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Language politics

Advocating for linguistic diversity

By May 17, 2019June 6th, 20196 Comments4 min read6,598 views

Linguistic diversity is a demographic reality, as Dr Alexandra Grey pointed out in her presentation

This week, Professor Lisa Lim and her colleagues from Sydney University’ School of Languages and Cultures brought together researchers from Sydney and Hong Kong to examine heritage languages in urban multilingual diaspora. The many diverse perspectives and research projects presented at the symposium served to reinforce the fact that, in Australia as elsewhere, linguistic diversity is a demographic reality.

At the same time, the presenters stressed that multilingualism and language learning are not widely valued. Language learning and maintenance are, by and large, considered private concerns that are the responsibility of families. By contrast, to society at large, they seem of limited benefit. At best, heritage languages are the object of benign neglect and haphazard policy efforts; at worst, they are actively suppressed.

How can we change that situation? Is the linguist’s conviction that linguistic diversity is inherently a good thing enough to make a claim on scarce societal resources to be devoted to language teaching and multilingual service provision?

The answer is patently no.

For us as linguists, this means that greater effort is needed to provide convincing answers as to why language teaching matters and why services should be provided in languages other than English (or the dominant language, to put it more generally). We can only do so if we highlight the social consequences of linguistic diversity. How do specific language regimes constrain or enable access to social goods such as education, employment, healthcare, or welfare?

Only where we can show that language loss is connected to social injustice or that language learning contributes to the social good, can we make legitimate claims on the body politic and lobby for changes in language policy.

Language is deeply intertwined with who we are, and the symposium’s focus on ancestry necessarily trained the eye on the family. Focusing on heritage means that we are likely to ask questions about our past and where we come from. However, as families and individuals we have responsibilities both to the past and the future.

Some Hong Kong parents prefer to speak English to their children, as Professor Virginia Yip has found

Parents strive to maintain ancestral languages so that children can communicate with grandparents and remain connected with their country of origin. At the same time, they are guided by future-oriented considerations, such as which languages can be expected to be most beneficial to children’s future careers. In Hong Kong, for instance, calculations of future benefit motivate parents to switch to English as family language.

The dichotomy between English and Chinese is artificial, of course, and bilingualism provides a ready means to honor families’ responsibilities both to the past and the future.

Bilingualism can be an attractive option for some families. At the same time, we also need to ask whether – in our desire to defend bilingualism against the monolingual mindset – we are not celebrating bilingual parenting a bit too enthusiastically, creating new barriers along the way. Bilingual parenting in the absence of strong institutional support, particularly in schools, is an uphill battle and one that requires significant resources to succeed.

There is an increasing body of evidence that parents want bilingualism for their children. However, wanting to raise bilingual children is not enough to do so. For us as researchers, this tension might mean that it is time to turn our attention away from battling the monolingual mindset to actually helping to build an infrastructure that makes bilingualism and language learning a realistic option for all parents, irrespective of whether they can afford to pay for private school attendance, are willing and able to give up their Saturdays for community school attendance, or decide to prioritize full-time parenting for maximum minority-language input over paid employment.

If we agree that bilingualism is not only the private responsibility of families but requires a whole-of-society commitment and effort, this inevitably raises the question of limited resources. In the Hong Kong example, the choice is not actually between English monolingualism and English-Chinese bilingualism but between Cantonese, Mandarin, English, a variety of combinations, and, for an increasing number of families, a wealth of other languages. In Australia, over 300 different languages are spoken.

Can and should we treat all these languages as equal when it comes to language teaching and multilingual service provision?

Linguists tend to shy away from the question of hierarchies – the equality of all languages is a fundamental tenet of our discipline. This means that, by and large, we are not very good at countering the obvious truth of the argument that it is impossible to treat all languages equally in schools and public service provision. I suggest we need to start asking some uncomfortable questions in order to be able to advocate for positive change.

Again, this means we need to shift our attention from language to social impact: what kinds of language policies have the most positive outcomes not in terms of language but in terms of social and family cohesion? In other words, we need a social justice approach to linguistic diversity.

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Ingrid Piller

Author Ingrid Piller

Dr Ingrid Piller, FAHA, is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research expertise is in bilingual education, intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization.

More posts by Ingrid Piller

Join the discussion 6 Comments

  • Maria Mikaela Henson says:

    This article is thought-provoking especially, right now that most of the present schools or leaders in the country that are leading the Department of Education focus on using one language as a medium of instruction that may contribute to monolingualism. Meanwhile, some people in the household are compelled to utilize English as their language at home for economic needs which may result in the deterioration of the native language. With it, both the educational system and household fail to recognize that a native language is crucial to the development of a child and that speaking the native language entails one’s culture.

  • Paul Desailly says:

    Benjamin, bon jour

    Your questions and concerns mirror those of Japan’s rep at the League of Nations * who did become one of its Under Secretaries. His visage to this day honours the 10,000 yen bank note, i.e. the incorruptible Quaker and exponent of Bushido – Count Inazo Nitobe:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_on_Intellectual_Cooperation (ICIC)

    In this famous photo at table with a youngish Einstein et al (uncommonly absent is Marie Curie, the only woman on the LN’s Language Committee) Inazo appears detached, as in deflated, in the wake of expounding galore on the part of venal academics engaged by the Poincare government to undermine the League’s revolutionary language policy adopted because of WW1’s carnage. Their objective, successfully undertaken until WW2, was to prop up, at the expense of Esperanto, the euphonic French tongue, as the world’s universal language of diplomacy and culture. Deja vu, mon ami.

    On outcomes of language pedagogy in China and Japan for a zillion kids struggling with English in expensive schools for three generations since 1945

    It’s the same big business hegemony and identically untenable language policy as it ever was in Paris and Geneva, in that Washington, London, Ottawa and Canberra vociferously promote at the United Nations, courtesy of gifted and relatively rare linguists in that organisation’s massive bureaucracy, the absurdly difficult language of Shakespeare. For the parliaments of the world to change today’s language order in favour of an easy auxlang with no colonial-imperial baggage, no weird idiomatic expressions impossible for the masses to absorb, no undecipherable accents and so on, the thought of more conflict as the catalyst for burying Babel is such an unconscionable avenue that Einstein joked about WW4 (sic) being fought with sticks and stones.

    At that time of opportunity lost during the birth of the age of consumerism, albeit three wise and kindly voices are strong and in favour of Esperanto at the ICIC’s investigative Committee, on which the language of Voltaire was dominant, the roar of the 1920’s drowns out Curie, Einstein and Nitobe. History repeats? The historic photo above seems to portray Inazo not au fait, not au courant or en accord vis-à-vis his ultra-famous Franco-phonic colleagues at the conference table lapping up the Franco frame-up.

    * Though the Japanese were the ANZAC’s allies in WW1, Tokyo was none too impressed with the treatment meted out at Versailles by Australia’s bombastically racist Prime Minister Billy Hughes. As the heads of the allied powers convene for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 it’s soon apparent that they are not on the same page. That the leaders’ pages were voiced in three separate European tongues, excluding the language of Goethe which is kaputt so to speak, only accentuated their differences. That is to say, the Big Four shared no one language in common and as for their Japanese ally in attendance they grasped not a word.

  • Hanna Irving Torsh says:

    I think this blogpost argues very convincingly that heritage languages, whatever their status, are often unsupported by societal infrastructure. The example given by Benjamin is a case in point – here even though English is a form of valuable social capital in France it is still unsupported. This kind of mismatch shows how limited the support for childhood bilingualism really is. It is often a parental project which can lead to tension as parents try to reconcile the economic and social challenges of migration, new mother/fatherhood and their own personal and professional needs with the personal investment needed into bilingual childrearing. The 29 bilingual couples I interviewed for my doctoral research found very little support for raising their kids with both languages outside their own efforts, and this had implications for the way mothers in particular felt about their childrens’ language skills. That is, they felt that they were responsible for the childrens’ language skills but often felt unable to provide the support they needed. If childhood bilingualism of this kind is only achievable for a minority, then those working in this field need to ask how we can better utilise the resources we have to support the language needs of migrant families. This post is an important and timely shift of focus from an idealist perspective on language advocacy to a more materialist one; with a greater focus on languages in their social context.

  • Madiha says:

    This is a really thought provoking and spot on discussion!
    I particularly second the idea that “Only where we can show that language loss is connected to social injustice or that language learning contributes to the social good, can we make legitimate claims on the body politic and lobby for changes in language policy”, and that we rather need to shift our attention from language to social good. We definitely need The Social Justice Approach To Linguistic Diversity!!!

  • There seems to be an implicit assumption here about “heritage languages”, namely that they can’t be economically valuable foreign languages such as English. I live in France and my first language is English, so my kids are learning English as a heritage language. I’m basically their only opportunity to learn it well at an early age. There’s a paradox here: although English is viewed as a prestigious foreign language in France, and everyone here seems to agree it’s important to learn it, the teaching of English (and of all foreign languages) in schools is very ineffective, and most people in France have low English proficiency at best. It’s difficult for me to find opportunities for my kids to use English outside the home, or anyone they could speak it with except me. Therefore, the difficulties I have bringing up my kids with English here are not entirely different to the ones I would have bringing up my kids with any other “heritage language”. When you talk about building “an infrastructure that makes bilingualism and language learning a realistic option for all parents”, my immediate reaction is that this is what I keep looking for.

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