The Muslim holy month of Ramadan has just come to an end. Like Christmas, Diwali or a wedding, the closing holiday, Eid al-Fitr, constitutes a massive occasion for gift-giving. In many parts of the world, one way to pay for all these gifts that have to be exchanged among family and friends on occasions such as these is through funds coming in from abroad, through the remittances of family members who work overseas.
In this post, I will explore the global flow of remittance monies and the language practices to which they are related.
Remittances are big business
The amount of remittances – monies transferred internationally by individual international migrants to family members in their home countries – is staggering: according to World Bank data, in 2016, migrants remitted USD 601 billion to their families back home.
Migrants in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are amongst the world’s top senders: in 2015, Indian nationals alone transferred USD 13 billion from the UAE to their families back home; another USD 5 billion were sent to Pakistan and USD 4 billion to the Philippines.
Multillingual money transfer ad in English, Hindi, Bangla, Urdu, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil
Staggering as these totals may be, they are made up of relatively small individual sums: the average value of an individual transfer from the UAE is 700 dirham, that’s about USD 190. Workers remit about 70% of their salary.
During Ramadan 70% is not enough, though, as Abdullah, a construction worker from Pakistan, explains:
“There is a need for more money in every home for Eid, it’s a necessity,” [he] said. He earns Dh700 [USD 190] but sent home an extra Dh200 [USD 54] on top of the Dh500 [USD 136] he sends each month. “I budget and save, and keep less for my needs. A gift must be given and everyone at home must get a gift.”
That it is very modest amounts that add up to form these large remittance streams is further illustrated by Zubair, a factory worker from India:
“Some people borrow but then they spend the whole year paying back,” said Zubair. “I try and save Dh30-40 [USD 8-11] more a month, so I can send more money now. Slowly, slowly that is how you can keep money aside, but it will not stay with you for long, so best send it home quickly.”
Bank ad offering to transfer “happiness” from Dubai to India
Languages in the UAE
The official language of the UAE is Arabic and the de facto language is English. This overview statement hides as much as it reveals, as I explain in a chapter about the urban sociolinguistics of Dubai. One of the complexities the statement hides is the fact that the UAE’s huge migrant population of around 85% speak a great variety of languages other than Arabic and English.
As is true of most migrant-receiving countries, migrant languages are, by and large, hidden and rendered invisible in public space. Migrant languages do, of course, appear in the signage of small ethnic businesses but they are excluded from “mainstream” commercial spaces: in the large supermarket chains, the shopping malls or the multinational eatery chains one will look in vain for any signs of languages other than Arabic and English.
For people on salaries such as those of Abdullah and Zubair, these venues have nothing to offer and just as these men are excluded from Dubai’s glitzy image, their languages are.
Multilingual money transfer businesses
While the signage in each and every corporate business in the UAE is dominated by English and, to a lesser extent, Arabic, there is one industry that is an exception and where extensive multilingualism is prominently displayed: money transfer businesses.
The ubiquitous retail outlets of global money transfer service providers constitute one domain where Dubai’s other languages have a strong presence in the public linguistic landscape. Given the figures cited above, it is not surprising that money transfer businesses in the UAE always seem to be doing a brisk business and on Fridays long queues can often be observed as migrants use their weekly day off to send remittances back home.
Money exchanges advertise their services in many different languages. It is not unusual to find advertising materials printed in up to seven languages in a variety of scripts.
Ad for moneygram.ae
What do remittances buy?
The main purposes for which remittance monies are used are education, emergencies and gifts, according to a survey by Western Union. These material uses are loaded with an emotional connection in remittance advertising, where the money sent home constitutes the migrant’s key link to family left behind. Remitting money is invested with the promise of belonging, connection and happiness.
The lives of migrants are often schizophrenic and caught up in transnational circuits where different parts of the migrant’s identity are anchored in different places. The money migrants send and Dubai’s other languages provide a link between their economic identities in their destination and their familial identities in their place of origin.
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A preprint of the chapter about Dubai – “Language in the ethnocratic, corporate and mobile city” (pp. 77-94) – is available here.
This work is licensed under a
This interesting illumination of the connection between language, remittances and advertising reminds us, also, that each note or coin is a little text using one specific language (or a certain few) to demarcate “this is the UAE” (or whichever country issues the money). Money is a subtle but ubiquitous way language creates a sense of place and of national borders. This blog also makes me consider how numeracy and literacy can be conjoined for migrants (or others) arriving in a new country; learning to read the local currency and correctly engage in transactions are crucial, early steps in the process of working abroad. This aspect of literacy is not very visible once the local earnings are transferred overseas into another currency, taking on new physical forms and also new monetary and social values ‘back home’ (e.g. as Eid gifts).
Dear Professor Piller and fellow classmates,
After reading this post, it makes me think of another similar phenomenon happens in Hong Kong. More than 350,000 foreign domestic helpers are currently working in Hong Kong. They are mainly from Indonesia and Philippines, which occupies more than 98% of the workplace in the territory. The reason for them to work in Hong Kong is money and they can remit their remuneration back to their home country to sustain their families. According to the Hong Kong government regulation, foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong can earn a minimum of AUD720 per month. I met a foreign domestic helper from Indonesia and she told me the remuneration she had in Hong Kong could help her support her family, including sending her three children to the university and she owns two houses, with a groceries store in Indonesia. She mentioned to me that the wage she has in Hong Kong is somehow more than that of being a professional in Indonesia.
Refer back to the issue on literacy, foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong, especially those who come from Philippines are also served as an English tutor of their employers’ children. Dulay, Tong & McBride (2016) mention that children who are taking care by foreign domestic helpers perform better in both the vocabulary and reading comprehension in the study conducted in the article.
Just some thoughts,
Lawrence
References
Dulay, K.M., Tong, X., & McBride, C. (2016). The role of foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong Chinese children’s English and Chinese skills: a longitudinal study. Language Learning, 67(2), 321-347.
Hi Tiya, I strongly agree with you on the viewpoint of literacy in remittance primarily intends to attract migrants to use the service, rather than shows a sense of understanding or recognition of the migrants’ culture. The most obvious example is that now in all the big shopping malls like Westfield or Myer, supermarkers like Wollies and Coles, there is a big sign of Chinese saying that ‘We accept Union pay and Ali pay’. The purpose is to make shopping more convenient for the Chinese who are major population of the tourists in Sydney, they do not need to exchange for the Australian Dollars but simply tap their Union card to pay (which is mostly used in China). To me, personally, I did not feel any kind of recognition of my language but a slogan to ask us to spend more on the remittance service.
It is stated in the article that remittances have been growing into big business industry. For a developing country like Nepal, it has played an important role in connecting people employed aboard to their family members back home. It could be a marketing strategy for those remittance companies to publish their brochures in many languages but from the another point of view, it has helped minimizing the communication gap and also simplified the process in an understandable way. Proficiency in English language will always be an advantage wherever they are. Though English has been the universal language of communication in the modern world, there are very less people from developing countries who ever could afford the luxury of learning English.
Especially during the festive seasons there is flow of money towards the worker’s home country. So, those months are targeted by the remit companies.
Remittance has emerged as a giant business, especially in nations which receive huge number of migrants. The amount of remittances by migrants to their home countries was an overwhelming total of USD 601 billion. It is no surprise that the advertisements of money transfers are multilingual even when the official language of the immigrant country is a specific one. These advertisements try to make an emotional connection with the remitter of the money, such as transferring “happiness” from Dubai to India. By becoming multilingual, the remittance businesses are flourishing even more.
This was a really very interesting article to read. Before this article i never thought that money transfer business has some connection with the language. I never thought that this business needs to do anything for the promotion, but after reading this article i realise the fact that wit the help of publicity only they were able to spread their business world wide. and this spread was done wisely by using almost all the language scripts so as to make the money transfer easy for the people of all the class. Use of different language specially helps the people from the low literacy background as they can understand the terms and condition on their own rather being taking help from somebody else and being misguided or robbed in case of money transfers.
Advertising in different language helps to create awareness in the people of all the literacy level. Last year in India i saw the advertisement of AIDS in about 4 languages say HINDI, BENGALI, ENGLISH, TAMIL which helped to create awareness about AIDS to a huge group of people.
It’s an appaling situation in both Nepal and India- the country where I was born and the country I grew up in. The whole time when I was reading this blog, the present exodus of youth in Nepal was on my mind constantly. After reading it, I feel the overall situation of any developing country now is the same in terms of its overly ambitious youth, lack of opportunities and the foreign currency luring them as any sweet substance attracts ants. Making money and sending it back home is fine. The larger question here is how difficult it is to earn that extra money they have promised their families back home. In the process of making a living for themselves and earn a bit more to fulfill their (relatives’) aspirations, these migrants are losing their control over their own lives and identity, slowly in a foreign land. The fact that the languages spoken by these migrants remain as ‘hidden’ is an hint to it. As Professor Piller says that these languages are never heard in mainstream commercial spaces, let’s hope that these migrants are not lost in the crowd or ‘hushed’ in the loud noises and glitz of a city.
In the context of Nepal too, a huge number of Nepalese are leaving their country for the sake of good job opportunities and a better life. And in return, the
families of these immigrants get more and more foreign currency through remittances and enjoy comparatively better life than in the past. They get
money especially during major festivals like Dashain, Tihar, Lhosar etc. One of the survey reports showed that this year Nepal received 48.9 % of the
remittance from the Gulf and 10 % from Malaysia. And the business owners use a number of techniques to attract the families using different local languages like Newari, Maithili, Tamang, etc. However, government is ignorant about the fact that the field can generate funds through
bonds which can be invested in productive areas for development.
Dear Professor Piller,
There is no doubt that money is a one of the essential necessities of life. And the fact that migrants are far from their families, they are working to obtain a livelihood for them and their families. As a multicultural and multilingual city, Dubai seeks to provide its citizens, residents and migrants with a convenient life of providing services that facilitate their communication with their families or even their colleagues and friends, both inside and outside UAE. According to Prof,Piller, literacy is a visual language, across time and space(2017). Hence, Dubai’s goverment nowadays provides such services with different languages throughout the country. As a result, the migrants can use those facilitated services for the transfer of money abroad.
Thanks
It’s really interesting to see the link between language and international money transfer! In my opinion, the development of multilingualism in money transfer business is indispensable when the need of transferring money mainly arises at international level, between countries or continents. In that situation, language barrier is inevitable and the idea of offering services in many languages will of course appear.
On the other hand, there is an interesting point that language and money share one common characteristic: the convertibility. The value of a nation’s currency can be converted into another country’s currency at a conventional rate. Similarly, the meaning conveyed by one language can be translated into another language according to prescribed linguistic rules.
I think that is an exciting article. Working abroad is never an easy thing to do. Workers have to work very hard and try to save as much as they can. Besides, they have no chances to display their indentities which are made through discursive practices such as: speaking, writing and communicating in their own languages. That is, in some sense, unfaair in terms of intercultural diversity that is happening on the global scale. There is one thing I wonder is that why do only money transfer businesses, not other business offer multilingual services? Do they care about migrants’ national language pride?
A good article about how money makes the world go round. I have also observed this phenomenon in European countries where foreign languages are limited to shop signs (even this is looked down upon by many) but are plastered all over money transfer centres and internet cafes which support telephone and internet services for local migrants. It is quite sad that where direct money is to be made, the recognition and use of foreign languages are exploited, just like teenagers are exploited by greedy companies that use famous personalities to appeal to them to buy their products.
Hi Dr. Ingrid Piller,
This is a great post on global flow of remittance and language practices. Remittance is something I come across very often, as I used to work in the financial industry, but it has never occurred to me to look deep into the topic from a linguist perspective. I especially like the relation that you have made on ‘remitting money… with the promise of belonging, connection and happiness’. I can resonate with this relation as there are many foreign workers (in Malaysia) who eagerly remit money back to their home country as soon as they receive their salary, and most often than not they go through money changers who are Western Union linked rather than financial providers (the Big Four) because of language barrier. Also, despite knowing that remitting monies incur handling fees (depending on providers) they still do it rather often. Merely because similarly to Abdullah, there is a need for money, it is a necessity (not just during festivities but for day-to-day basis). It’s interesting to note that despite the differences in language practice, remittance around the world is made possible.
Regards,
Jay Mi
Hi Jay Mi,
We share a lot about this article though I do not have any experience in financial industry as you do. The thing I find interesting the most when reading the article is that we may notice the presence of mulitingualsim in money transfer business, but we hardly see it from the perspectives as what Prof. Ingrid has made about how ‘remittance makes the world go round’. I have many friends who used to work overseas and from their stories I could understand what the ‘link’ is as well as how happy they were whenever they remiited something back to their families. Before I read the article, I thoght that business was not for me to read. But thanks to it, I’ve learnt that I could do it.