The current global order has thrown up yet another bewildering language problem: the monolingual sniffer dog!
I glean the following from a recent NYT article about Rabbis in Montana: with all the concerns about homeland security, the US has an expanding need for sniffer dogs. Training sniffer dogs locally is costly (the article quotes US$ 20,000 for a “bomb dog”) so the business is being outsourced to those who can do it cheaper and much like sneakers a sniffer dog is “assembled” internationally. In the case reported on in the article, the dog was bred in the Netherlands, then shipped to Israel for training, and then imported to Montana to serve with the Helena Police Department. The problem arose when the dog-handler in Helena discovered that the dog had been trained on Hebrew commands and wouldn’t respond to his English-accented pronunciation of those commands.
Luckily, the Helena Police Department has discovered that there is one(!) Hebrew-speaking rabbi in Montana, who now works with the dog-handler and the sniffer dog, and the dog has made such progress that it was even used “by the Secret Service to work a recent presidential visit.”
The article is framed as a good news story; even the rabbi is presented as a winner:
But the big winner is the rabbi, a recent arrival from Brooklyn who is working hard (against tough odds) to bring his Lubavitch movement to Montana. He has been scouring the state for anyone who can speak Hebrew, and is elated to have found a German shepherd he can talk to.
“Elated”?! Because he can try out 12 commands in Hebrew on a dog?! Either the rabbi’s standards are a bit low or the writer knows nothing about multilingualism. I suspect the latter. Actually, I don’t even share the writer’s optimism that this is a good news story. It seems to me that the story of this dog is similar to the one of all those international nannies, maids, nurses or sex workers who are isolated and often subject to exploitation because they don’t speak the language of the country in which they work. A basic human relationship and need – be it safety as in this case, or care and love – is being outsourced and “assembled” internationally. This global care chain is mediated by language, as Aneta Pavlenko and I have explored more fully in a 2007 paper, which is available from our Resources Section (click on “Migration, transnationalism and social justice”).
I’m sure it won’t be long before the Israeli Defense Forces or some other security entrepreneur discover that they can add value to their dogs by training them bilingually. In the new economy, bilingualism is just another commodity, as Alexandre Duchêne has argued in a recent paper about tourism call centers.
All in all, I think it’s nothing short of tragic that a story about a lonely dog and a lonely rabbi who have found each other makes it into the New York Times as a good news story.
References
Duchêne, A. (2008). Marketing, management and performance: multilingualism as commodity in a tourism call centre Language Policy, 8 (1), 27-50 DOI: 10.1007/s10993-008-9115-6
Piller, Ingrid, & Pavlenko, Aneta (2007). Globalization, gender, and multilingualism Helene Decke-Cornill and Laurenz Volkmann (Eds.), Gender Studies and Foreign Language Teaching. Tübingen: Narr, 15-30
This work is licensed under a
Enlightened by your book chapter “At the intersection of gender, language and transnationalism”, I read up on intersectionality theory. I found this theory provides a very useful tool for analyzing complex sociolinguistic phenomena. In this increasingly globalizing world, socially constructed categories of differentiation (namely, race/ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, class, species or disability) always intersect with language to produce and maintain social inclusion/exclusion.
Some references on “Intersectionality” are as follows:
1. Alcorso, C., & Ho, C. (2006). Migrant women and the Australian information, communications and technology sector–a special case? Labour & Industry, 16(3), 109(123).
2. Kofman, E., & Raghuram, P. (2006). Gender and Global Labour Migrations: Incorporating Skilled Workers. Antipode, 38(2), 282-303.
3. Lan, P. C. (2003). “They Have More Money but I Speak Better English!”: Transnational Encounters between Filipina Domestics and Taiwanese Employers. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 10(2), 133–161.
4. Lan, P. C. (2008). New Global Politics of Reproductive Labor: Gendered Labor and Marriage Migration. Sociology Compass, 2(6), 1801-1815.
5. Piller, I. & K. Takahashi. In press. At the intersection of gender, language and transnationalism. In Nik Coupland. Ed. Handbook of Language and Globalisation. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
6. Valentine, G. (2007). Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography. The Professional Geographer, 59(1), 10-21.
7. Yuval-Davis, N. (2007). Intersectionality, Citizenship and Contemporary Politics of Belonging Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 10(4), 561-574.