In interview: Alex Grey with Melanie Fernando

One of the main reasons why Language on the Move exists is to mentor the next generation of researchers in the sociolinguistics of intercultural communication, multilingualism and language learning. As our diverse team at Macquarie University is immensely strengthened by our opportunities to collaborate, interact and learn from each other, we thought we’d share some of our conversations with our global readership in a loose new series of “mentoring conversations.”

The first such conversation that we bring to you today is between Dr Alexandra Grey and Warnakulasuriya Melanie Fernando. It has been edited from a live discussion.

Alex has been a member of the Language on the Move team since 2013, when she started her PhD under the supervision of Ingrid Piller. Her PhD research was an ethnographic investigation of language policy and language change as it relates to the Zhuang language, China’s largest minority language. Her thesis, which is available here, was the winner of the inaugural 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award and also won the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics. Alex is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sydney University’s Law School, where she works on a project devoted to governance in multilingual urban communities.

Melanie is one of our newest recruits and joined the Language on the Move team in 2018 as a Master of Research student. She is researching multilingualism in the collections of public libraries in Sydney.

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Melanie: You have an interdisciplinary background in Law and Linguistics and also Sinology. How did that come about?

Alex: I studied and practiced law, but I was also interested in learning Mandarin. So, with the help of AusAID [the Australian government’s now defunct overseas aid agency] I managed to arrange an assignment in Beijing for a year which helped me to learn Mandarin practically by speaking to, and emailing with, my colleagues. From that starting point, I then continued living, working and studying in the People’s Republic of China. China is a massive country, and although I consider my work to fit in with China Studies, there is an enormous depth of knowledge which I’m yet to achieve.

Melanie: How did you go about navigating an interdisciplinary career and moving between different departments as a student and early career researcher?

Alex: That’s a big topic for another blog post! Basically, I played to my strengths in communicating and attended seminars etc. to learn about what was happening in different fields. Ingrid encouraged me to apply for a variety of events and prizes, which helped. I like meeting people and I often have questions to ask, which helped me build up relationships and a sense of where my research could fit. However, it is quite worrying, at times, realizing that you’ve entered a different field and that people do not immediately ‘get’ or value your research. Trying to maintain a solid publication record that speaks to various disciplines is hard work but essential.

Melanie: You must be so thrilled to have won the international inaugural 2018 Joshua Fishman Award sponsored by the publisher deGruyter Mouton. Congratulations, again! How is Joshua Fishman’s scholarship still relevant today and particularly in the Chinese context?

Alex: Joshua Fishman was a pioneer of the sociological study of language, so my PhD (and much of the literature that I based my study upon) are indebted to his work. As I review in Section 2.3.3 of my dissertation, this sociolinguistic approach came relatively late to language research in China but has a lot of currency now. Moreover, Fishman was the first major author to examine what it means to a community to undergo language shift and language loss. Although Zhuang is not listed as endangered, it is contracting from certain domains that he identified as germane to language maintenance such as homes, schools and the media. In all these, Zhuang has been losing ground over just a few decades.

Melanie: When I read your thesis, I was stuck by the idea that language policy treats Zhuang as an object rather than a practice. Can you explain that?

Alex: Policy generally turns languages into objects. Language – Zhuang in my case study – is transformed from dynamic practice into an academic artefact and an object for the archives. Zhuang is not unique in this regard. Objectification also happens through language standardization. I will discuss this angle in a chapter for an upcoming book, Language standards, norms, and variation in Asia, edited by McLelland and Zhao and published by Multilingual Matters. Standardization can create a static, abstracted form of the language which then becomes an emblem. The government can then use this emblem to signal that they are doing something for Zhuang or that they are incorporating the voice of Zhuang people. However, as an emblematic visual object, Zhuang needs to be recognized, rather than read, to convey the intended meaning. Since the government did not match the standardization policy with a fulsome literacy policy, many Zhuang people (and others) cannot actually recognize Standard Zhuang when they see it …

Melanie: Does that mean that Zhuang is widely seen in the linguistic landscape?

Alex: No, not at all. In a place like the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (GZAR), which is considered Zhuang’s historical ‘homeland’, very little Zhuang is present other than on bilingual street signs in the capital city. There’s even less Zhuang in linguistic landscapes outside this GZAR. In commercial signage it is not there at all. This absence itself is semiotic: Zhuang does not mean ‘urban’ or ‘future’ or even create a marketable emotional affinity with customers. All it means is ‘heritage’.

Melanie: A big challenge for me as a junior researcher is figuring out how to align my research interests with the most suitable research methods. Can you tell me more about your research methodology?

Alex: In language policy studies in general, and in Chinese studies, people have pointed out the cleavages between overt and covert, or posited and practiced, policy. I built on the emerging field of ethnographies of language policy, which in general target these cleavages. I took it further, adding a more technical legal analysis and using qualitative methods to enrich linguistic landscape study with an intersubjective perspective. Basically, I asked Zhuang language activists, professionals, artists, teachers and scholars as well as university students how they experienced and engaged with policy. Data collection spanned a series of cultural, commercial and campus sites: part of the innovation was the breadth, being able to cross-illuminate within one study, another part was the triangulation of theoretical perspectives.

Melanie: Moving on from your PhD research, can you tell me a bit about your postdoctoral research?

Alex: There is a lot to be done back here in Australia in regards to multilingualism, and lack of multilingualism, in the public space of diverse urban communities. I am curious how legally enshrined as well as ad hoc language policies are formed. Specifically, my post-doctoral research is about how the Australian government makes decisions about which language(s) to use for public communication and in which contexts, and how people get involved in these language policy processes.

Melanie: The public libraries I am studying are incredibly diverse. How do you think libraries users can influence language policy?

Alex: Libraries are a good site for looking up-close at how a community remakes or applies language policies. We’ve featured examples from public libraries in Vienna and Sheffield here on Language on the Move. However, it’s another step to get the ‘language stakeholders’ of a library to feed ideas back to policy-makers, especially to influence other, non-library aspects of language policy. That’s determined by people’s political dispositions as well as by communication protocols which the policy-makers may set up. I suspect there could be room for more engagement leveraging libraries and other community spaces or networks.

Melanie: Finally, what has winning the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman award meant to you personally and what’s next?

Alex: The win was a completely thrilling piece of news to receive. I am obviously honored, as I know more people are reading my thesis and that the judges approved of it. This has reassured me to trust my judgement, which is a useful boost to an early career researcher. Based on the award, DeGruyter Mouton will be publishing a book based on my thesis. The book is provisionally titled Language Rights in a Changing China. What a boon! It will be out in early 2020 and Language on the Move readers will hear more about it in due course. I feel really lucky that Professor Piller fostered in me a sense of confidence, and Language on the Move gave me lots of writing practice opportunities and great exposure for my work. Now I feel like I’ve got the skill and the intuition to go in the right direction (but never enough time to do it all!)