua University. With teaching experience at the Confucius Institute in Minsk and Xi’an University, his research focuses on language policy, language economics, and Chinese education. He has co-authored publications such as “Blueprint and Marketing Strategies for Structuring Chinese Courses” and participated in projects on Shaanxi’s linguistic landscape and Chinese education in the Balkans.

References

Bodomo, A., Che, D., & Dong, H. (2022). Calculator communication in the markets of Guangzhou and beyond. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 43(10), 981-992. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2020.1786575
Dong, H. (2020). Language behavior and identity change in the Fangshang Hui community of Xi’an. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 30(1-2), 255-272. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.00051.hon

Language on the Move 2024

Ingrid Piller — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 18:57:53 +0000

The author team of “Life in a New Language”

“This year was average; worse than the year before but better than next year.” I am reminded of this saying each year when I collate the annual Language on the Move Report.

In 2024, two highlights stand out: the publication of Life in a New Language and the establishment o of the Language on the Move Podcast in collaboration with the New Books Network.

Below you’ll find a month-by-month list of our podcast episodes and blog posts, so that you can re-read your favorites or discover new ones.

As always, I want to express my deepest gratitude to all team members, contributors, readers, students, and fans. You make Language on the Move worthwhile – as a research publication and an exercise in community building.

In the hope that 2025 will be better than we dare to anticipate!

Keep in touch!

Make sure to keep in touch by signing up to our updates in the ‘Newsletter subscription’ box in the footer below, by following us on BlueSky, and by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast in the podcast app of your choice.

December

Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge 2025: Check out our monthly recommendations and join us for a year of long reads in linguistic diversity and social life!
Language-on-the-Move Podcast Episode 39: Whiteness, Accents, and Children’s Media: Brynn Quick in conversation with Laura Smith-Khan
Language-on-the-Move Podcast Episode 38: Creaky Voice in Australian English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Hannah White
Laura Smith-Khan, Trust and suspicion at the airport
This blogpost features our latest article in the Border Security series: Smith-Khan, L., Piller, I., & Torsh, H. (2024). Trust at the border: identifying risk and assessing credibility on reality television. Journal of Law and Society, 51(4), 513-538.
Abstract: Every day, officers working at international airports investigate potential risks to state safety and security. But how do they decide who they can trust, and also ensure that the broader public trusts themto conduct this work? This article explores these questions through an examination of the reality television show Border Security: Australia’s Front Line. Through critical discourse analysis of a collection of 108 televised airport encounters, we explore the aspects of communication, behaviour, and identity made salient in officers’ evaluations of passengers’ credibility and critically examine the assumptions underlying them. Further, we consider how power and role divisions are implicated in the construction of passenger and officer credibility, both within border encounters and in discourses about Our analysis makes a novel contribution to the literature on credibility assessments in intercultural communication, demonstrating how an institutional and social ‘culture of disbelief’ is constructed vis-à-vis certain groups through seemingly banal border work.
Loy Lising, Life in a New Language at ALS2024
This blogpost reports on the annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society and the launch of Life in a New Language

November

The 2024 cohort of “Literacies” students in Macquarie University’s Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL

Pia Tenedero, Mindful about multilingualism
This blogpost reports on events related to Buwan ng Wikaor (National) Language Month in the Philippines.
Language-on-the-Move Podcast Episode 37: Supporting multilingual families to engage with schools: Agi Bodis in conversation with Margaret Kettle
Language-on-the-Move Podcast Episode 36: Linguistic diversity as a bureaucratic challenge: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Clara Holzinger
Language-on-the-Move Podcast Episode 35: Judging refugees: Laura Smith-Khan in conversation with Anthea Vogl

Previous annual reports

For an even deeper trip down memory lane, here is the list of our full archives:

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2025

Ingrid Piller — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 14:21:19 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Reading!

January: The Politics of Academic Reading

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

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

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

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

February: Global Communication Platform WhatsApp

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

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

March: How to Free a Jinn

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

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

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

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

April: Life in a New Language

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

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

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

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

May: Judging Refugees

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

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

June: Wordslut

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

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

July: Inspector Singh

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

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

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

August: Speech and the City

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

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

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

September: Multilingual Crisis Communication

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

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

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

October: Critical Sociolinguistics

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

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

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

November: Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples

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

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

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

December: Language Discordant Social Work

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

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

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

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

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

Linguistic diversity as a bureaucratic challenge

Ingrid Piller — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 06:47:17 +0000

How do street-level bureaucrats in Austria’s public service deal with linguistic diversity?

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, I speak with Dr Clara Holzinger (University of Vienna) about her PhD research investigating how employment officers deal with the day-to-day communication challenges arising when clients have low levels of German language proficiency.

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

Employment Office, Vienna

Transcript (coming soon)

Migration, constraints, and suffering

Ingrid Piller — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 21:13:24 +0000

Supermarket in Naples (Image credit: Marco Santello)

A key part of the experience of migration is not being in full control of one’s circumstances and doings. In this episode, Ingrid Piller speaks with Marco Santello about his research with Gambian migrants in Italy. The focus is on Marco’s recent article in Language in Society about migrant experiences of constraints and suffering.

This article explores one underestimated aspect of language in migration settings, namely the experience of not being in full control of circumstances and doings. Recent linguistic research often highlights transcendence of boundaries through migration and celebrates the fluidity and hybridity of multilingualism. By contrast, Santello argues that this discourse neglects migrants’ experiences of constraints and suffering. He sees limitations not just as structural inequalities resulting from macro-social pressures that migrants have to navigate, but focusses on the lived experience of constraint at the individual level.

The study is based on fieldwork with Lamin (pseudonym), a young man from Gambia in Italy. Instead of asking the conventional question how language learning unfolds, the researcher was interested to understand why Lamin had not learnt to speak Italian to any significant degree.

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

Call for papers

Marco is currently guest-editing a special issues of Language and Intercultural Communication devoted to “Constrained Multilingualism.” The Call for Papers is available here (abstracts accepted until Nov 21, 2024)

Reference

Santello, M. (2024). Constraints, suffering, and surfacing repertoires among Gambian migrants in Italy. Language in Society, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404524000423

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 18/10/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller and I’m distinguished professor of applied linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Marco Santello.

Marco is a researcher in multilingualism at the University of Turin in Italy. Marco has a PhD from the University of Sydney in Australia and has held academic positions at the University of Warwick in the UK, at Monash University in Melbourne, and at the University of Leeds where he taught intercultural competence. Marco’s research interests revolve around the intersections between language and migration.

Welcome to the show, Marco.

Santello: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Piller: Marco, so your current research is with African migrants to Italy, and maybe you could start us off by telling us about your research project and the approach you’re taking.

Santello: Yes, that’s right. So, my research at the moment is with migrants from Africa to Italy, and in particular with the group of these migrants, those that come from Gambia, which is a small country in the west of Africa. So, it’s a country which is basically enclosed within Senegal.

It’s only three million people live there, more or less. And that’s a group of migrants that is quite common, actually, in Italy, that I was able to come across. And I thought of being interested in.

The way the project unfolded is due to, first of all, my reading of certain authors in particular, Michel Destot. And so, first of all, I did some kind of academic intellectual work, if you will, on his understanding of everyday life, action in everyday life, and how important are constraints for his understanding of creativity and action within the space of action, indeed. So, this kind of idea that very many people operate within a specific space of action, and don’t have quite the possibility of going beyond it in so many ways.

And on the other hand, migrants have always been at the centre of my attention. I’ve been a migrant myself, travelled, as you were saying before, and lived in different countries. And it’s also been challenging for me at times.

So that’s always been some kind of an interest. At the same time, I was, I always worked in, with multilingualism. And so, from an academic perspective, that’s what prompted me to do a PhD and then to work with migrants afterwards.

And but also in my personal life, I’m just simply dedicating some of my free time to volunteering for new migrants and that I’ve been doing.

Piller: Maybe you can tell us a bit about that intersection between your volunteering and what your volunteering involves and how this relates to your research project.

Santello: Yeah, that’s right. Listen, it’s, you know, I’m a researcher, but I’m also a person. So, the, it just makes me happy really to be surrounded by foreigners.

And it, I volunteer for a couple of NGOs. One of these provide shelter and support to migrants near Padua. And this is something that just I wanted to do and I started doing.

And I didn’t have much of an idea other than I can support them with their linguistic needs. And they were really, the NGOs, they were really telling me, you know, we would need this, would you be happy to do this? Would you be happy to do that?

For example, meeting one to one with people or supporting some small classes. And it’s something I simply did. That was it really.

But then when I thought about this, and this kind of idea that we don’t know for sure constraints that people experience as they migrate, immediately I thought about the possibility of, you know, getting in touch with the NGO and see if they had anything to do, if they thought that was a good idea. Because in my research, I always try to start from the needs that might be coming from the field. So, if of course, on one side, as I was saying, I’m doing some kind of, you know, reading as a researcher, at the same time, you know, what matters to me is really that somehow, I’m connected to people and they were really enthusiastic about it.

And at the very beginning, I remember, I wanted to focus on people who had just arrived. Because that was my idea, and that’s also the kind of people that I was meeting in these kinds of volunteering activities. But then they told me, why don’t you instead talk to these Gambians?

Because they’ve been in Italy for a much longer time, and then probably have much more to say. And honestly, they don’t speak much Italian, some of them. And we don’t know exactly what happens there.

And I also thought to myself, actually, it is very interesting as a question, like why after years, you are not able to easily have a conversation. Some of them, of course, do have conversations in Italian, some of them really don’t, they struggle. So it was an interesting question.

And that kind of linked back again to this kind of idea that we focus a lot on the resourcefulness of migrants, but sometimes there is just something that happens and it doesn’t seem to be working as well as perhaps we would hope for or think about. So that was the whole reason.

Piller: So, what did you actually find in terms of why is it that they take such a long time to learn Italian? I mean, it is a really interesting question. And particularly with Africans, I mean, we know that there is a lot of language learning going on on the continent and people are often very, very multilingual and sort of learn languages easily.

And then we suddenly find that once they come to the global north, to Europe, same in Australia. We’ve just seen that in this new research that we’ve published, Life in a New Language, that actually then all of a sudden learning English becomes really difficult in all these everyday language learning skills that they brought along no longer seem to work. So, what did you find?

Santello: Yeah, I mean, listen, with this particular study that I published called Constraints, suffering, and surfacing repertoires among Gambian migrants in Italy, what I found was that there’s a level where there’s an impossibility to practice spoken Italian because of lack of an environment which is conducive to it. So people working in jobs that don’t require much interaction, and also not having a circle of people with whom they can speak Italian. And that was one of the constraints.

Another constraint that people brought up is the lack of classroom instruction available to them. So, in the specific case of these migrants that I met, the NGO provides some support from volunteers. But it’s a kind of a support which is quite limited in terms of hours, for obvious reasons.

Whereas there might be other schools in other places. But what Lamin, the specific migrant, my main informant for the study reported, it was that he tried to call the local school, but nobody replied. So, he assumed there was no space for that to happen.

And that doesn’t mean of course, that he doesn’t speak any Italian or he can’t communicate at all. But that he feels the need or the willingness to advance in certain aspects. And Lam also showed me a notebook filled with exercises.

And you could see the effort that was there in terms of the learning. But from the spoken perspective, there was a kind of limitation that he was experiencing. So we really see, we touch concretely through his experiences, the range of constraints that he experiences, particularly in terms of the environment.

Piller: Can you tell us a bit more about Lamin? Just introduce him as a person?

Santello: Absolutely. So, Lamin is a migrant, of course it’s a pseudonym, a migrant who moved to Italy six years ago. So, we’re talking about a migrant who has been in the country for a long time.

He comes from Gambia, as you were saying, and he speaks English fluently. Now, I usually have these exchanges in English, and it was important for him, particularly that he could speak English with me, because of course he’s extremely proficient, so he’s able really to make himself understood. He also speaks Mandinka.

That’s his main language, as he describes it. But then he also speaks Wolof, and bits and pieces of other languages. indeed, that was one aspect that came up through my research, which was the progressive surfacing of linguistic repertoires and interactions.

So, what both me and him made apparent at the very beginning, in terms of the languages we speak, was not what actually unfolded during the exchanges. So, by talking about constraints, we were able to bring up bits and pieces of our repertoires. For example, for him, in Italy, it is very important to speak Wolof, because Wolof allows him to communicate also with Senegalese.

The Senegalese are very numerous in Italy, in a long-standing community, many more than the Gambians. Many people in Gambia speak Wolof as well. But at the very beginning, he did not make that apparent to me that he spoke Wolof.

Now you would think such an important language for his life would have been apparent to him straight away. But this is not surprising at all that bits and pieces of our experiences and our speaker would also become apparent in conversation. The same goes to me.

When I explained to him that I’ve lived in Norway, then immediately brought up the fact that he spoke a little bit of Swedish. So, he said a few sentences to me, which was very important because I wasn’t expecting myself, as I was saying, I’m a person, I’m a researcher. So, it immediately brought some kind of emotional reaction on me, very positive.

Hearing this language, I wasn’t expecting to hear it in the shelter in Padua. So yeah, so he’s a multilingual, that’s for sure. And he has lived in the south and in the centre of Italy, going through different camps and also living in the streets.

So as a homeless person and was now living in Padua in the shelter, working in a local factory and trying really to settle in Italy in many ways. So, and when I when I introduce myself to the group, he was immediately very, very keen on telling me about his experiences and so on and so forth.

So, another thing that I want to be an opportunity for him to practice Italian or not, not really?

In this specific case, I don’t think so. In this specific case, I think that for him, it was really important to make his experiences known. And one aspect also that came out of my study was the fact that he was also trying to convey to me that his experience is not like an isolated experience.

That is something that is shared among several migrants. For example, when he was talking about the fact that he arrived in Italy, but some people didn’t because he crossed the Mediterranean. And it’s a very dangerous road as a road and route, really.

As he was putting it, he was really kind of representing it as a collective experience because it is. It’s not just him. There are many, many people taking that boat and trying to cross the Mediterranean.

The same goes for being homeless. So, he was really talking about this in the plural. And conveying the idea that people suffer.

And that’s one of the aspects that I wanted really to include in my article because I sensed that something that he wanted me to communicate. And even though this suffering is not strictly related to language, I thought it was a very good idea to insert it in many ways as part of the data. Because it was, I felt that it was important for him.

And it was important for me to be faithful to what I was given. And so, whilst, of course, every time we do research, particularly this type of research where the researcher is highly involved because again, it’s a kind of ethnographic and it’s a participation of US researchers, he at the same time, for me, was important to do justice as much as possible to what he was giving me. So even though it was something that wasn’t related strictly to language, I wanted for it to be inserted in the research so that again, I did something that I thought was faithful to what he was telling me.

Piller: Yeah, I think we’re both sort of interested in how language actually shapes your life, and the lived experience of language learning and language as a part of life. So, I thought that was really, really important and just so interesting to also for him to have that desire. I mean, again, that we see that a lot in our research as well, that sometimes participants really have this expectation that if they speak to a researcher, we’ll be able to, I don’t know, bring their experiences to the proper authorities, to the attention of people who can actually make a difference in their lives, and I sometimes find that really hard to deal with actually, because I think there is a bit of an expectation that by talking to someone who is in a fairly privileged position as a researcher or who they perceive to be as influential, even if we aren’t really socially influential.

That has a positive aspect or a positive consequence for themselves, but really for the larger structures under which they labor. As you say, he often wanted to make explicit to you that this was not only his experience but that suffering is sort of an endemic condition, I guess. So how did you deal with that expectation?

Santello: Yeah, listen, I don’t tell him, I’m going to solve your problems, etc. I’m just telling him, we don’t know these things, we just don’t know. My job as a researcher is to try and understand them with your help.

What I’m doing is simply trying to understand what’s going on, but I don’t have any power to change policy or anything like this. On the other hand, of course, it is a way for him to take these experiences in another place so that other people are aware of, for example, the constraints he experienced, or the suffering, or the deprivation, and so on and so forth.

And of course, also the sheer fact that we could have this conversation in English, as I was saying to you, at the moment in Italy, my position is within English. And for him, this was very important. And so, I was really, and it was something really united us because just the possibility for him to articulate himself the way he wanted to was key.

And that again tells us something about the importance of the resourcefulness of migrants and of multilinguals more generally, in being able to use different linguistic resources to make meaning. However, as I was also trying to explain in my article, very often we focus on the resourcefulness only from below saying that there’s a kind of a freedom of fluidity, etc. And that somehow by being multilingual, almost automatically, if you will, we will be able to advance or at least to be oppositional to some kind of a given system.

Whereas I didn’t necessarily find that in my research. In the sense that it’s not that by being multilingual, you’re automatically trying to disrupt the system or by going against monolingual norms, etc. Sometimes none of that really happens.

Another thing I also was interested in is in how the constraints are part of the multilingualism that people experience. For example, something really surprising in a positive way that I found was that he was even welcoming some constraints.

For example, in his house, and most of them are from West Africa, and he can speak with them either in English, or in Wolof, or in Mandinka, and so on. But there’s one person who doesn’t speak any of these languages. And so, for him, the only way to speak with this guy is in Italian.

And initially, at the Wolof, that must be difficult, you’re not. But, and I asked him, is that okay for you to speak? And he said, yes, yes, because it’s the only way I can improve my Italian by speaking it.

So, the constraint then was not experienced as a dramatic predicament in that specific circumstance. He was even welcomed as an opportunity to be in a, to be able to speak another language which he finds useful. And in a situation where he’s, that he’s lacking in his daily life, which is the possibility to speak in Italian, because of what we were saying before, the isolation, the non-Italian speaking environment in general, and some many tasks that don’t require any circles of people that speak other languages that he speaks, which are very important, of course.

And he says that very often with the Senegalese, with the Gambians and so forth, and other people from the foreign parts of West Africa, that also speak languages related to Mandinka. But so, there’s a kind of a, it’s a complicated picture, where the constraints are not simply impediments that are lived as something to be overcoming on costs. There is also that aspect, of course, of something that is experienced as a problem, and that is actually something that’s blocking.

But at the same time, there are many more things that we can see happening in, for the understanding of the multilingualism.

Piller: Yeah, I mean, just let’s continue with this idea a bit more that constraints can also be opportunities, because I guess from the national European perspective, from the perspective of the Italian state, or from the majority population, there is this idea that if you don’t speak Italian, you’re hugely constrained, and that’s a real lack, and without discounting that it’s important to speak Italian and whatnot, I think you’re also drawing attention to the fact that there are other multilingual repertoires or other languages in Lamin’s repertoire that are really important and that open doors for him in some kinds of ways and enable his life in Italy. So maybe you can speak to that a bit more.

Santello: That’s right. Yeah. So, as we know, in many countries around the world, there’s this kind of sense that a successful migrant is a migrant who’s able to speak very fluently the national language, for example, the national languages.

This is something that we kind of take for granted. And we know how this is very problematic because it kind of assumes that everybody is a more is more a lingual, it assumes a native speaker standard, and so on and so forth. But actually, even if you think about Italy, people born and raised in Italy, we have plenty of people in Italy who don’t speak Italian fluently, maybe they understand, but then to speak it fluently.

For example, people who speak regional languages, dialects, etc., who are not really able to have an entire conversation, monolingual conversation in Italian. And nobody would even dream of telling them that they are not good citizens.

Or else, we often put this label on migrants who might not be entirely proficient the way we think they should be in Italian, for example. So, there’s a huge problem there. And indeed, when you look at people’s lives, you look at the reality of them living with multiple languages and using many of them to create social networks, to work, to shop, for example.

Now, Lamin, for example, talks about this, the importance of using Mandinka and Wolof, or particularly Wolof, in shops, when he was living in Naples, and when he was going around the Central Station, and there were African shops, he says, and there I would be speaking my language, he says. And that’s where I realized that he was talking about Wolof, not Mandinka. So, you can tell that in that specific circumstance, there is no need for him to necessarily to speak Italian.

Of course, Italian is important, because it allows you to do things. And also because, you know, the overall society has a specific idea of Italian, what confidence in Italian is, but that’s not the only side of the story. So, by shedding light on this multilingualism, we try to understand better how things work, simply and without having this kind of preconceived idea that either you speak Italian like a native, or you’re not very, very good as a migrant, right?

So that’s not what comes out of this. However, he really hopes to improve his Italian and to be able to attend classes. That’s something that he conveyed to me.

Remember that Lamin has been in Italy for six years. And to this day, he has problems, you know, having a full conversation in Italian. So, there’s, and his willingness is there.

And he’s hopeful that that can change, particularly when it comes to spoken language, because it’s important for him. But again, that doesn’t mean…

Piller: Are there any Italian speakers in his social networks? Or is Italian really just the language he needs to interact with institution?

Santello: Yeah, so he didn’t say to me that he has any Italian-speaking friends. And so, I don’t think he has a kind of, you know, interaction from that kind of perspective with Italian speakers. So that’s one side, you know, of the coin.

On the other hand, of course, you need Italian in Italy in many ways, also to interact not just with institutions, but sometimes but also with people around. And then in the future, you know, with potential employers and whatever. So, there’s a, he knows that’s useful, that’s for sure.

One thing that, for example, he mentions to me, which is also very interesting, is this kind of idea that he cannot rely fully on English in Italy. Whilst he was making this comparison to Scandinavian countries, for example, where the knowledge of English is much more widespread. And so, people like him who are proficient in English, can easily rely on English if they don’t speak, for example, Swedish or whatever.

And whereas in Italy, he says, that’s not exactly my experience. So, it also tells us something about people speaking in the country. Of course, people in Italy, lots of people speak Italian, but that doesn’t mean, what I’m trying to say is that English and knowledge of English, which sometimes is regarded as only the kind of way to advance your career, etc.

It actually can be a way to create an easier environment for newcomers. In the beginning, those who speak English, so that at least when they’re very proficient in Italian, it’s not there yet to be able to communicate what they want to communicate. You can resort to English.

That’s not exactly his experience. So, he was making this kind of comparison, which also tells me about his knowledge of different countries, different languages, different, this kind of idea that these people come with a boat and they are unaware where they are. That’s not what I’ve found at all.

Piller: Yeah. Let’s maybe just have a bit more of a look at the conceptual side of things a bit more, because one thing that I really enjoyed about your article was actually that going back a bit, typically in applied linguistics, we see individuals as really creative, and you see a lot of multilingual playfulness, and individual multilinguals enjoy their multilingualism, and on the other hand, when we talk about constraints, when we talk about inequality, we locate that on the macro level, or in terms of language policies, in terms of the state, in terms of institutions. I think you are trying to break down that dichotomy a bit, that the constraints are macro, and the playfulness and the joy is individual.

Maybe you can explain that a bit more.

Santello: That’s right. Yeah. It’s exactly the way you explained it to us.

Basically, often what we see is that there are some societal structures that impede multilingualism, and that really is something that comes from above, and it constrains people, and from below instead, there will be a freedom and fluidity, a playfulness. Some authors talked about unbridled use. But actually, what we see happening among these individuals is something a bit more subtle than this.

It’s not simply social structures that push down, and that are, and these kinds of multilinguals would fight against it somehow. Nor is something at the bottom level unbridled use, where simply linguistic resources are used without any problem, and that they just show creativity and so forth. It doesn’t work like that in this kind of experiences.

What you see is something much more subtle. For example, one aspect which comes out of my research, is this kind of constraints that have to do with their personal life. It’s not only societal structures, for example, you know, something that you experience yourself, you know, for example, in another piece of research, you know, the family member passes away, and that actually sets in motion a change in your investment in language or investment in certain things that you need to do for your migration.

So, and that doesn’t mean that it’s not entangled with some other societal processes, it’s also a personal component. There’s also, you know, the lived experience of people in interaction, the social networks, the people helping each other or not helping each other, and so on and so forth. And so surely, we don’t see at a base level, the simple and unbridled use where people, you know, enjoy their multilingual resources, and this is somehow, you know, they will be unrestrained if they could.

It’s not exactly like that. And there are many more aspects that we need to consider. For example, indeed, what we were saying before, this kind of idea that certain constraints actually can function as a way to exercise certain linguistic skills that the person wants to exercise.

And so, it’s not the unbridled use in that case that becomes relevant, that becomes powerful, that becomes meaningful, but it is indeed a constraint which is inhabited. This is what Destot used to say. People inhabit what is given.

And what they inhabit, what is given, doesn’t mean that they adapt to it. It means that they engage with it in a creative way. So there’s a lot of…

Destot never talks about being passive. Quite the opposite. He says there’s a way to be active, to be proactive, to be able to be creative, which isn’t against the system.

It is within a system where people kind of manage to find a way to be creative, to be able to communicate within a given system. Which was sometimes there is no solution to that at the very stage. There is no way that you can all of a sudden speak Italian, all of a sudden doesn’t work like that, right?

And so that’s what I was interested in. There’s a level of creativity, of resourcefulness, which happens within a space of action. And that specific moment that migrant is not trying to go against anything really, she’s just trying to get things done and communicate within that specific space of action.

And we can see a lot of multilingualism there, a lot of creativity, a lot of things being done. So again, this kind of idea of a dichotomy between strong macro structures that oppress us and something at the bottom which is just free and fluid, I think it’s much more complicated than that. That’s what I found.

Piller: Yeah, so true. Look, Marco, before we go, what’s next for your research? Where will you take this project?

Santello: Yeah, so I’m really trying to expand on the things that I’ve been working on. And one thing that, for example, I would like to expand on is a kind of idea of how are constraints related to this kind of educational deprivation, and how is this educational deprivation actually being counterbalanced by other activities? So, for example, things that don’t happen in the classroom, where people, for example, you were saying about the multilingualism of Africans, you know, how is that ability to learn languages in the street, for example?

So many interacting with people inside the classroom. How can this become resourceful for them in the migratory settings? So, in the host country, in this specific case, how is that worked out?

So how is the constraint inhabited by interacting with people when classes are not provided, for example, because it’s not a situation, it’s not conditioned or you yourself are experiencing certain problems, et cetera. So that’s something I’m working on at the moment. Very excited about it.

Piller: Oh, that’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, we’ve also found that even where classes are provided, they sometimes can be so unsuitable.

And so, you know, besides the needs of the learners, that actually the classes can become another barrier to language learning. So, look, good luck with that. Thank you so much for the conversation, Marco.

Santello: Thank you very much. Grazie.

Piller: Grazie mille and thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time.

Are language technologies counterproductive to learning?

Ingrid Piller — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 07:14:25 +0000

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

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

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

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

Has ChatGPT ruined writing practice?

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

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

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

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

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

Machine writing and bad human writing now look the same

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

The feedback loop between reading and writing is breaking down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear reader, I need your input!

Translation as a bridge to English writing?

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

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

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

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

Grammar checkers, suggested phrasing, and auto-complete

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AILA 2024 in Kuala Lumpur: Day 3 Highlights

Ingrid Piller — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 01:41:14 +0000

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

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

Southern Epistemologies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real-life catch-ups

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

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

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

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

Korean translation of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice

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

And a bit of nerdy linguistics conferencing fun:

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

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

The Rise of English

Ingrid Piller — Mon, 20 May 2024 22:07:05 +0000

In Episode 17 of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Rosemary Salomone about her 2021 book The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language, which has just been reissued in paperback by Oxford University Press, with a new preface.

The Rise of English charts the spread of English as the dominant lingua franca worldwide. The book explores the wide-ranging economic and political effects of English. It examines both the good and harm that English can cause as it increases economic opportunity for some but sidelines others. Overall, the book argues that English can function beneficially as a key component of multilingual ecologies worldwide.

In the conversation, we explore how the dominance of English has become more contested since the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in higher education and global knowledge production.

Enjoy the show!

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

References

Novak Milić, J. 2024. 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University. Language on the Move Podcast.
Piller, I. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2022). Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua, 41(6), 639-662.
Salomone, R. C. (2021). The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language. Oxford University Press.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 30/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Professor Rosemary Salomone. Rosemary is the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. Johns University in New York, USA. Trained as a linguist and a lawyer, she’s an internationally-recognised expert and commentator on language rights, education law and policy, and comparative equality.

Rosemary is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She’s also a former faculty member of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, a lecturer in Harvard’s Institute for Educational Management, and a trustee of the State University of New York. She was awarded the 2023 Pavese prize in non-fiction for her most recent book, The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language.

Welcome to the show, Rosemary.

Prof Salomone: Thank you for inviting me, Ingrid.

Dist Prof Piller: It’s so great to have you and to be able to chat about The Rise of English. The Rise of English was first published in 2022 and has just been re-issued in paperback. The NY Times has described The Rise of English as “panoramic, endlessly fascinating and eye-opening”, and I totally have to agree. It’s an amazing book. Can you start us off by telling us what in the seemingly unstoppable rise of English has happened since the book was first published two years ago?

Prof Salomone: When I look back over those two years, I was looking for trends, you know, was there some theme running through language policy that indicated there were some new movements going on, if you will. Or was it just more of the same? I actually found both. In terms of themes I saw running through, for sure, were nationalism, immigration and a backlash against globalisation.

So, you saw that coming through in English-taught programs in universities, where the Nordic countries and the Netherlands were pushing back. They had been in the vanguard of offering English-taught programs, and then they started pushing back. Some of that was related to governments moving towards the right and hostile feelings toward immigration and linking internationalisation with immigration.

So, you saw, for example, Denmark limiting the number of English-taught courses in certain business subjects. They saw enrolments drop precipitously, particularly in STEM enrolments, and the business community started pushing back on it. Denmark, then, had to back-pedal because they realised they really did need these international students to come in. Many of these countries are suffering from declining demographics, and so they’re trying to balance this internationalisation and migration against the needs of labour and the global economy.

We see the Netherlands, right now, this week it’s been in the newspapers in the Netherlands, where there’s been proposed legislation to limit the number of courses taught in English. There was a real concern about the quality of education and accessibility for Dutch students, and whether the Dutch language itself was dying or being lost, so there was a proposal that was put forth by the minister of Education into their legislative body. That seems very likely to be adopted.

So, again, you see these Nordic countries where there was this connection between migration, internationalisation and a backlash against globalisation coming through in these very nationalistic environments.

What I saw also, which was interesting, was the use of English in diplomacy. I was tracking the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as he was giving speeches and addressing the British parliament in English, the US Congress in English. Progressively, he was more and more speaking English, and his English was, indeed, improving. But you could see the effect of it, that he was able to address these groups. He was speaking from the heart. He was asking them for aid, appealing to them, and he was doing it very directly in their language, and without the barrier of an interpreter. He was able to control the message better. It became more and more comfortable for him to do that.

I also saw it, which was interesting, in Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he visited NY. He has been pushing to have Hindi considered one of the official languages of the United Nations. So, he goes to address the United Nations, he speaks to them in Hindi to indicate the importance of his language, but then there’s a yoga event on the lawn of the United Nations. Now, there he has a rather young, progressive group of individuals. Some celebrities were there. And he speaks in English. So, you see this very strategic use of English being used by world leaders for diplomatic effect, for diplomatic purpose.

So, those were two of the trends that I saw, or novelties. There was also a rather interesting proposal in Italy, and again, Italy being a country where it’s become a much more conservative to the right government at this time. There was a legislative proposal that all education would have to be in Italian. Now, you understand that would be devastating for English-taught courses in the universities, and we see those growing more slowly than, certainly, in the Nordic countries. But we see Italy adopting many more English-taught courses because they also are suffering from declining demographics. And in order to attract young people from other countries to come in and stay, in order to keep their own students from leaving to take English-taught programs in other countries, the Italian universities realised that they have to move toward English-taught programs or courses. And yet, you had this proposal from the government saying that all education would have to be in Italian. There would even be fines imposed up to 5,000 euros to businesses that would use words like “deadline” or “blueprint”.

This is the sort of thing we’re accustomed to more seeing from France, from the Académie Française, but even their equivalent in Italy, the Academia della Crusca, they opposed the legislation. There was legislation proposing that English should be the official language of Italy. It’s all coming from these feelings of nationalism. So, Italy doesn’t have an official language in their constitution. Any references to an official or national language raises concerns about fascism because Mussolini imposed standard Italian on everybody, and there were so many regional varieties being spoken. So, again, that theme of nationalism, the pushback against globalisation, fears of internationalisation, that’s what I found in those two years.

Then, on the other side, there was much more young children in primary and secondary schools learning English as their second language throughout Europe and throughout the world. More and more, universities were offering English-taught courses. So, it seemed like English was really unstoppable, but then there were these other forces operating that I didn’t see originally trying to set it back.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I think that’s really one of the fascinating bits of your book, that it’s in many ways such a contradictory and conflicting story. I mean, throughout the 20^th century it seemed that there was this much more linear narrative of the rise of English. But in the 21^st century, it has become more complex and there’s this competition with other languages, as you’ve just pointed out. In diplomacy, multilingual people are English and their other language strategically. So, the story of competition between languages that is inherent in The Rise of English really also looms large in your book.

So, I thought maybe we can take this conversation now to Africa, which also plays a big role in your book, and focus on the competition between French, another European language, and English, and how it plays out there. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Prof Salomone: Well, there’s competition in the former French colonies, the francophone countries, with regard to English. France has had a rather tenuous relationship with those former colonies over the years. We see Morocco, very slowly, moving toward English. We see Algeria, I guess it was about 2 years ago, the minister of higher education announced that university courses would then be offered in English, that university instruction would be in English in Algeria. It made headlines in Morocco when the minister of education announced that children would be learning English beginning in the 3^rd grade.

In those countries, you have English competing with Arabic and with French. There was a study done by the British Council several years ago looking at about 1200 young Moroccans, asking them what they favoured in terms of a language. Well, they favoured English more than they did French or Arabic. They predicted a large number, a very large percentage, predicted that English would be the primary secondary language in Morocco within 5 years, meaning that it would push out French. Arabic being their primary language and English being their secondary language.

So, there is this competition in Africa within the francophone countries between French and English. But you also have China in Africa now. You have Russia in Africa now. You have Chinese Confucius institutes in Africa, and Africa has been much more willing to accept those institutions. Certainly, the US and some western European countries as well. They just don’t have the resources to provide those language programs on their own, and they’re not as concerned about the issues of academic freedom that certainly rose in the US where most of those programs have closed at this point. But you do have this competition between Chinese and English, and other languages within Africa.

And now Russia coming through, and Russia is sort of following the China playbook on language, and instituting language programs both online and in person in Russia. Russia has moved into the Sahel region where we’ve had those coups in recent years, and some of that has been provoked by Russian disinformation. So, here you have, again, the use of language in kind of a perverse way as well. There’s lots going on in Africa right now in terms of the competition for languages.

That said, I don’t think Chinese or Russian is going to replace English as a lingua franca throughout Africa. I think it is replacing French in many ways.

Dist Prof Piller: Interesting that you mention misinformation because it seems to me that a lot of the misinformation is actually also enabled by English. I’m wondering whether you have any thoughts on how the global spread of English is actually part of a lot of misinformation that’s coming out of Russia or wherever it’s coming from.

Prof Salomone: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting observation because of the internet and because of streaming. Because of all these media outlets and what we call fake news. The ability of people all over the world to access this information through English. You’re absolutely right, that English is in a way fomenting some of that or facilitating or enabling some of that disinformation as well. For sure.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it’s contradictory yet again. So, you’ve already mentioned Chinese, and China was also one of these countries after the pandemic, as the Nordic countries, where English became a bit more controversial and they are kind of pulling back on English in higher education a bit.

So, I thought let’s turn to higher education now because English is, of course, the global language, even if it’s not the language of teaching in all higher education, it’s certainly the language of academic publishing. It’s the language of knowledge-making. So can you maybe tell us a bit more about the role of English in international academia?

Prof Salomone: Well, it’s there for good and for bad. We can argue that there is a value of a common language so researchers can better collaborate. If you think of the Covid 19 vaccine that was produced between Pfizer, an American company, and BioNTech, a German company. Could that have been produced at such breakneck speed if those scientists couldn’t collaborate with each other and communicate with each other in a common language? So, you see there the benefit of having a common language.

But then again, you also see all the downsides of it, particularly in academia. It used to be, when I would attend conferences in Europe, that you would get a headset, that there would be interpreters. That doesn’t exist any longer. Most often, those conferences may be in the national language and in English. Maybe. But very often they’re just in English. So, it really does put non-native English speakers, those who are not fluent or proficient in English, not necessarily just native speakers, it does put them at a disadvantage in terms of the ease with which they can present their scholarship. Do they have humour? Do they understand the nuances of the language? It forecloses them from networking opportunities as well if they don’t speak English proficiently. It forecloses them certainly from publishing opportunities. It used to be “publish or perish”, but now it’s “publish in English or perish”. In order to have your scholarship published in an academic or well-respected academic journal, you have to write it in English.

I bring that point up in the book. It really puts younger faculty or researchers at a disadvantage. They may not have the economic means to hire someone to do the editing on it, whereas those who do have the economic means can get that outside help. This is a booming business of editing scholarship and refining the English of scholarship. So, you see that there are some serious inequities built into the rise of English in academia.

Dist Prof Piller: You’ve got this law background as well. Do you have any thoughts on what we can do to enhance fairness? You’ve just raised all the issues and laid them out quite clearly, but what can we do to improve equity and fairness in global knowledge-making?

Prof Salomone: In a legal sense, I don’t think there’s much we can do. But I think pf Philippe Van Parjis and his proposals. He believes very strongly in English and the utility and value of English as a common language, but he understands (being a political philosopher and economist) on the other hand the limitations of it. How can we build more equity? Should there be a tax imposed on countries that have high levels of English? That money would go to other countries where there’s not a high proficiency in English in order to gain proficiency. I don’t see that being workable. I don’t see how that can occur.

I think it’s just, at this point, unfortunate. I don’t see any legal way, or even a policy way, out of it. English has become just so dominant. The interesting question I find, though, in talking to other people about this, and people in other countries, as to whether English really belongs to us, to the Australians and Canadians and Brits and Americans. Does it belong to us any longer? Or does it belong to the world? Has it become neutral? Is it just utilitarian? Just a tool, a pragmatic tool for communication that’s kind of unleashed from British colonialism or American imperialism or American soft power in Hollywood.

I think that’s easier for those of us who are anglophones to say, “Yeah, sure, I think it’s neutrual.” But I’m not sure that, for other people, it’s really neutral. I think it does carry all that baggage for better or worse.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, true, and I guess even on the individual level. Things like, you mentioned earlier, that networking is so much more difficult in a language in which you are not entirely confident. Or even if you have high levels of proficiency, you might not be the one to joke easily or have that confidence. So, there are challenges at all kinds of levels.

Personally, I am also quite interested in individual mentoring approaches and co-publishing. I think there is a responsibility that we as people who are in established anglophone academia have to co-author or collaborate with people who are struggling with their English and to support peripheral scholars to come into these networks as more central members.

Prof Salomone: I think that’s a really interesting suggestion. I really do. Should there be some of us coordinating this? Should there be some movement, if you will, for those of us who are strong in English to mentor professors who are not, or to collaborate or to coauthor pieces with them? I think that’s really an interesting suggestion. I do. And I wonder what the vehicle could be for instituting a project of that sort. I have to give it some thought. What networks you or I belong to, seriously, to raise that.

Dist Prof Piller: For us, the Language on the Move network has been a little network where we collaborate, and we have lots of people, particularly PhD students, who come to Australia as international students and then return to their countries of origin to teach there. We continue to collaborate, so we’ve built, at a very small level in our field of applied sociolinguistics, a kind of international collaboration network. We’ve tried to co-publish in English, but also then translate some of the publications into other languages for more national or regional dissemination.

That brings me to my next question, actually, to the anglosphere. We’ve talked about English in the non-anglosphere, the countries that are not traditionally considered the owners of English. But, of course, the dominance of English, the hegemony of English, also does something to English in the US, in Australia, in the UK, and to the speakers there. We mostly see that kind of as an advantage, I think. That’s how we’ve discussed it here.

But there is also this other dark side. There is a real complacency about other languages in the anglosphere – like, “If I speak English, I don’t really need another language because I’m able to get around wherever I am on this globe.” We see that in the dwindling numbers of students who enrol in languages programs, the disestablishment of languages at all kinds of universities. Every couple of months we have the news that this or that university in the US, in Australia, in Britain, is establishing their language programs.

I’d like to hear how you view these developments and how we can push back.

Prof Salomone: It’s so short-sighted. It really is very short-sighted. It’s myopic. English cannot do it all. It just can’t. And there is a value to speaking other languages other than the human flourishing that many of us experienced in learning other languages when we were young at the university or whatever. That seems to have gone by the wayside. People don’t talk about it anymore. It really is unfortunate.

Just the joy of reading a classic in the original, or the joy of watching a movie in the original. I’ve tried it. I’ve tried a little experiment of my own of reading a book in English that was translated from Italian, then reading the book in Italian, then watching the movie version, the Hollywood movie version of the book, which was totally perverted (the book). I realised that it just lost so much in the translation. Even the best of translators, and it really is an art form and I totally respect them, even the best of translators – you’re not reading the original. So, there is that sense of human flourishing that we don’t talk about anymore.

Multinational corporations – a large percentage of businesses are done through a cocktail of different languages, so it really does give you a leg up in the job world. In the US there is this slow-moving interest toward offering dual-language immersion programs where you have half the student population (in the public schools) are native speakers of Spanish, Chinese, French, whatever. The other are native speakers of English. And you put the kids together, half the day in one language and half the day in another. What’s motivating the English-speaking parents here is the value of languages in the global economy. They’re not concerned about their children reading Dante in the original, or Moliere in the original. They’re interested in their children having a leg up in the global economy, so they’re becoming more and more popular in the US within public school districts.

So, you have that value in terms of job opportunities. We saw during the pandemic the need for multilingual speakers to deal with immigrant communities, you know, to explain to them what the health hazards were, whether it was in hospitals or social welfare agencies. There was a critical need for speakers of other languages, and some of them were relying on Google Translate or software translation. But even Google Translate – the state of California posted a disclaimer on their website that you cannot rely totally on the translation of Google Translate. It didn’t have necessarily 100% accuracy.

We know that artificial intelligence is getting much more sophisticated. As I was writing the book over those 7 years, I didn’t know Afrikaans. I didn’t know Dutch. I didn’t know Hindi. So, I had to rely on translation software, and it became more and more accurate as the years went on. BUT….but…. you lose lots of nuance there. You lose the human element. Very often, translation or interpretation is needed in a crisis situation, whether it be in foreign affairs diplomatically, or in a health crisis. Can you rely on artificial intelligence in that critical kind of moment where you really do need the understanding of nuance and sensitivity toward the human situation?

So, I think we are really short sighted in not understanding the value of other languages. Just this week it’s come up in newspapers here in the US that our Department of Defense has dropped 13 what we call flagship programs at universities. These were federally funded programs that provided funds for university students for 4 years to learn a critical language – Chinese, Arabic, Russian. They dropped 13 of them, ok? Five of them being Chinese programs.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s unbelievable.

Prof Salomone: What are they thinking? What are they thinking? That this should be a high priority for the federal government, to be training our young people in speaking Chinese and where they would have a study abroad opportunity in either mainland China or Taiwan. Thirteen of them were dropped, and 5 of them were Chinese programs.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I mean that’s just stupid and heartbreaking. And shocking to hear.

I want to get back to what you’ve just said about AI in a second but, before we do, you’ve mentioned the dual language programs in the US and that parents and their children are there to enhance their careers and for economic reasons.

But I have to pull out one of my favourite bits from your book, and that was the information that the most bilingual state in many ways, or the one that has the most bilingual programs is Utah. That’s related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and how they want to be missionaries. I really enjoyed reading that. I’ve met lots of young Americans in various places who speak the language beautifully. Maybe you can tell us a bit about one of these other impulses, why people actually learn languages. The missionary impulse and this particular church.

Prof Salomone: When I thought of what states or localities should I select to flesh out these dual language programs, I chose California because that was a dramatic turnaround where bilingual programs were just about dead several decades ago. What that did, effectively, was mobilise the support for language programs to the point where they could turn that legislation around through a popular referendum. So that was just a dramatic turnaround.

I looked at Utah because Utah has just such a high number of dual language programs and was really in the forefront of these programs because you had the support of a governor, a senator, of somebody within the educational establishment. But it was all done because of a particular religious population there that values languages. They train their young people there in Utah and then send them out on a mission.

But what it has done, it’s been a boon for industry in Utah. Multinational companies are looking to move into Utah because you do have this linguistic infrastructure that’s already there.

In NY City, what I found really interesting, was the French community, this bottoms up, grassroots community of mothers who were looking for an affordable alternative to bilingual education for their children. (Then they went) to the NY City Board of Education to a particular principal whose mother was French, and so she was very sympathetic. But also, she had declining enrolments in her school, so she was very eager to welcome a larger population. That school has so changed that community in Brookly. You walk down Court Street, which is the main street there. Loads of French cafes. French restaurants. People on the street speaking French. It changed the community. It became a focal point for the community. French mass at the local Catholic church. The French population has never been politically active in NY City at all, but because of their efforts and with the support of the French Embassy as well, other language groups within NY City started saying, “We could have that as well”. So, you see a proliferation of dual language programs across the city in all kinds of languages.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. The importance of these flagship programs. And if you’ll allow me, I’ll just plug another of our podcast episodes here. We recently spoke with Dr Jasna Novac Milić, about the Croatian studies program here at Macquarie University. It’s one of the few Croatian studies programs outside of Croatia. And, like you’ve just said for this French school in Brooklyn, it’s got such a flagship role and it’s also so inspirational to other language communities when they see what you can build in terms of structures from primary education through secondary up to the tertiary level. So yeah, these programs are really, really important.

Prof Salomone: I was speaking in the UK last week, and a woman came up to me afterwards and said, “My grandson attends a dual language program in California. He’s 9 years old, and he speaks Spanish fluently.” And I said, “Well I admire his parents for having the good sense to enrol him in that program.”

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. I think we really need to think about the rise of English within bi and multilingual ecologies. It’s not just about English, right? This is not English doing away with other languages. We really need to keep thinking about how we can make the best use of this international lingua franca while also supporting all these multilingual ecologies. All these languages have different roles for different people, and that’s sort of the positive side of it.

Before we wrap up now, I wanted to ask you on your thoughts on the future of English. Will we really, you know, will English keep rising? Or will not another language come along but will language tech and generative AI and automated translation be the end of any kind of natural language hegemony?

Prof Salomone: Or any kind of natural language communication at all! We don’t know. We just don’t know where AI is going to take us. And it’s developing by the nanosecond. Yesterday I viewed audios that one of my colleagues at the law school has been a partner on where they took the oral arguments from the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education which was the racial desegregation case from 1954. Now it’s the anniversary.

They recreated the voices of the justices of what they would have sounded like. They took the transcript, the written transcript, and converted it into an audio using artificial intelligence. So, they just took audios of the justices speaking in other contexts so that they could get a sense of their voice and then transposed it onto this written transcript and created what would have been, could have been, the oral arguments in the case. I mean, who would have thought? And it sounded convincing. It sounded convincing. These were bots speaking, not the real justices. So, we have no idea.

We need human communication. We will. We’re not going to have machines communicating with each other. Not in our lifetimes. So, as a language of human communication, I think English is going to steadily increase. Not this huge trajectory that we’ve seen in the past 20 years. It’s really gone quite high. It’s not going to level off. I think it’s going to slowly increase as we see more young people learning English in schools and colleges. More of these English talk programs at universities. So, more and more people are speaking English than ever before, and that will continue.

Will it be the lingua franca forever? Don’t know. If I had to think of any language that could possibly replace it, it would be Spanish because it is a language that’s spoken on 5 major continents. But I don’t see that happening in a long time. I think English, as a dominant lingua franca, is here to stay for quite some time.

Will we see more pushback against it? Possibly. A couple of years ago I didn’t foresee the pushback that I’m seeing now. Certainly, in a country like the Netherlands or Denmark, I never could have predicted that. Or the kind of radical legislation coming out of Italy. I couldn’t have predicted that. Or the incursion of Russia into Africa. Couldn’t have foreseen that. The world is in such constant flux, and the global politics are really in such constant flux that I don’t think we’re capable of foreseeing how English is going to intermix here.

I was hoping that with the streaming of movies, that more people would become interested in foreign languages because there are so many movies being produced on Netflix. So many of those movies are produced in other countries, in other languages. But, you know, there’s dubbing. So, people just turn on the dubbing and would rather listen to the dubbed voices than listen to the original or make any effort to understand the original. I think that’s unfortunate. Part of it is us. Part of it is anglophones ourselves. Seeing English as being just the possibility of doing everything with it.

But English will continue. It will be our lingua franca for a while.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I agree. Obviously, you can never predict the future, but I think there are interesting questions to be raised, particularly in terms of how the bulk of text and garbage that is being put out by digital technologies now, how that actually will overwhelm communication in a sense.

One sense that I get from my students, many of whom are from Asia, many of them are very multilingual, is that English is completely normal. You have to have English in the same way you need to know how to read and write. But what they’re interested in is actually learning other languages. You spoke about Netflix. Korean is super popular with K-pop and Korean drama and whatnot. Really, all kinds of different languages being learned. So, I do see a great diversification actually. It seems to me that English has become so basic. You need it, no doubt about it. But what’s really interesting seems to be more and more other languages, other skills, other frontiers. It’s an exciting time to think about language.

Prof Salomone: Well (Korean) is the one language where enrolments are on the rise in the United States. Because of K-pop. Totally. It’s the only language where enrolments are going up. So, it gives you a sense of the soft power, the power of soft power.

Dist Prof Piller: Well, thank you so much, Rosemary. It’s been really fantastic and really informative. Everyone, go and read The Rise of English. It’s such a rich book and so many interesting panoramic views as we said earlier.

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

Till next time!

History of Modern Linguistics

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 22:24:32 +0000

In Episode 12 of the Language on the Move Podcast, I speak with James McElvenny about his new book History of Modern Linguistics.

This book offers a highly readable, concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversies, and the role of the social and political context in shaping their ideas and methods.

In the conversation we focus on the national aspects of the story of modern linguistics: the emergence of the discipline in 19^th century Germany and the passing of the baton to make it an American science in the 20^th century.

James also shares the story of writing the book and how it grew out of the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast he hosts.

Enjoy the show!

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 12/04/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

My guest today is Dr James McElvenny. James, is that how you pronounce your name?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that is how I pronounce my name, but I actually do like to encourage varying pronunciations because I think that will give philologists something to do after I die.

Dist Prof Piller: (laughs) Fantastic, so we’ll try another pronunciation like “Mackelveeney”.

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that’s perfect.

Dist Prof Piller: Dr McElvenny, or James, let’s just do it like that – James is a linguist and an intellectual historian at the University of Siegen in Germany. He is the author of “A History of Modern Linguistics” and also of “Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism”. He also hosts the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast.

Today we are going to talk about his new book, “A History of Modern Linguistics”, which has just come out from Edinburgh University Press. Welcome to the show, James.

Dr McElvenny: Thanks for having me on.

Dist Prof Piller: James, can you start us off by telling us how you got to write a “A History of Modern Linguistics”? Aren’t there enough histories of linguistics already?

Dr McElvenny: There are plenty of histories of linguistics. So, what happened is I was doing a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, and I was teaching their course in the history of linguistics while I was there, and the Linguistics editor at Edinburgh University Press came to me. I had already published my first book with them, and the Linguistics editor said that they would like a text book in the history of linguistics for their linguistics series. So, I thought, “Gee, that should be relatively easy. I can just base it on the course I’ve been teaching.”

And I also long had had the ambition of doing a podcast, so I thought that I might be able to imitate Peter Adamson who does the podcast “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps”, and he’s produced books with Oxford University Press based on that podcast. So, I thought, “I could just turn my lectures into a podcast, and I could turn the podcast into a book.”

It didn’t turn out to be quite as simple as that. So, moving from one text type to another, in my experience, was actually quite complicated. Podcasts have their own format and affordances, which I had to adapt my lectures to. And then turning that into a book was also a huge amount of work to make it into a coherent written text. But it’s done now, so… (laughs).

Dist Prof Piller: And it’s eminently readable, I really enjoyed reading the book so much. I think the process you’ve just described of trying out the text with your students and then turning it into a podcast and then turning it into the book really shows in the readability of the book. So, I enjoyed that immensely.

Dr McElvenny: I’m glad you think so.

Dist Prof Piller: Tell us – how did you actually choose where to begin and where to end, because it’s not a history of the longue durée from the Greek and Sanskrit grammarians to the present day. It’s actually a much narrower project. So, can you tell us about the beginning and the end?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so it’s meant to be a history specifically of disciplinary linguistics. By that I mean this modern discipline of linguistics that we study at universities. So, I think that there’s a great deal of value in a longue durée history of linguistics which is the modes that most histories that have previously been published are written in. They go back to ancient Greece and follow things through the medieval period and the early modern period, right up to the modern era.

That’s very good, but it’s more of a sort of old-fashioned history of ideas kind of approach. And I think there are some problems with that, like it sort of is based on the assumption that there are facts about the nature of language and that we’ve discovered them and that it’s a story of simple progress of us building on what has happened in the past. Of course, we do know a lot of things about language that are the direct result of the research that we do today at universities, but we’ve also forgotten a lot of what has come before. We also have, as university researchers in linguistics departments, we also have a very specific perspective on language. There is much, much more that could be said.

So, I think that it can be problematic to assimilate everything that has come before to say that that is all a prelude to what we do now. All of those things that have come before need to be understood on their own terms. Each of those need their own book, and they have their own books. So, I thought I would start when this modern discipline starts. And I don’t say that nothing came before. I actually do refer back to things that came before when they’re relevant to what is happening in the modern discipline. But I do place a boundary there and say, “This is when the modern discipline starts”. And I say that it’s around the beginning of the 19^th century when modern research universities came into being, the first of those being the University of Berlin, and linguistics as a modern university discipline started to develop.

As for the end point, well that has its own story as well. I actually wanted to come much closer to the present, but I also wanted to get the book finished before my funding ran out. This is one of the contingencies of being a researcher in modern linguistics. So, I decided to end it with WWII where there’s a major shift that the sort of centre of gravity of linguistics as a discipline, and of lots of other university disciplines, shifted from Europe to America. There’s the beginnings of that shift in the book, so I talk about figures like Bloomfield and Sapir, and the so-called American Structuralists, but I don’t venture into the sort of Cold War period when America became preeminent.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and look, I think that makes a whole lot of sense, even if it was sort of an extraneous reason. So, you just stated that essentially the book starts with the foundation of the modern research university in Germany in Berlin University. I’d still like to go one little step before that because your book actually starts with Sir William Jones and the discovery, if you will, of the Indo-European language family. Can you tell us a bit about Sir William Jones and why you started there and what was novel about his work?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean I think it’s easy to over-emphasise the role of Sir William Jones. So, this is the traditional fable of how modern Linguistics came into being. So, I repeat it in the book, but I mark it as the traditional fable. I mention that as soon as Linguistics started to form as a discipline, people started writing histories of Linguistics, and this story that started to develop that there was Sir William Jones and then Schlegel and Bop and then Grimm, and so I repeat it, like I rehearse this story because this is designed as an introduction to the history of Linguistics so that people are aware that this is the traditional narrative.

But at the same time, I try to poke holes in it. So, Sir William Jones is well known because he was a British judge in Calcutta and was very interested in philology. In fact, he probably went to India to pursue his philological interests. He studied Sanskrit, and he gave a famous address where he pointed out the similarities between Sanskrit and ancient Greek and Latin and said that this must mean that they came from a common ancestor. Then this has sort of been taken as the beginning of historical comparative Linguistics.

But if you actually read Sir William Jones’ address, you immediately see that this is not modern Linguistics as we understand it. The framework that he’s putting this genealogical narrative into is actually a Biblical framework. He’s talking about the sons of Noah spreading across the Earth, and that’s how he identifies the families of languages in the world today. So, it’s a sort of medieval hangover.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I really like that idea of the medieval hangover as you put it, and that still we have medieval ideas baked into modern Linguistics. So, let’s then go from William Jones to the German foundations of modern Linguistics. Essentially, you are telling a story of a national discipline that’s grounded in two nations, if you will. The beginnings in Germany in the 19^th century and then the passing of the baton, if you will, to the United States in the 20^th century.

So, why Germany? What was going on in Germany at the time that provided this fertile ground for the creation of this new discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, above all it’s the creation of the research university which is in no small part an achievement of Humboldt, Wilhelm Humboldt, who was himself very interested in language and made sure that professorships in language were represented in the new research university in Berlin and brought Bop to Berlin to pursue his comparative approach to grammar.

But there’s also a broader social and political context which comes out very clearly in the story of Grimm of German nationalism, of trying to show that people who speak German are a unified national group. This is before the days of Germany as a political unit, so it was a project to try and raise German national consciousness as a way of forging a political unity, and also to create a history for the German nation because the great rivals of the Germans at this time, the French, could trace their own intellectual history back to classical Rome, back to the ancient world, whereas the Germans had nothing. They just had barbarians as their ancestors.

But through historical comparative Linguistics, you could show that the Germans actually belonged to this bigger Indo-European family, you know, that links them up with Sanskrit, an even older, more prestigious tradition as was understood in 19^th century Europe.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. So, can you maybe talk us through some of the key linguistic ideas about what’s new in language now? So, if we start with, you’ve mentioned Bop and Grimm – what’s key for Bop and Grimm and maybe the neogrammarians?

Dr McElvenny: Ok, what’s key? Well, the key methodological breakthroughs that they made – so Bop went through the meticulous task of comparing in excruciating detail the conjugational forms across the European languages, and thereby provided a basis of reconstructing to the ancestor that they could have come from. So, instead of talking in sort of general terms about similarity, you could actually show in detail what the ancestral forms would have looked like.

And then Grimm is usually credited with establishing the principles of sound laws, so showing how specific sounds have changed historically over time.

Dist Prof Piller: And I guess this methodological innovation really was new in a sense and was not necessarily well-received by all the key players at the time. Many people sort of thought that Bop in particular was really pedantic. You cite this nice little limerick of sorts about how he’s really a pedant. So, what’s the tradition against which Linguistics established itself as this very formal and very narrow discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so I mean these grammatical tasks, or these details of grammar that people like Bop were interested in that form the basis of comparative grammar were traditionally considered just to be something that you had to know about in order to read texts in an ancient language. The real task was understanding the culture and the literature that is written in these ancient languages and not to obsess about the grammatical forms.

But Bop, for the first time, spearheaded this tradition where grammar becomes the really important thing. You can make your entire career just out of comparing forms, and the literature, what is actually written in the language, is completely irrelevant. Or is of secondary importance.

I think it’s probably fair to say that this is something that characterises Linguistics as a discipline, that Linguistics as a discipline has this sort of fetishisation of form, by which I mean that Linguists want something that their discipline is about. They want an object that they study that is different from what everyone else has. The traditional philologists have literature and culture and so on.

But the linguists have the language itself. They have the grammar. They have the forms. So it’s all about separating the form off. This is what Bop has done, and then with the neogrammarians who you mentioned, they turn this into an art that the sound laws of how languages change become THE key thing. That’s what it’s all about.

Then even if you move into the structuralist era, you could understand Saussure’s distinction between la langue and la parole as being a further manifestation of this desire to hive off language as a special thing that linguists study themselves. La langue is the formal system of the language –

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and it’s an imagined system, right? I mean, he claims or posits this exists and parole is not interesting, but really –

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean it is controversial whether Saussure thought that there could never be any – whether Saussure thought that parole was not interesting at all as a scientific object, but definitely he is usually understood as saying la langue is where all the action is.

Dist Prof Piller: So your book covers these 200 years of intellectual history. There are 15 chapters, and we don’t really have time to go into all of them, but I think you’ve told us very nicely about the German context and where this obsession with form really starts. Let’s maybe jump close to the end of your story, but not quite to the end, not quite to structuralism which is the logical conclusion of the formal obsession. But one step before Sapir and Whorf.

One thing that I’ve noticed, I mean obviously not for the first time, but it’s very clear that the history of modern Linguistics is the history of monolingualism, of national languages, and that there really, because of the way it got started, there really is no interest in language contact and multilingualism and linguistic diversity.

Sapir and Whorf are actually credited with being interested in linguistic diversity. That was actually very important to them, and also drawing on Boaz. So maybe can you tell us a bit about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in quotation marks for everyone who can’t see us. How is that sort of close to the end of your story?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, sure. I’ll quickly say too on the topic of 15 chapters – yeah so there are 15 chapters with content that tell the story, and then an introduction and a conclusion. But I think saying 15 chapters sort of misrepresents the style of the book because it makes it sound like it’s a gigantic tome, but it’s actually a really short book. It’s like, 200 pages, and the chapters are really short. It’s made to be very snappy.

Dist Prof Piller: And it is snappy! It’s really very readable. Sorry to kind of create an impression as this being – I mean I guess we can’t really cover all of these developments here in our conversation.

Dr McElvenny: On the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, yeah, and linguistic diversity, I mean this is a very interesting question. It depends a little bit on what you mean by linguistic diversity, but perhaps what you’re getting at with Sapir and Whorf is this interest in indigenous languages of America and other parts of the world. So, indigenous as opposed to the written standardised languages familiar from the European countries, and that is definitely something they were interested in.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is well known, and you put it in inverted commas because neither Sapir nor Whorf formulated a hypothesis in the sense of something that could be tested, like something could be tested with experiments.

Dist Prof Piller: Could you maybe just tell our audience how the name came about? So, neither of these two men ever claimed that they had formulated a hypothesis, and still that’s all we can think of now. I mean, it’s one of the most well known linguistic facts, if you will, outside the academy.

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, the first attestation of the term as far as I’m aware, in print, comes from Harry Hoijer, who had been a student of Sapir’s from the 1950s, so after both Sapir and Whorf had died. Hoijer used the term in the context of a conference that he had convened on the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, so on the idea that there’s some sort of connection between language and thought, or perhaps that even language influences thought.

Sapir and Whorf didn’t formulate a hypothesis as such, but they definitely wrote lots of things about the interplay between language and thought. Whorf perhaps more so. I think one of the most, well there’s a few interesting things that can be said about the background to both Sapir and Whorf’s ideas on linguistic relativity as you could also describe it. One is that there is a German tradition which Sapir was directly in touch with, and Boaz as well who was Sapir’s doctoral supervisor and mentor. This goes back to Humboldt and so on, and that’s also something I talk about in the book.

But there’s also a contemporary context for Sapir emphasising linguistic relativity, that language creates a worldview and shapes how we see the world, and Whorf too for that matter. This contemporary context is there was a lot of discussion on a political level on propaganda in the period between WWI and WWII. This was the era in which totalitarianism arose in central Europe and eastern Europe as well. There was a feeling that propaganda often had a linguistic basis, that it was a deliberate abuse of language to shape the way people think, to sort of brainwash them.

This finds an expression also in the philosophy of the period, so in early analytic philosophy or in the earliest works that fed into what later became analytic philosophy of people like Bertrand Russell, but even Wittgenstein, you can see this discourse that we need to purify language in order to be able to think clearly and logically. So, this is what motivated Russell’s Logical Atomism. He says this as much in his scholarly writings but also in his popular writings where he’s presenting his ideas.

And there was a whole ecosystem of popular books, so like The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards, which forms the basis, or is one of the major works that I talk about in my first book Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism. But also Korzybski with General Semantics, and so on. There’s a whole heap of these.

So, I think that it’s fair to say that Sapir in emphasising linguistic relativity was picking up on this discourse, and you can find Sapir also directly referring to this discourse of how language can be abused to brainwash people. I believe that Sapir was picking up on this discourse and using it as a justification for doing linguistic scholarship. So, Sapir says by studying diverse languages, so languages that have a very different structure from the familiar European languages, such as the indigenous languages of America, we can get a completely different view on the world. We can see how what we assume to be a fact is just an illusion created by our language. This also comes out very clearly in Whorf’s writings, and Whorf is perhaps more explicit about it too.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I was fascinated by how you describe that. Partly the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a form of language critique, and of course that feeds into another key tension that runs through modern Linguistics, the tension between descriptivism and prescriptivism and whether we just describe language or we actually engage with the meanings of language.

Before we end, I’d like to quickly draw one other kind of dichotomy or tension that also comes out really nicely in your book, and that is sort of the establishment of Linguistics as a scientific discipline, and the ambition to be scientific, but at the same time the constant undercurrent of all kinds of romantic ideas. There is the German Romanticism but also the romanticisation of ancient India for instance, so that’s a big topic. Or then Whorf and his spiritual world view.

So, can you maybe talk about this tension a bit more as Linguistics as a science, but Linguistics also as a romantic philosophy or the spiritual undercurrents?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, definitely. This is actually a topic that is much broader than disciplinary Linguistics itself. It has to do with what is considered in this period from the 19^th century to the present, what is considered legitimate scholarship and what is considered science.

So, the English word “science” generally only refers to natural science. We make a clear distinction between the sciences in the sense of the natural sciences and the humanities. I can’t really think if there’s a superordinate term that would cover both of those. I don’t know in English; I don’t think so. Scholarship?

Dist Prof Piller: Hmm, “research”?

Dr McElvenny: Research, yeah, research perhaps. But in the European context, like Wissenschaft, can also be, it can be Geisteswissenschaften, Naturwissenschaft – well do they have their own methods? And do they have their own objects of study? Or are they both two different manifestations of the same thing? This is a debate that ran throughout the 19^th century and influenced Linguistics.

So, by the end of the century, well, if we start at the beginning of the century, the Humboldtian university was very much oriented towards the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften. They were the more important ones, and the natural sciences were considered to be less prestigious. But as the century bore on, the natural sciences could show all sorts of amazing discoveries in fundamental physics in chemistry, and all sorts of really interesting and useful applications of these discoveries in the development of technology – so electricity and new medicines and new chemicals that were synthesised and so on.

So, the natural sciences grew in prestige during the 19^th century, and by the 1880s this became a bit of a sticking point for the humanities, and in Linguistics there was this question of whether Linguistics should orient itself towards the natural sciences or whether it should claim its own special method as one of the humanities. The neogrammarians, of course, were very strongly on the natural science end of this debate with their emphasis on sound laws, saying that these are a kind of natural law.

But critics of the neogrammarians, people like Schuchardt, were saying that that doesn’t make any sense, that the sound laws are not like natural laws because they have limited applicability. They only work in a single language or a single dialect, and they only work for a certain period of time. They go to completion, so they can’t be equated to things like the law of gravity, which applies everywhere in the universe. So, someone like Schuchardt argued it’s just trying to grasp at the prestige, incorrectly, of the natural sciences by importing this to Linguistics.

I say that this came to a head in the 1880s, but it was already building up through the century. Schleicher, another figure who I talk about in the book, in mid-century was already going down this path where the debate was more in terms of materialism, as I described in the book, which is more a debate about whether laws of matter, like laws of physics, tell us everything we need to know about the world, or whether there is a special world of the soul or world of the mind that exists separately from this.

This debate continued after this period. It didn’t end in the 19^th century, but it’s probably fair to say that the model that has won out in Linguistics is very much a scientistic model that wants to orient Linguistics as a discipline to a sort of natural scientific conception of the world.

Dist Prof Piller: One question maybe. So, for a sociolinguist like myself, one thing that is very noticeable in your history is that there really was no place in the story of the birth of modern Linguistics, there was no place for linguistic diversity. There was no place for language contact. There was no place for multilingualism and all those kinds of things that weren’t clearly tied to “one nation, one language”, if you will.

So, can you maybe talk a bit about this history that is not there and how that got back into Linguistics again? Or how it was written out?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I think it was written out because of this form fetishism, of this obsession with the language as the object of study that is an entity in its own right, and the job of the linguist is to describe its grammar and so on. Because if you make the language into the thing that you are studying, then there’s no space for speakers. It’s not about people speaking language, it’s about this abstract thing that exists independently of them.

But even in the 19^th century, you know, I talk about William Dwight Whitney. Even William Dwight Whitney in the mid 19^th century started to talk about diversity in texts, so he still had a philological method where he was analysing written texts, but he looked at the distribution of different sounds in the texts. He produced tables and calculated statistically how sound was distributed, not using the sophisticated statistical methods that we know today, but still talking in terms of percentages and using that to describe tendencies in the development of languages. On a theoretical level he also talked about the individual speaking subject and how people interacting with each other in language will influence each other, and how an individual might innovate a change, but then it has to be ratified by the speech community to become part of the language.

There were other figures as well into the latter half of the 19^th century who talked about the speaking subject and their place in the community of speakers. But it is definitely true that this was a minority, an oppositional position that you could take in studying language because the default position in Linguistics was to talk about the language as an abstract thing.

The introduction of modern sociolinguistics, or the advent of modern sociolinguistics, is probably, I think it’s fair to say, a phenomenon mostly of the post WWII era. So, it definitely has roots that go back earlier than that, but as a sub-discipline in its own right it’s a post WWII thing. So, you’ll have to wait for volume II of the book to be able to find out about that.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s brilliant. So is that what’s next for you, James? Volume II? Post World War?

Dr McElvenny: Well, if I get funding, yes. (laughs)

Dist Prof Piller: Brilliant. So looking forward to that and very much hope you’ll get the funding. Thanks again, James.

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

Until next time!

40 years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University

Ingrid Piller — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 20:46:02 +0000

In this latest episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, I spoke with Jasna Novak Milić, the director of the Croatian Studies Center at Macquarie University.

The Croatian Studies program at Macquarie University celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. One of a very small number of Croatian Studies programs at university level outside Croatia, Jasna and I took this opportunity to chat about Croatian language learning in Australia, Croatian migrations to Australia, languages in higher education, and heritage language learning.

Broadly speaking, Croatian Studies in Australia attracts three groups of students: first, children and grandchildren of immigrants from former Yugoslavia who learned the language at home and want to study it formally to develop higher levels of proficiency, including academic literacies; second, students with a heritage connection who did not learn the language in the home but want to develop some level of proficiency to connect with extended family, also on visits back to Croatia; and third, a small but growing number of students, with no heritage connection who have developed an interest in Croatian for various reasons. The latter include mature age students who take up the challenge of learning another language later in life for reasons of personal interest and intellectual development.

Dr Jasna Novak Milić in the Croatian Studies Centre Library at Macquarie University

Croatian is a fascinating language in many ways and so the conversation is also a springboard to speak about language politics and language naming, both back in Croatia/former Yugoslavia and in the diaspora. Croatian speakers first came to Australia in the early 20th century but mass migration from former Yugoslavia was a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century.

The Croatian Studies program at Macquarie University developed in this context and during Australia’s decisive turn to multiculturalism from the 1980s onward. The Croatian Studies Centre today enjoys strong community support through the Croatian Studies Foundation and is also benefitting from the commitment of the Croatian state, a member of the European Union, to the Croatian diaspora.

Beyond the specifics of Croatian language learning, our conversation also turned to broader issues related to “small” languages in Australian higher education, and why the availability of languages programs in higher education is critical for heritage language maintenance.

Enjoy the show!

Related resources

About the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie University
Study Croatian at Macquarie University
“Easy Croatian” Podcast” hosted by Dr Jasna Novak Milić on SBS
Keynote lecture by Dr Jasna Novak Milić, “Why Australia needs Croatian Studies“
Petition to save Croatian, German, Greek, Italian, and Russian at Macquarie University

Interpreting service provision is good value for money

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 23:25:09 +0000

In this new episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, I spoke with Dr Jim Hlavac about interpreting in Australia.

Dr Hlavac is a senior lecturer in the Monash Intercultural Lab in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics. He is a NAATI-certified and practicing professional interpreter and translator. NAATI is Australia’s National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters.

Dr Hlavac’ research interests relate to interpreting in healthcare settings, interprofessional practice with trainee professionals with whom interpreters commonly work, and the incidence of interpreting and translation amongst multilinguals and in multilingual societies.

In the conversation we explore how professional interpreters, language mediators, and language brokers help to support fair and equitable access to healthcare and other forms of social participation.

How does interpreting work in practice in a hospital setting? Who gets to interpret? How is the need for an interpreter identified? Who pays? What is the role of policy vis-à-vis bottom-up practice? Is the process the same for all languages? Will AI make human interpreters superfluous?

Enjoy the show!

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

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick)

My guest today is Dr Jim Hlavac. Dr Hlavac is a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting at Monash University in Melbourne. Today we’re going to talk about language barriers in a diverse society and how they can be bridged through interpreting between different languages. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Dr Hlavac: Thank you very much for the invitation, Ingrid, and to be on the Language on the Move Podcast.

Dist Prof Piller: Maybe I should say servus and tell our listeners – Jim and I are old friends, and usually we would have this conversation in German because that is our main shared language. So, doing this in English is actually a bit unusual for us. Maybe, Jim, you can tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into interpreting?

Dr Hlavac: Well, Ingrid, it’s probably not uncommon for people in my situation to have been brought up bilingually, or with even three languages, but also mobility – living in different countries – being born in Australia but then going to the birthplace from my parents when I was 7.5. And then, going back to other places where I have relatives and friends, spending time in Europe growing up, then coming back to Australia. So, often mobility has been affected which has accounted for my acquisition of languages and also my use of them.

When I travelled again from Europe to Australia in 1995, I had done kind of ad hoc unpaid translation and interpreting work for others, and I decided I really should formalise my credentials. So, I attempted a test and passed it, and since then I’ve been a what’s called a NAATI – NAATI for those who don’t know – it’s the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters – I’m a NAATI translator and interpreter, and I work across 3 languages – English, Croatian and German.

Dist Prof Piller: Thanks a lot, Jim. Jim, maybe can you tell us what a professional interpreter actually does? I don’t think everyone knows. I mean, it sounds very glamorous. What do you do?

Dr Hlavac: I’m glad it sounds glamorous. Some parts are glamorous, some parts are less glamorous. So, what you do if you’re a professional interpreter is that you should have training, which I do have. You should have credentials such as I have from NAATI. Basically, when you work with other people you are working with 2 or more people who don’t have another language. When you work with them, you interpret everything that they say or sign – everything – so you don’t leave things out. You don’t add things. You don’t distort things. You’re impartial. You’re neutral. You’re not on anyone’s side, regardless of who’s paying for you. If you do have a particular relationship with a particular party, that should be declared to the other one.

You also observe confidentiality. Often, interpreters work in situations where people are talking about quite personal or intimate details, and it’s important for an interpreter to observe that confidentiality and to not pass on to anyone else information of events happening in interpreting assignments.

Interpreters work sometimes on site face-to-face with others. Sometimes it’s remote by video interpreting facilities or telephone. We all know about COVID. Everything went remote. So, there are different modes that you can use to communicate with people. But that, in a nutshell, is what a professional interpreter does.

Dist Prof Piller: So, you’ve been stressing “professional” interpreter now, and I’m wondering about – I mean any bilingual can interpret, right? People who don’t have the qualifications you have can also go and interpret, so can you maybe tell us what’s the difference between a professional interpreter and a language mediator or language broker?

Dr Hlavac: So, Ingrid, lots of bilinguals do interpret. If you speak to some bilinguals, they’ll say, “I can’t interpret, and I hate having to do it,” so it’s not a natural progression. It is something else, but you’re right in that many bilinguals do, as a matter of course, do it within their families or circles of friends or whatever.

So, what distinguishes a professional interpreter from a mediator or a broker is the following. I’ve talked about a professional interpreter. A mediator typically is someone who has a different role. They might be a youth worker, a settlement worker, a social worker, housing worker or perhaps a guide at a hospital, etc. where their primary role is to do something else, i.e. to help a person find employment or housing or what have you. And they might do so using another language other than, let’s say, English in Australia, which is the dominant language. Sometimes they’re just having conversations in that language. Sometimes they might be working with an English speaker as well, in which case they do interpret. But they often don’t know or care to know that when they work as an interpreter relaying other people’s speech or signing, that they have to do so fully without distortion. They can’t add their 2 cents’ worth, so to speak.

So, there’s always an issue with a mediator that their own primary role gets in the way, or they’re advancing the situation of a person for settlement or housing, and often the linguistic skills that they have are questionable. Sometimes they can be good, but they haven’t been tested. They don’t see themselves as an interpreter. They don’t know about ethics, etc.

A broker is something else. A broker is typically a family member who is often pressed into service. Sometimes they put their hand up, but often they’re pressed into service. Often, it’s a child who, if the parents don’t speak English, let’s take Australia, is there to interpret what the parents say to an English speaker and vice versa. Classic situations are hospitals, maybe police stations, other places, etc. Now, a broker is a family member, and so although they might look like a person doing interpreting, what they’re doing, their primary role, is being a family member. They’re looking after their parent, or whoever it is. They’re advocating for their interests. They’re making sure that what they hear and what they say is conveyed to their advantage. They’re also available all the time. They understand the parents’ language very well, etc. They’re also available all the time, and they’re free. So, they sound like they’re really great people to use in these situations, and often they are.

But there are some pitfalls, and the pitfalls are that not every child wants to or should be in that kind of a situation. A child can never typically tell a parent how to behave, what to do, because the power relations are such that they’re there to simply hear what they’re told to do.

There’s also many cases of brokers intentionally or unintentionally changing things. Imagine in a healthcare interaction the parent says something and the child doesn’t quite understand or really fully grasp what it’s about and says what they think the parents says. They convey that into English, and so what the healthcare worker hears is a description of symptoms that are actually different from what the parent says. Or, conversely, they might not understand the healthcare professional properly, be too shameful or kind of shy to ask for repetition or clarification, and they tell the parent something else that they think they’ve heard from the healthcare professional.

So that can lead to misdiagnosis, forms of treatment being misunderstood or not followed, to quite embarrassing situations. Let’s say an adult has a particular health issue which is an intimate issue. Is it appropriate that the child is privy to that information, and are they really likely to convey that? And also, when you think about yourself, would you like to go to the doctor and have your brother-in-law sitting next to you and you’re divulging information about your medical history and expecting your brother-in-law or whoever it is to recount this accurately and correctly, and they’re not going to change things that the doctor might say to them? How does that affect your relationship with your brother-in-law afterwards if he’s privy to all these things?

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I’m sure there are many, many difficult situations, and you’ve probably got a huge amount of stories to tell us. You’re not only an interpreter yourself, you’re also an interpreting researcher. A lot of the research you do is in healthcare, and you’ve already started us on healthcare. I guess, by the sound of it, it sounded like you’re not a huge fan of language brokering, and you pointed out all the problems that there are with family members actually interpreting for other family members.

But at the same time, we kind of know that it happens, and so I guess I’d be curious to hear from you specifically about interpreting and language mediation and language brokering in the healthcare system. What are the main barriers that patients in Australia who do not speak English, or who don’t speak English well, what kind of barriers do they face in accessing adequate healthcare in Australia?

Dr Hlavac: Typically, they have a number of barriers. There are often low levels of health literacy. They don’t know the health system in this country. They don’t know what services are available or that they’re entitled to. If they don’t speak English fluently, then they might not know that they’re entitled to an interpreter in most healthcare interactions that they’re likely to have. If they don’t know that, then they’re not going to ask, or ask a family member to ask on their behalf.

So, the challenge is for healthcare workers to recognise that a person is unable to communicate effectively in English and to offer or to organise an interpreter on their behalf. I’ve done some research, and even amongst those people who claim that they do know that health interpreting services are for free, it’s often the healthcare provider who still ends up providing them. And it sounds silly, or sounds obvious, but often people with so little English don’t know how to ask for an interpreter. They don’t even have those skills sometimes. And if you haven’t got effective communication, then, as you know, as the healthcare professional, they can’t work out what the symptoms are, what the level of health literacy is. They can’t work out a diagnosis and things like that.

Dist Prof Piller: So, who actually has to ask? I mean, you’re saying patients may not know they have the right to an interpreter, or they may not know how to ask. What’s the role of the healthcare professional, or how does – if I go to the doctor and I don’t speak any English, how does it actually work that an interpreter comes in? How is that decided, and what’s the process?

Dr Hlavac: So, the process is that, if you go into a large hospital, particularly in a metropolitan area like Sydney or Melbourne, you’re likely to have front of house staff who knows that this is one of the questions that they would ask as a regular feature when they’re addressing you for the first time through triage or whatever. Now, if you can functionally express yourself clearly, fluently, then they’re unlikely to ask you, but they still might. So, they’re obliged to ask this question, “Do you need an interpreter?” or “What language would you like your healthcare services provided to you in?”, which is a kind of optimal question, you know.

So, it’s up to them, and there’s a lot of cultural competence training happening in hospitals. There’s a lot of information that healthcare workers learn through professional development through their respective professional associations – how to work with interpreters. There’s a lot of skilling up that has happened across, particularly, hospitals. GP clinics are not so skilled up very much. I’m tracking data that’s looking at use of interpreters by GP clinics. It’s lower. Aged care facilities are also lower, so we do have variation. They key thing is, often it’s the front of house person to make the diagnosis. If they don’t, though, the healthcare professional can make the call that this person, this patient, needs an interpreter. So that’s how it usually happens.

The other challenge is, I mentioned health literacy and what have you. There’s a lot of information that’s been translated as well. I know we’re talking about interpreting mainly, Ingrid, but here in Victoria, I’m based in Melbourne, there’s the Victorian Health Translations website, which is 28,000 translations of material related to healthcare across 150 languages. There’s a lot of information out there to advise people about healthcare conditions, and one of the challenges is the discoverability of these resources. How do you get to them? They’re there, but how does the person for whom they are intended actually access them?

Dist Prof Piller: I’ve been wondering about that a lot, actually, because they’re usually organised by language, right? So, if you’re not good at spelling the Latin alphabet, or if you don’t know the name of your language in English, it’s really hard to find that information.

Dr Hlavac: It is. Typically, it’s a family member often, a younger family member, I did talk about brokers, who can lead them there. But they also need to know about this existing. So we do have a challenge in the accessibility of this information to people we want it to reach. When you do get to that site, you’ll find that there’s not just written text there. They’re moving now to audio files as a way of conveying information to people because we have a lot of data to tell us that this is the way people like to consume health information. Not through written text, but through an audio file. And there’s audio plus video. So, the repository of translations in Victoria does reflect people’s preferred ways of reading or gaining information in other languages. And it’s also quality checked.

There’s a lot of work happening recently of, firstly, the translations being checked and sampled amongst communities. And secondly, when healthcare departments or healthcare facilities are looking to compose a document in English, let’s say about Covid or whatever, that they actually involve translators at the stage where the plain English version is developed in the first place. It’s very helpful if you can have translators as part of the group, working on them, so that when the translations are then developed you don’t have the issues of “What does this mean? Let’s rephrase this”, etc. So, there is a lot of work happening in this area to optimise health translations. But we’ll go back to interpreting because I know that’s your focus.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, well look, I mean translation is fascinating too, and that leads me to another question. How do we actually know which languages are needed? We can go back to the clinics, so the receptionist establishes that this person needs an interpreter, but how do they find the right interpreter? Or, going back to your translations, how do we actually know in which languages do we need to make available information about a particular condition, for instance?

Dr Hlavac: The big hospitals collect data on not only interpreter requests, but the languages that are being requested, and they direct their resources to employing interpreters either in-house or freelance for those languages which are in demand. But they could have, you know, within the catchment area of northern health here in Melbourne, they service residents across 150 languages. They also have data from the ABS. Every 5 years we have the census.

So, we do have a fairly fine-grained idea in each municipality or local government are, what the profile is of the languages of the residents there, and also the level of English proficiency. The census data, the census has a question – “If English is not your language spoken at home, what is your level of proficiency in English?”, right? There are 2 gradings – “not at all” and “not well”. When residents tick those responses, that’s pretty indicative that those are people that will need an interpreter. So, we’ve got some demographic data. We’ve got data from hospitals themselves to know which languages are needed.

In terms of sourcing the interpreters, yes, Ingrid, this is a challenge because for bigger languages we do have an ok kind of cohort of interpreters to fall back on, but for new and emerging languages like Rohingya, when Rohingyas started to arrive say, 5, 6, 7 years ago, Chaldeans 15 or 20 years ago, we had to quickly develop testing for potential interpreters for those languages. Then getting them out to be able to work in communities. Often, it’s a kind of chicken and egg situation where you kind of approach people who are community leaders and ask them if they know of people who have good language skills who might have been doing this before migrating to Australia. And to locate people who have the attributes that you’re looking for in a potential interpreter and supporting them through training.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I guess one problem that also kind of relates to named languages, you know. I mean, in my own research I’ve encountered people who’ve said they needed an Arabic interpreter, but they actually needed someone with Sudanese Arabic but then got someone with Lebanese Arabic and it was really, really difficult. The interpreter couldn’t really understand them. Or there have been all these media reports about the Yazidis in northern NSW who speak a variety of Kurdish but couldn’t really work with the Kurdish interpreters because their brand of Kurdish was quite different. So, I guess that’s an additional challenge.

Dr Hlavac: It is, and we do know about them. South Sudanese Arabic – there are 3 varieties of Kurdish that NAATI credentials. There are regular meetings, and I’ve been a part of them, between the language service providers who are at the coal face (Australian or British idiom for “front end” or “grassroots level”). They supply the interpreters, and they get together with NAATI, with the professional associations, and they say, “Hey, we’ve got this problem. We can’t find interpreters for this language. We’ve got a high incidence of people reporting this language, but they can’t understand the interpreters.” There are different varieties of Kurdish, etc. So, these things are fairly quickly made aware to the people who need to know about them, and we do respond accordingly.

Australia, through NAATI, is probably the only crediting organisation to have 3 varieties of Kurdish. And that’s simply because, as you said, there are Kurdish varieties that are mutually incomprehensible. And the whole thing of interpreting is that you need to be able to communicate effectively. If Lebanese Arabic interpreters aren’t able to communicate effectively with a South Sudanese Arabic speaker, the interpreter needs to inform the service provider, the English speaker, about this issue, that they are unable to communicate properly and that they need to rebook the assignment with a South Sudanese Arabic interpreter.

You do have speakers who might be speaking varieties that are not your primary one. You kind of, well you know about this very well, Ingrid, you practice accommodation. You try and work out how do they speak, you try and avoid things that are specific to your variety. I’m often working with Slovenians, who I don’t understand that well, and they, through misallocation that happens. If you really can’t understand that, the onus is on the interpreter to declare this issue, and for that assignment to be booked with the correct interpreter.

Dist Prof Piller: So, does that happen a lot? Like, you talk about misallocation. Is that a problem in the system, and then if I’m, I don’t know, I need to attend the emergency department, for instance. Maybe there is not a whole lot of time, actually, for people to find out what language I speak, and then to book and rebook, so how does that work?

Dr Hlavac: Yeah, it’s not easy, but there is infrastructure to address this. If you turn up to emergency and you’re incoherent or what have you, there are people at front of staff who will try to work out how much English you have, and if you don’t have English, what’s your language. They’ll often ask you anything – your country or language – in English, etc. It’s often possible for front of house staff to at least work out the language or the country of birth. Often, the country of birth does not coincide with the language, but that’s at least a piece of information that’s helpful for the front of house staff to start the process of locating an interpreter.

The free interpreting service is available 24/7. This is financed by the federal government. It’s free, so the healthcare facilities with emergency departments use this service, particularly after hours, and the ability to be able to locate and get an interpreter on the other end of the phone is not bad. The waiting time is usually between 3 and 5 minutes on average, which is not bad. There is a fair bit of infrastructure in place to address this issue.

People say, “This costs a lot of money”, etc. But if you look at the sums and if you look at the rates of misdiagnosis, healthcare workers not being able to communicate properly, the health effects, etc. and how much it costs the health system when these things happen – it’s much cheaper to pay for interpreting services that address the linguistic discordance in the first place.

Dist Prof Piller: Jim, you’ve got fantastic data, actually, on how the provision of interpreting services kind of reduces length of stay in hospital and how it reduces readmission rates for linguistically diverse people. So, really, this kind of value for money that our interpreting system gives Australian society – can you maybe talk us through that research and how interpreting really, you know, improves outcomes for people from non-English speaking backgrounds and overall lowers the burden on the Australian taxpayer if you will?

Dr Hlavac: So Ingrid, yeah, that was data that was collected by a colleague of mine, and friend, Emiliano Zucchi, based at Northern Health here in Melbourne. He tracked the use of interpreting services over 10 years. In those 10 years, interpreting services greatly expanded, as did the population in the area, but what we had happening was, and we can’t quite say it was only the interpreting services that resulted in lower length of stay in hospital and lower readmission rates. We’d need to do what’s called multivariate analysis to say that conclusively. But what we did see was that the increase in interpreting services co-occurred with these really good health outcomes – reducing the length of stay in hospital, lowering readmission rates – those are compelling reasons. They’re also reasons that hospital managers like to see. It’s not just the fact that patients and healthcare workers can communicate with each other optimally. There are great healthcare outcomes that have occurred or co-occurred with this happening.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s really brilliant. I mean, we’ve already been talking about NAATI a lot and provisions in Australia. Our listeners come from all around the world, so I was wondering whether you could talk us through how Australia compares in terms of provisions for people who don’t speak English or don’t speak it well to other countries and the interpreting provisions and translation provisions available there?

Dr Hlavac: So, Australia compares favourably. I go back to really 1975 when they changed the macro policy, social policy of Australia, to introduce multiculturalism. If it wasn’t for multiculturalism, the flow on effect of that such as interpreting services would not be in this country to the extent that they are. So, Australia compares favourably in that throughout your provision of services acorss health, education, defence, employment, welfare – no matter what it is, each department has to have a multiculturalism policy, including linguistic diversity.

Part of linguistic diversity is the linguistic diversity of the government employees in that department, but also the people who use those services. So, when you’re unemployed and you need welfare assistance, the government department that you go to has to have a policy on providing interpreting services if you require them. Health is a big area, what I’ve mentioned. The courts, police, defence, tourism, etc. So, it’s actually built into the provision of all government services.

When you have money from government at federal and state level to support this, you can build up an infrastructure. When you don’t have the government support, it’s much harder. It’s much less prevalent and widespread, so that’s really the reason why Australia does compare favourably and why, compared to other countries, you do find, you know, a good service in terms of interpreting service and translation.

Dist Prof Piller: So, you’ve already spoken a lot about top-down and that the policies in Australia are really favourable, and the funding situation is quite favourable. Can you maybe talk us through bottom-up efforts? What needs to happen in institutions? Government can only do so much, you know. We need the policy framework in place, but at the same time at the institutional level, as you said earlier, people have to make things happen. There has to be a commitment to multilingualism and service provision for everyone and so on and so forth. I know that, from your research, you’ve also done a lot at the institutional level. Can you tell us a bit about what works and what doesn’t work?

Dr Hlavac: That example I gave before, when language service providers gather around a table to talk shop, to talk about what’s happening, what are our problems, issues, things we’re not doing well. That’s an example where people who are at the coal face do tell those people further up about what their gaps are and how they can be addressed. People aren’t short of suggestions. Now, sometimes those suggestions can’t always be addressed, but there’s this interchange of people at various levels that does characterise the system here which is pretty comprehensive.

If I go back to the 1970s though, when I was talking about multiculturalism being a key thing, there were people such as police officers complaining to their local members of parliament to say, “I can’t actually interview this potential witness because they don’t speak English and I don’t speak their language. They’re getting someone off the street to interpret. What are you going to do about it?”. You had doctors writing letters to say, “I can’t treat my patients. What are you going to do about it?”. When the country had actually gotten to a stage where they thought, “Ok, migration is an ongoing thing. This problem is not going to go away. How are we going to solve the problem?”. There were a lot of activists in that period coming up with lots of suggestions, and that’s how a lot of almost revolutionary things happened in that period. We’re fortunate we’ve had bipartisan support from both Liberal and Labor parties. Both sides of politics continue to support multiculturalism. So, interpreting services have not become a political football which can affect their future existence. So, that’s how things kind of panned out.

I’m sorry I’m not giving you a very good bottom-up example, but there’s a lot of interchange happening at many levels, and the system is kind of being fine-tuned, reviewed, and it’s open to lots of suggestions which are forthcoming from lots of people.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I mean, that’s the democratic process, I guess, and it is encouraging to see it working. Now, I hear a lot of people currently coming forth with suggestions about AI and saying, you know, “We won’t need interpreting anymore in the very near future because AI is going to do it all for us,” and all those translation apps and so on and so forth. So, I have to ask that question, Jim. Are language technologies going to make human interpreting and translation superfluous?

Dr Hlavac: Ingrid, what a question! It might, one day, not tomorrow or the day after. With voice recognition technology which is the basis for technology understanding human talk and then being able to convert it into another language is really advancing, as we all know. We can turn on the captions function and that will probably give a pretty good rendition of what I’m saying and what you’re saying.

So, we’re speaking English, and hopefully we’re speaking standard English and speaking reasonably slowly and clearly, so voice recognition technology is good if you’re speaking a big language slowly, clearly, and a standard version of it. If you’re speaking a slow, standard version of another big language, you’re probably going to be able to use technology that is going to, I don’t know, probably interpret most of what is said correctly without too many mistakes and distortions. So, the technology is there, and it’s improving.

However, there’s two things. Most of the interpreting assignments that interpreters work in in this country is they’re working with people who typically don’t speak standard varieties who are often, particularly in health, they might be sick, distraught, unwell, unhappy, they don’t speak coherently. They don’t speak slowly. They don’t speak clearly enough. And so, the technology is not there to be able to pick up what they’re saying to then reliably be able to transfer it into English.

For the time being, the technology is not good enough to deal with the vast array of different varieties that people use in their vernaculars when they’re interacting with a healthcare worker. You need a lot of feeding of data from all sorts of languages, including colloquialisms, dialect, variation, etc. to have a voice recognition technology system that reliably can replace an interpreter. I don’t think it’s going to happen tomorrow or soon, but it might happen in 10 or 15 years, but it’s up to interpreters to work with this because there still needs for many things to be some sort of human overview, or at least supervision of this.

I’ve got a PhD student who’s testing voice recognition and using a tablet and asking interpreters, “Do you want to take notes like you normally do, or do you want to look at the tablet and see what the transcription looks like? When you interpret, is it easier from that or from your notes?”. So, there’s research happening.

The other thing is though, Ingrid, if the technology makes a mistake and there’s some sort of horrible outcome, who has liability for it? If you try and contact Google Translate and say, “Hey you made a mistake and this cost me $100 million. Can I sue you?”, you won’t get an answer, probably, because it is unclear who is responsible for that transfer of recorded speech from one language into another if you use automatic or neural translation technology. So, it’s a grey area, but we’re not going to be replaced tomorrow I don’t think.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, personally I don’t even think in 10-15 years. I mean, there is so much technology hype, and I guess I’m also interested in the dangers of that belief that at some point in the future interpreters will be replaced because, as you’ve pointed out, it’s the most vulnerable and the most high-stakes situations where technology actually fails. Technology is great if I need to get directions, if I’m a tourist somewhere and sort of in the leisurely, fun situation. Then it’s really, really good to have Google Translate or Google Lens or whatever. But if I’m in a vulnerable situation, a high-stake needs situation in healthcare, before the courts or whatnot, I think there is a real danger, actually, of thinking that this leisure and fun situation is somehow going to transfer to that situation where it really matters. Where we need human accountability. Where we need to make sure that it’s the right variety, it’s all those connotations that are there and so on and so forth as you’ve explained so beautifully.

Dr Hlavac: Yeah, things are developing. People might think, “Hey, I used it on holiday, why can’t I use it with my legal client here?”. There are some disclaimers and warnings out there. So, for example, Optus has a particular function where they can do speech recognition software, so you can speak, let’s say, German to someone. And at the other end of the telephone call, someone can speak Italian or Swahili or whatever. They said this is good for general communication only. They’ve kind of used the term “general communication”.

They do warn that this is not suitable for health or legal or high-risk situations. So, it’s often up to people to assess what the level of risk, particularly if there’s a miscommunication or mistranslation, what the consequences of that are. So, you know, the messages, as you said, it might be good in low-risk situation, but as soon as you have something at stake, you need to ask yourself questions. And human beings are a better evaluator of risks are. Human beings do make mistakes, but they are better in dealing with high-risk situations than what the technology has to offer us at the moment.

Like we say to our students, though, those interpreters who don’t work with interpreters will end up without a job, but those interpreters who do work with technology can look forward to continuing to have a job.

Dist Prof Piller: Well thanks a lot. I think that’s sort of a good note to end on actually. Thank you so much, Jim. And thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on our podcast or on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Til next time!

Language on the Move – the podcast

Ingrid Piller — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:21:59 +0000

Language on the Move has launched a podcast

We are delighted to share an exciting new development: Language on the Move has partnered with the New Books Network (NBN) to launch our very own podcast.

Based on our occasional audio series “Chats in Linguistic Diversity,” the Language on the Move podcast channel on the New Books Network will bring you conversations about linguistic diversity in social life on a regular basis.

Members of our team will be chatting with key thinkers in our field to explore ideas, debates, problems, and innovations. Our aim is to have in-depth and fun conversations about language learning, intercultural communication, multilingualism, applied sociolinguistics, and much more.

Check out our first episode: Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism

Our first episode won’t be new to our regular readers: we’ve gone live with a re-launch of Ingrid Piller’s and Aneta Pavlenko’s conversation about Aneta’s new book Multilingualism and History.

Over the next few days, we’ll be re-publishing our full archive of “Chats in Linguistic Diversity” on the Language on the Move podcast channel and new episodes will start in March.

Feedback, please!

The Language on the Move podcast channel will be edited by Ingrid Piller and Brynn Quick, and many other Language on the Move team members will be pitching in as occasional hosts. To support our new venture and benefit from our efforts, please make sure to find us on the podcast app of your choice and subscribe to our channel!

We are also keen to hear your recommendations about topics or interviewees, or any other suggestions you might have for us as we embark on this new project. Please share feedback and ideas in the comments section below.

In case you are not familiar with the New Books Network (NBN), check out our new partner:

The NBN was founded by Marshall Poe in 2007 and has been in continuous operation since that time.
The NBN’s mission is public education.
The NBN is the largest book-focused podcast network in the world.
The NBN has over 120 subject-specific, author-interview podcasts, such as “New Books in Language.”
The NBN hosts over 25 academic podcasts produced by academic institutes and academics, and the Language on the Move podcast will be one of them.
The NBN has almost 1,000 hosts, all of whom are experts in their fields. Most are professors. We are excited to join this brilliant team.
The NBN publishes between 65 and 80 new episodes a week.
The NBN has published over 23,000 episodes, all of which are available on the NBN website and on the major podcast apps.
The NBN reaches around 750,000 million people a month.
There are NBN listeners in every country in the world except North Korea.
NBN listeners download 1.5 million episodes a month.
The NBN is like a library and episodes continue to be available and download forever
Everyone is free to share NBN episodes using the links in the player at the bottom of every NBN episode. Cool little tip: Add your favorite shows to your syllabus!

And this is the show that first attracted me to the NBN

Legacies of the Next Generation Literacies Network

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 21:02:24 +0000

The Next Generation Literacies Network is hosting its network conference devoted to “Social Participation in Linguistically Diverse Societies” at Hamburg University this week. I take this opportunity to share my reflections on the legacies of the Next Generation Literacies Network as the 3-year funding period comes to an end.

Network of networks

Although the Next Generation Literacies network is only 3 years old, it is embedded in a series of much older and more long-standing collaborations.

As a network of networks, the Next Generation Literacies network has brought together not only individual researchers but three research teams, namely the Literacy in Diversity Settings Research Center based at Hamburg University, the Multilingual Innovation Research Team based at Fudan University and Language on the Move Research Group, based at Macquarie University.

The broad international character of the Next Generation Literacies Network with its bases in Australia, Germany, and China, and including individual members from every continent and from countries across the Global North and South is truly unique and an achievement we can be rightly proud of.

As such, I believe that the Next Generation Literacies Network will leave at least three legacies, related to the new knowledge we have created, to the research capacity we have built, and to the research community we have created.

Focusing linguistic diversity and social participation

The Next Generation Literacies Network is very much a child of the Covid-19 pandemic. Professors Ingrid Gogolin, Sílvia Melo-Pfeiffer, Yongyan Zheng, and I wrote the funding application in 2020 and the funding period was from 2021-2023.

The pandemic forced us to do things differently right from the start and affected all aspects of our work.

In terms of research content, for a research network devoted to linguistic diversity and social participation, it was only natural that many members would turn their attention to the exclusion of linguistic minorities from public service communication.

Some of the internationally leading research into the intersection of linguistic diversity and emergency communication took place within the auspices of the Next Generation Literacies Network, such as the Language on the Move Covid-19 Archives, where we started to explore the lived experience of migrants, indigenous people, and international students from February 2020 onwards or the special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a time of crisis” edited by network members professors Zhang Jie from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, Li Jia from Yunnan University in Kunming, and myself.

We showed how the the Covid-19 pandemic had exposed language barriers in societies around the world. It became obvious that the fact of linguistic diversity had not been incorporated systematically into emergency preparation and crisis planning.

As a result, the effectiveness of the pandemic response suffered, and linguistic minorities everywhere struggled to access timely high-quality information. The consequences of widespread language and communication failures have been felt most heavily by the most marginalized groups, with the mortality rates of migrant and indigenous populations exceeding those of linguistically dominant populations in every context where such data were collected.

In short, the pandemic has demonstrated that the intersection between linguistic diversity and social participation is vital to ensuring social cohesion, fair and equitable enjoyment of human rights, and the well-being of all. As such, going forward, the research focus of our network will only gain in importance.

A strong legacy of capacity building

The Next Generation Literacies Network will also leave a strong legacy in terms of capacity building. Academia is a global enterprise but one where information flows are from the Anglophone world to the rest, and from the Global North to the Global South. Members of our network have played a key role in challenging those inequities and asymmetries in our field.

An example comes from the Next Generation Literacies virtual doctoral summer schools under the theme “Linguistic Diversity, Education, and Social Participation,” which we have run each year since 2021. These summer schools brought together students from across the world and from many countries, particularly in the Global South. We successfully piloted a multilingual and multimodal model of an international co-learning community facilitated by remote learning technologies.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all those network members who readily volunteered their time and expertise so that students could attend the event for free.

If we want to challenge the linguistic and epistemic exclusion of peripheral multilingual scholars from global knowledge production, we need events such as these and networks such as ours: networks that enable, provide linguistic and epistemic brokerage, and help scaffold participation in academia, as a community of practice, as Zhang Jie, Li Jia and myself showed in a positive case study.

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

Let me now move on to the third legacy I want to talk about, community building. I’m talking about a humanistic way of day doing research together, in interaction and communion.

When we did the research for “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production” we framed epistemic justice within the evidence of research metrics – essentially, we asked who gets published and who gets cited, and we showed how disproportionately both these metrics are skewed towards scholars based in the Anglophone world and in the Global North.

Yet, the last few years have shown that such metrics are quickly becoming completely meaningless as academics write more than they read – a strange inversion in literacy practices Deborah Brandt noticed already back in 2014. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and other automated writing technologies have further taken off the brakes. Texts – including academic texts – are now being produced on an industrial scale just for the sake of textual outputs, as opposed to sharing knowledge and ideas. A condition Matthew Kirschenbaumer has famously called the looming textocalypse.

Of course, knowledge and ideas that only exist digitally bypassing the human mind are completely useless. To be useful, research must go hand in hand with community building and here, too, the Next Generation Literacies Network leaves a strong legacy.

For me personally, a recent highlight project combining original research, capacity and community building has been Life in a new language. Life in a new language is a co-authored book project, which will come out from Oxford University Press this year.

Life in a new language asks what it is like to learn a new language as an adult in real life. The project builds on ethnographic research with 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries on all continents. The research spans a period of almost 20 years between 2000 and 2020.

By sharing and re-using data from 130 participants from across 6 separate ethnographic studies, we were able to cover a wide range of themes in a single analysis.

Our methodological approach germinated within the Language on the Move research team and has been inspired by open science principles, the desire to share our data, and pool our existing resources to paint a bigger picture of language and migration.

Life in a new language is both a research product and a research process. The process with its multilingual collaboration across different levels of academic experience and its focus on data sharing and reuse is what I want to highlight here. It is an example of the kind of research and publishing community of practice that has been fostered with the framework of the Next Generation Literacies network.

We’ve had a lot of fun in the past 3 years, as this photo from our first in-person network meeting at Macquarie University in June 2023 shows. And fun matters because it inspires us to do better research and be better researcher together.

As Alexander von Humboldt reminds us, “Ideas can only be useful if they come alive in many minds.” And that is what the Next Generation Literacies network has achieved and what our legacy will be as we head into the next phase of our network.

Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 21:30:50 +0000

Just before the holidays, Professor Aneta Pavlenko and I chatted about Aneta’s new book Multilingualism and History. We talked about amnesia and ignorance pacts in contemporary sociolinguistics, ghost signs that point to dark pasts and presents, and the politics of romanticized multilingualism.

Enjoy this latest episode of Chats in Linguistic Diversity! The conversation is a sequel to our previous conversation about whether we can ever unthink linguistic nationalism.

Edited transcript below

Can you tell us about the story behind Multilingualism and history?

I have a very short answer and a somewhat longer answer to your question.

The short answer: this is the book I always wanted to read. And I was hoping that somebody else would write it or edit it. That never happened.

The longer answer is that it’s a very natural outcome of the way I see my scholarly trajectory.

If you remember when we were junior scholars, our main preoccupations were, “I want to be heard, I desperately want to be published.” And then you go along and then you start thinking, “What are the conversations going on? How can I contribute to these conversations?”

And then you go along and you start thinking, “What conversations are not happening? How can we start them?”

And you and I have both been very successful starting some conversations about gender, identity, emotions. I’ve also been very lucky to start conversations about forensic linguistics.

And so it seemed like the path is very clear. You put together an invited colloquium, maybe a workshop, you put together a special issue. An edited volume. And you are building a network of people, and you get people interested, and you get people excited, and I’ve always believed that history was another missing piece.

But nothing was ever easy with history and multilingualism. Because when people heard about gender and emotions and identity, it made sense to them. It was relevant. It was relevant to the present moment. But history seemed utterly irrelevant to multilingualism in the digital age.

And so the long answer is the purpose of this edited volume. It’s to make historic research relevant to sociolinguists in a very pointed way because this research undermines the foundational myth of our field which is that we live in a world that’s more multilingual than ever before. When in reality we live in a world that’s less multilingual than ever before.

And the historians know this.

How is Multilingualism and History structured? What topics are being addressed and who are the contributors?

The choices I made was not to be comprehensive, but to highlight what is novel and interesting. So, for example, the pivotal chapter by Ben Fortna shows the transformation of a very multilingual Ottoman Empire into a very monolingual nation state of Turkey. It follows the transformation in a way that for me is emblematic of the main point made in the book.

Susan Gal talks about language ideologies that shape the ways linguists themselves work, and see multilingualism, which is also very relevant.

Or I invited Roland Willemyns to contribute a chapter on why Dutch failed as a lingua franca. Because we love talking about Latin and English and other Lingua Francas, but we never think about languages that were poised to become a lingua franca but never became one. Why is that?

So for me, each chapter highlights a novel dimension in relationships with language in ways that we often don’t talk about.

Ads in Polish and Yiddish for Halpern’s fabric store and warehouse, Skład towarów bławatnych, on Nalyvaiko street, 13 (at the turn of the 20th century the street – then known as Rzeżnicka – was inhabited primarily by Jews). Lviv, September 2019. Photo by A. Pavlenko

The progression in the book is chronological from ancient Egypt to modern day.

The aim of this volume was never to be comprehensive and to only show that multilingualism was here. Multilingualism was there. Because if that’s what I wanted, I would have edited a very different book. The challenge for me is not in the many contexts where we can find multilingualism. But in the story that we have been telling ourselves. And the story we’ve been telling ourselves is a very European, Western story. And we got it wrong.

How did we get the history of multilingualism wrong?

There was a lot of forgetting that happened in the early part and the middle of the twentieth century. And a lot of lack of intergenerational transmission.

It also has to do with the incredible dominance of English as an academic language that emerged in the second part of the twentieth century. That led to the loss of multilingual knowledge that no longer made it into the sociolinguistic mainstream. And that unfortunately also extends to historians.

In my introduction to the volume, I cite one very bitter German historian who says that American historians write the history of the colonial United States without looking at documents in European languages like Dutch and French and Swedish. Not to mention Native American languages.

It has become acceptable to be a scholar of multilingualism while not knowing more than one language. It has become acceptable to be historian while being monolingual. And that is part of forgetting.

To an English speaker, multilingualism is an unusual phenomenon worthy of study. For me, it’s a rediscovery of the wheel. It’s the process of historical amnesia.

Let’s talk a bit more about amnesia and ignorance pacts.

The term “ignorance pacts” is from Joshua Fishman, who talked about the reciprocal ignorance pacts between sociolinguists and sociologists, which made sociolinguistics a very provincial, parochial discipline.

Café Sztuka, with restored Polish and Yiddish ads for groceries and haberdashery. Kotlyarska street 8. Lviv, September 2019. Photo by A. Pavlenko.

And of course, Fishman is still that generation of scholars who are trained in a much broader tradition than we’re currently trained. And so when you spend a lot of time in the field, as you and I did, what becomes apparent?

When we started out in the 1990s, there were 3 journals focusing on bilingualism. It was hard to get a publication in, but everybody was reading everybody else, everybody knew everybody else. Since then, our own field, just like other fields, has experienced a tremendous growth. And the growth came with many positives but also with many negatives such as the fragmentation of the field.

And this split into academic tribes with their own little conventions. Their own publications, their own conferences. Bilingualism people for some reason meet separately from the multilingualism people. And the sociolinguists of multilingualism, bilingualism, live in a very different world from the psycholinguists.

Where do data about past multilingualism come from and what methods do we use in the study of historical multilingualism?

By definition, the spoken word is fleeting and so everything that we have pretty much is written records and that, of course, has limits.

The challenges are also advantages because when you look at multilingualism in the past the degree to which we privilege the spoken word becomes very obvious.

In reality, the data is plentiful for many contexts. As of today, there’s still many little clay tablets and many papyruses sitting there unread, containing precious information: administrative records, bureaucratic records, receipts, letters. There is a ton of information to be gained about all aspects of history, economics, politics, and also multilingualism from such trivial things, such as bureaucratic receipts, court records, administrative correspondence.

Moreover, when we look at evidence such as, for example, travel accounts by pilgrims. They also pick up on oral language practices. The eyewitness accounts of these people bring very precious information about what we would call oral practices. And the same goes for court records.

Bilingualism was foundational to the development of literacy. And that is not something we talk about. We kind of imagine the trajectory being the other way around. But people go on and appropriate scripts from other languages and make them their own.

What do ghost signs tell us about past multilingualism?

Ghost signs are very commonly painted, sometimes faded ads. That have lost their functional significance. The business they’re advertising, for example, is no longer there. The store is no longer there. But the sign is still there. And people love them just for the aesthetics for an immediate connection to the past.

Nevsky Prospect 20, St Petersburg, with Russian signs, German signs for St Petersburger Zeitung, the German bookstore and library of Andreas Isler, and a French sign for the Grand Magasin de Paris (ca. 1900)

The capital of ghost signs is the Ukrainian city of Lviv, which before World War 2 was the Polish city of Lwów and before that was the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg.

And so the signs in Lviv are in German and Polish and Yiddish; three languages that are no longer spoken on its streets.

And when you start seeing those signs, some of them very nicely repainted and spruced up, you start asking yourself, well, what is the function of the signs? If they are not really about Ukrainian history, what are they doing on the streets of a modern Ukrainian city?

They tell a story of how multinational the city of Lviv has always been, and an example of the tolerant coexistence between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. And that is a kind of statement that doesn’t make sense on many different levels.

First of all, because the Ukrainian language is missing from the signs. It was not very much in use in signage before World War II in a Polish city.

Secondly, we all know of the historic antagonism between the three main populations, so the coexistence was by no means very tolerant.

The multilingualism was real, it was there, but it was hierarchical. If you were Polish, you may learn German, but you’re not going to learn Ukrainian or Yiddish, but if you were Jewish you would have to learn everybody else’s language, in addition to Yiddish and Hebrew.

Even more importantly, the signs that make this very smooth artificial transition from a Polish to a Ukrainian city obfuscate the amount of violence that took place in the city during and after World War 2, that transformed a historically Polish city into a Ukrainian city through the genocide of its Jewish population, and ethnic cleansing and deportation of its Polish population.

We don’t just innocently reimagine history. We reshape people’s perceptions of what happened in the past. And that is what the ghost signs are very successfully doing. They’re creating someone else’s history. In this case, the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was cosmopolitan, the history of multilingual Poland – to give a very respectable aura of cosmopolitanism to a modern Ukrainian city, that is by no means very tolerant. In my fieldwork I found not a single sign in the language of the largest linguistic minority of the city of Lviv, which is Russian.

How is the past entangled in the present and the future?

It breaks my heart to see war in my homeland of Ukraine. It broke my heart to see Russia invade Ukraine, cruelly, with no justification. Nobody can justify that.

But it also breaks my heart to see the Ukrainian government using the very same invasion to push forth language policies that have been unpopular before and making them popular. Taking down every monument in a Russian writer, reducing the uses of the Russian language further because it’s presumably the language of the enemy and not the language of the population.

And that is something that no sociolinguist comments on because presumably that is okay. We are okay with linguistic nationalism in certain forms. That to me is hypocritical.

Language on the Move 2023

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 21:04:17 +0000

The Language on the Move team hosted members of the Next Generation Literacies network in June

Where has 2023 gone?! Unbelievably, it’s time for another annual report.

In terms of research blogging, 2023 has been the leanest year since we started this website. This is because we have brought more of our activities back into the real world as the virtual world is being overwhelmed by the looming textocalypse. One thing that ChatGPT sadly has achieved is to devalue all digital writing.

Without concomitant community and capacity building, writing is quickly becoming meaningless. Therefore, our efforts have been directed at balancing the two.

Thank you for being part of Language-on-the-Move!

I want to express my gratitude to all team members, contributors, readers, students, and fans for supporting our research, teaching, and team efforts. Your commitment to creating and sharing knowledge about language in social life and to striving for a more inclusive world makes it all worthwhile.

As we look back on 2023, we are guided by hope for 2024.

Ways to keep in touch!

If you have not yet done so, start 2024 by subscribing to Language on the Move in the ‘Newsletter subscription’ box in the footer below.

Dr Abdulrahman Alfahad translated “Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice” into Arabic

In previous years, we also used the annual report to encourage readers to join our Twitter followers @lg_on_the_move, but considering the direction in which that platform is headed, we are not sure how much longer we’ll be on the site.

We have already significantly scaled back our Twitter presence, similar to the minimization of our Facebook activities some years ago. We’ve started a BlueSky account, but unsure whether we’ll really hang in there. For now, feel free to follow us on any of these platforms. If you are not yet on BlueSky but would like to be, feel free to ask us for invite codes.

And in case you need a reminder, Language on the Move also hosts a YouTube channel.

January

Ingrid Piller, How do universities decide whose English needs to be tested for admission?

January is summer break in the Southern Hemisphere, but we did get to put out one research blogpost, a general audience version of an academic article in Language in Society that came out just around Christmas 2022:

Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 1-23. [open access]

February

Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Vera Williams Tetteh, Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower

Much of our summer break was devoted to finalizing the book manuscript for Life in a new language. In 2024, the book will finally be published by Oxford University Press. Watch this space!

March

Vera Williams Tetteh, Triumph over trauma: new migrant memoir
Event: Multilingual students in monolingual universities. A recording of this departmental seminar is available here.

Regular reading group meetings are the lifeblood of the Language-on-the-Move team

In March, team members also made a submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into ‘Migration, Pathway to Nation Building.’ Our submission was published on the website of the Parliament of Australia and can be retrieved here.

We argue that the problem of systemic migrant exclusion must be addressed for migration to work as a strategic enabler of vibrant economies and socially sustainable communities.

April

Two new Language-on-the-Move PhDs

Huge congratulations to Dr Agnes Bodis and Dr Liesa Rühlmann, who graduated from their PhDs this year, and Ms Tazin Abdullah, who graduated from her MRes!

Liesa’s PhD thesis was published as a monograph later in the year: Rühlmann, L. (2023). Race, Language, and Subjectivation: A Raciolinguistic Perspective on Schooling Experiences in Germany. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43152-5; and she also won the Karl H. Ditze Prize 2023, an annual award carrying a cash prize of Euro 3,000 and honoring the best postgraduate thesis in the humanities in northern Germany.

Dr Yining Wang, who finished her PhD thesis about heritage language maintenance among Chinese families in Australia in 2020, never got to have a graduation ceremony due to Covid, so we celebrated in April.

Pia Tenedero, Lent, language, and faith work
LI, Jia & HE, Bin, Hallyu and Korean language learning
This was our 2^nd most popular blog post in 2023, testament to the popularity of Korean cultural exports. Interpreting the Korean show Squid Game was also the topic of an article by Jinhyun Cho over in the Conversation: From Squid Game and Physical: 100 to K-pop and BTS, translation is central to tectonic shifts in global cultural consumption.
Tazin Abdullah, New ways to answer old questions about Ramadan

Never miss an opportunity to share cake! Dr Loy Lising’s famed pavlova was the cherry on top of Dr Yining Wang’s PhD

May

Annmaree Watharow, Monika Bednarek, and Amanda Potts, Labelling people with disability in Australian newspapers
Agnes Bodis, Studying abroad is amazing, or is it?

In May, I had the privilege to spend a month as a visiting fellow at the Passau International Centre for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies (PICAIS). During this time, I spoke with the online magazine of Passau University about linguistic diversity and democracy.

Four years after the Persian translation, May also saw the publication of the Arabic translation of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. Translated by Dr Abdulrahman Alfahad, it was published as التنوع اللغوي والعدالة الاجتماعية by King Saud University Press.

June-July

Xingxing Yu, Nashid Nigar, Qi Qian, Translanguaging the English language curriculum in Tibet [Chinese translation]
Event: Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia. A recording of this talk by Dr Alexandra Grey for the Linguistic Justice Society is available here.

The June highlight was the International Symposium of Bilingualism (ISB 14) hosted at Macquarie University. A recording of Ingrid Piller’s keynote lecture is available here. It was a special pleasure to welcome so many of our international colleagues to Macquarie University, particularly fellow members the Next Generation Literacies Network.

The conference also offered an opportunity to interview key international scholars about their research, which we published as part of our lose series Chats in Linguistic Diversity.

Hanna Torsh, Linguistic diversity in education: Ingrid Gogolin in interview
Loy Lising, Translanguaging: Ofelia García in interview
Laura Smith-Khan, Intercultural communication in migration law practice. A recording of this talk is available here.
Jeffrey Gil, Competing visions for the global promotion of Mandarin

August

Students created some of the content we published in the 2^nd half of the year, including this informative video about the Thai language in the Australian diaspora by China Fukuda, Choltita Mukdahan, and Jankamon Salasuta, a project they undertook for a unit about “Languages and Cultures in Contact” as part of their Macquarie University Masters degree in Applied Linguistics and TESOL.

September-November

Alexandra Grey, Linguistic Inclusion in Public Health Communications
Ingrid Piller, Meet the people behind Life in a new language. This post collates tweets in which we featured each of the 130 research participants behind our forthcoming book Life in a new language.
Laura Smith-Khan, Refugee credibility assessment and the vanishing interpreter
Emily Bailey, The Complexities of Simplifying Language
CfP: Conceptual and methodological challenges in linguistic inclusion
Linguistic Inclusion Today

Throughout the year, our main activity is our fortnightly reading group, which brings together researchers based at Macquarie and other Sydney universities, Higher Degree Research students, and visitors. This year, we welcomed three international visitors for periods of 6-12 months, namely Professor Yuanbing Duan (Yunnan Normal University, Kunming), Professor ZHANG Jie (Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan), and Ms Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, a joint PhD student at Fudan University and UNSW.

A topic that regularly comes up during our meetings is the effects of English hegemony on education, employment, health, and all facets of life in a linguistically diverse society. How English hegemony plays out in new technologies was the topic of this piece over in the Conversation: ‘Your United States was normal’: has translation tech really made language learning redundant?

December

Sarah Hopkyns, Seeing the linguistic landscape through the eyes of Barbie and Ken
Rizwan Ahmad, Is Arabic under threat on the Arabian peninsula?
Undarmaa Munkhbayar, How to maintain Mongolian in Australia?
Natalie Davis, Auslan in Australia: Fighting for a voice
Ingrid Piller, Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024
Jasna Novak Milić, Why Australia needs Croatian Studies. Recording of one of the keynotes at the Linguistic Inclusion Today

This stimulating and engaging day with 50 attendees allowed us to close the year on a high note

Happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year!

Previous annual reports

For an even deeper trip down memory lane, here is the list of our full archives:

Why Australia needs Croatian Studies

Ingrid Piller — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 03:20:12 +0000

Attendees at “Linguistic Inclusion Today” workshop pose for a group photo

There is only one Australian university that has a program in Croatian Studies: Macquarie University. A few weeks ago, the University proposed to disestablish this program, along with four other language programs, citing low enrollment numbers, expected advances in language technologies that would make language learning redundant, and a strategic shift to generic cultural competence focused on Asia.

Against this background, we explored the role of languages in Australian higher education at last week’s Linguistic Inclusion Today workshop.

In a powerful keynote the director of the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie, Dr Jasna Novak Milić, explored the role of Croatian Studies in Australia.

The lecture clearly identifies the academic, community, and socio-cultural benefits of a “small” languages program in Australian higher education. Since its founding in 1983, Croatian Studies at Macquarie has built a strong model for a university language program that is closely integrated with the Croatian community in Australia and also has deep international ties.

The curricular and funding model created by Croatian Studies at Macquarie University provides excellent language education in a language that is both learned as heritage and international language. Additionally, it also has the potential to serve as a template of a successful university-community partnership for other languages within Australia’s multicultural fabric.

Ultimately, the question is not why we need a Croatian Studies program at an Australian university. The answer to that question is abundantly clear. The real question should be why we would consider destroying something that is so valuable to so many people.

Ingrid Piller – Language on the Move

New Year’s Visit

Gong Xi Fa Cai! All good wishes for the Year of the Snake!

References

Language on the Move 2024

Keep in touch!

December

November

October

September

August

July

June

May

April

March

February

January

Previous annual reports

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2025

January: The Politics of Academic Reading

February: Global Communication Platform WhatsApp

March: How to Free a Jinn

April: Life in a New Language

May: Judging Refugees

June: Wordslut

July: Inspector Singh

August: Speech and the City

September: Multilingual Crisis Communication

October: Critical Sociolinguistics

November: Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples

December: Language Discordant Social Work

Linguistic diversity as a bureaucratic challenge

Further reading

Transcript (coming soon)

Migration, constraints, and suffering

Call for papers

Reference

Related content

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 18/10/2024)

Are language technologies counterproductive to learning?

Has ChatGPT ruined writing practice?

Machine writing and bad human writing now look the same

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

Translation as a bridge to English writing?

Grammar checkers, suggested phrasing, and auto-complete

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

AILA 2024 in Kuala Lumpur: Day 3 Highlights

Southern Epistemologies

Real-life catch-ups

Korean translation of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice

And a bit of nerdy linguistics conferencing fun:

The Rise of English

References

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 30/05/2024)

History of Modern Linguistics

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 12/04/2024)

40 years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University

Related resources

Interpreting service provision is good value for money

Further reading

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick)

Language on the Move – the podcast

Language on the Move has launched a podcast

Check out our first episode: Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism

Feedback, please!

In case you are not familiar with the New Books Network (NBN), check out our new partner:

Legacies of the Next Generation Literacies Network

Network of networks

Focusing linguistic diversity and social participation

A strong legacy of capacity building

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

Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism

Edited transcript below

Can you tell us about the story behind Multilingualism and history?

How is Multilingualism and History structured? What topics are being addressed and who are the contributors?

How did we get the history of multilingualism wrong?

Let’s talk a bit more about amnesia and ignorance pacts.

Where do data about past multilingualism come from and what methods do we use in the study of historical multilingualism?

What do ghost signs tell us about past multilingualism?