What does it mean to govern a multilingual society well?

Here are Language on the Move we know that linguistic diversity is often seen through a deficit lens. Another way of saying this is that it’s perceived as a problem, particularly by institutions and governments.

So what does good governance in a multilingual city actually look like?

This was the key question of Dr. Alexandra Grey’s keynote speech at the Linguistic Inclusion Today Symposium held at Macquarie University on December 14^th 2023. I was fortunate to interview Dr. Grey the day before her presentation and to ask her the following questions:

1. What was it about the topic of good governance in a multilingual urban environment such as Sydney that sparked your interest? Why is this an important or relevant topic to research today?
2. How did you investigate good governance in multilingual urban environments? What were the main challenges and opportunities when you carried out this research?
3. What did you find out and why does it matter?

In the interview Dr. Grey presented in her clear and engaging way why we should care about this topic, what some of the key challenges of doing this research during the COVID-19 pandemic were, and how this research into linguistic diversity is connected to social justice in a participatory democracy.

Happy listening to this latest episode of Chats in Linguistic Diversity!

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick; added on March 06, 2024)

Dr Torsh: Hello and welcome to this Language on the Move interview. My name is Dr Hanna Torsh, and I’m interviewing Dr Alexandra Grey today as part of our Chats in Linguistic Diversity. I’d like to start by acknowledging that the land on which this interview was carried out is the land of the Wallumattagal people of the Dharug nation whose customs have nurtured this country since the Dreamtime, and I’d like to pay my respects to any indigenous listeners listening today and to acknowledge that this always was and always will be aboriginal land. Dr Alexandra Grey is giving the keynote speech at the symposium held here at Macquarie University hosted by Language on the Move entitled Linguistic Inclusion Today. She’s a chancellor’s research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, and she’ll be very familiar to many of our readers as she writes frequently about her work which lies at the intersection of law and linguistics. Today Alex is going to be talking about her work on urban multilingualism in Australia, and we started the interview when I asked her why this topic was important to her and how it became something that she noticed.

Dr Grey: Look, Hanna, it’s important not just to me but to researchers who are still researching and were in this space before me who were pointing out the fact that Australia has, in fact, since the time of settlement and particularly in recent times been a very multilingual society with a lot of individuals who speak more than one language and across Australia a great range of languages. From various times over history what those languages are changes – aboriginal languages, Torres Strait Islander languages, migrant languages from different parts of the world and different varieties of English. My own background is in both law and linguistics, so I’m always interested in how governments respond to and represent linguistic diversity. The project I had just come out of was about a really quite legislative approach, you know, a government that saw law as something that should be used in relation to languages and multilingualism, and that was my PhD in China. In the Australian context that’s not really the way things are done, but I was still interested in this underlying reality of multilingualism and thinking, “Well, how does our government do in that situation, and does it do things that could do better, you know? Does governing in a in a good or a better way rely on acknowledging or somehow actually adapting to this linguistic diversity?” And then there was a very particular catalyst. My father was working at a local council in Sydney, and he brought home (because he just knows of my general interest in posters) that they’d made, had designed, had laminated all about when bins were collected and other sort of, you know, services that local governments provide in Mandarin. And I thought to myself, “Ah!”. You know, that’s clearly not the only local council in Australia doing this, but equally not all local councils are doing that, and in the past local councils were not necessarily doing that. What’s driving that sort of decision-making in government? And so I started thinking to myself, “ Well, is that coming just from the grassroots or from pressure people are putting on local government or requests they’re making in that sort of interactive politics, or is it coming from some sort of rule or some sort of rights-based approach that is, if you like, more top-down that’s directing decision-makers to think about linguistic diversity?”. And I proposed a project about essentially that question to Sydney law school. They had a sort of, as it turned out, one-off postgraduate research funding opportunity, and they liked this question too. So I took it up, and I framed it really around that bigger question that I’ve just articulated – what is the framework of rights or rules that might be influencing decision-makers within Australian governments, so at state and federal level, to tailor their approach for a linguistically diverse public? And that’s still a bit of a broad question, so I had to focus on specific jurisdictions, and I focused then also on mass communications from government departments. Of course, there might be other ways that governments respond to that linguistic diversity too, but in a way, thinking back to those local council posters, I was still thinking, “Well, you know, there’s not a lot of documentation or research for investigation going on but clearly they’re changing practices with those mass communications, so let’s have a look.”

Dr Torsh: I’m really interested in what you said about the different approaches between China and Australia, and out of your PhD research what were some of the key differences that you can think about between those two different approaches to multilingualism?

Dr Grey: Look, I can probably say three things, and these are all structural things, and so I will preface them with a caveat that those structures don’t necessarily work the way you might think, or they work differently in different practice. But three structural differences: First of all, there are officially-recognised minority languages in China. Not just one, but many. Secondly, there is a constitutionally right to use and develop minority languages. The Australian constitution says nothing about languages, doesn’t say anything about English either, says nothing about languages at all in terms of recognition of official status or use or language rights. The third difference is that in China, linked to this idea of official minority language and official minority groups, there are counties, cities, prefectures, regions which have nominally, at least, a legal autonomous structure. And that is not unique to China, and it’s not even unique to, if you like, similar countries. It comes out of a Soviet model. For instances, I understand also Spain had developed autonomous regions in the 20^th century. So there was, if you like, a mode of thinking that was not unique to China. But it’s definitely not something that was imported into the Australian context. And there are reasons for that to do with culture and our culture of, if you like, adherence to English as a dominant language, maybe a sense of the need for a unifying language and a unifying ethnicity. But there are also legal structure reasons. Australia is a federation, so each state has a very high level of legal autonomy, if you like, anyway, within a federal structure. And so an autonomous region doesn’t sit well within a federal structure.

Dr Torsh: So interesting. Okay, so, you went about this project looking at these sorts of structural issues in mass communication in multilingual urban Australia. How did you approach it? It’s a huge topic, as you said. So, what sort of approaches did you take to doing that research, and what were some of the challenges that you encountered, and maybe some of the opportunities as well?

Dr Grey: I think the first challenge was my approach, which was a bit chaotic (laughs). I went into the project attempting to gather data, attempting to do lots of things on lots of fronts, and as it turned out I really needed to sort of step back and spend more time doing things slowly and planning. My approach in general was to, first of all, look at legislation on the books. Australia has very good public records of acts of parliament, or what we call legislation, and so along with a research assistant who later became my co-author, Ali Severin, who I know is a teaching colleague of yours, we started assembling legislation and doing an analysis of words using search terms to find laws that dictated a choice of language. And then we had to go through them to find was it in terms of individual interactions, say, mediated by an interpreter, or was it the sort of public communications that I was focusing on? And my plan was to do that jurisdiction by jurisdiction in NSW, the commonwealth, but also say Victoria, Queensland, etc. And at the same time, I wanted to, but these are only two points, I was going to say triangulate, but at least compare (laughs) empirical data that I was to collect of actual public communications practices. So website posters, government announcements, government radio slots, all these sorts of things, and I had gone somewhat down the road of starting to do that when Covid struck, which was, of course, the major challenge. And I clearly remember well sort of pivoting the research because, you know, from my perspective at least, a benefit of Covid for this project is that the government, at the state and federal level, started to take multilingual communications more seriously. It started to be discussed in the news media, and we started just to see a lot of government mass communications about Covid rules, about where to get testing, and then as we rolled into 2021, vaccination campaigns and so forth. So just a time of a lot of mass communications from governments. So once we had sort of adjusted to that scenario and it was safe to at least go out of my house and do some field work, you might recall, Hanna, we did this together on a bitterly cold day in the middle of 2020. We went to a couple of Sydney suburbs that, on the census data, have high rates of multilingual households, and we started recording the signage that we could find, both commercial and government signage in key public spaces and the language that it was in. And so that turned out to be one of the key forms of empirical data that I collected that I collected, and then I also, along with Ali, did research on government mass communications on websites, which we had planned to do anyway and we had already started looking at websites in 2019 across a number of NSW government departments. Again, with Covid I could focus, drill down on a number of NSW and federal government health websites in particular that were really important when we were all sort of locked at home with the internet as the main source of information. So I ended up gathering a whole subset of the empirical data that was just about Covid communications, but I also then continued to do the analysis of legislation. Covid interrupted a lot of things, and so I didn’t end up having the time to do every jurisdiction as I’d hoped. But, with Ali, I ended up doing NSW and the federal jurisdictions, so looking at acts that control choice of language, and then to sort of marry with that Covid-specific data set, I then did an extra limb which I had not originally envisaged, which was to look at international law, and then international organisations’ commentary about a rights-based approach, particularly in regards to the right to health and linguistic non-discrimination in the enjoyment of human rights, and sort of looking at guidance from that space as another supplementary form of, if you like, top-down impetus for decision-makers, whether that guided them and obliged them to make multilingual government communications.

Dr Torsh: I’m so interested in the idea that there was this obligation because one of the things that we found, and I remember that too when we were going around and looking at all the signage, it was very interesting and for me it was the first time that really a lot of those language, because I usually read English, were really so salient in communities that we walked around. So, what struck you during that time about some of the examples of governments doing multilingual communication about Covid well or not so well?

Dr Grey: Yeah, two things struck me. First, in article after article in the news you would read, you know, quotes from community organisations, all sorts of sources saying, “Look, there’s a problem with multilingual communications. It’s not reaching us. We’re not being taken account of. This was translated terribly, etc.” And the government response would always say something like, “We’ve produced 700 million pdfs in different languages.” And already in some of the data I had been analysing pre-Covid, I had been seeing with Ali that information in languages other than English might be on websites but very hard to find for various reasons. And we later came to the conclusion that that website architecture had both a monolingual logic and was primarily designed for an English-speaking intermediary to somehow find that material in other languages and share it with the appropriate people. And so that just became more and more clear through Covid, that, you know, there was a problem with the government almost, I won’t say complacently, because they were putting a lot of effort into some of these multilingual communications, but somewhat misunderstanding the uptake or the accessibility of these resources. And so the fact that these resources existed or that the number of these resources was increasing, was not really addressing the problem that people were raising. So that’s something that really struck me. The other thing that struck me, particularly when we did the physical fieldwork together, was not only that you saw that translating into the public space some of these freely-available government posters and so forth were just not appearing in shop fronts, but instead we saw that a lot of local businesses in some areas, and in some areas local councils, were stepping in and producing their own not handwritten, totally ad hoc signs, but you know, designed professional-printed, multiple copies of their own Covid information signage. And to me, that was really interesting that these were the players stepping into this space. Local businesses, often in consortia, and local councils. And I started digging a little deeper, and it’s research that I’d like to pursue a lot more if and when the time presents itself, but local governments seemed to have a better feel for the linguistic needs of the community and be more responsive, but not in all cases. Like, you know, the day we were out and about in Strathfield, in Sydney, Korean, Mandarin clearly present on signs made by the local council. In neighbouring Burwood, just a few kilometres away with equally high rates of multilingual households, and we’re talking over 70% of households in that area in the last census having a language other than English spoken, nothing from the local council at all. Is it a resourcing question? Is it just a blind spot? Is it one particular decision-maker who says yes or no? What is it that leads to these very differential outcomes?

Dr Torsh: Yeah, it’s such a good question, and I think we are seeing since the pandemic more and more awareness of the need for multilingual communication because it literally means the difference between good and bad outcomes, and we saw that during the pandemic, of those communities being, unfortunately, subject to higher rates of disease and death because, in part, of that communication gap.

Dr Grey: That communication gap can definitely cause those sorts of serious health outcomes, but it can also cause the policing, or if you like, higher incidences of getting slapped with a fine. And that’s not because particular communities are more willing to bend the rules or less respectful of the police necessarily. It might also be because the types of information with the specific, really up-to-date rules – those who mainly communicated in English through certain media channels that certain people cannot read or do not have the habit of accessing or perhaps even knowing are there – that is an area that I think we’ve seen even this year a reversal of a huge number of on-the-spot fines given by police. I think there’s more to look into the question of how the differential linguistic reach also led to differential policing.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so fines that were issued during the Covid pandemic, for international listeners who might not be sure, yes during the periods of lockdown we had on-the-spot fines for all sorts of things, like being out of your house when everything was really shut up to if you were out and you were a non-essential worker, those sorts of things. And we’re seeing those being challenged in the courts and being reversed at the moment.

Dr Grey: So, I mean, that’s an area that, you know, as someone who is in a law school with criminologists, that’s an area of research that occurs to me, but that’s sadly not the research that I have the time and resources to do myself as one person or even, you know, with you or with Ali. But I just wanted to hone in on that point that the differential outcomes of having fewer resources in one language compared to English, they can be quite serious. As you say, health. As I say, policing outcomes. But I also make the point in some of my work that sort of regardless of these grave outcomes, it’s also just about autonomy of individual people being able to make decisions about their own health, their own healthcare, family, and to do that, people should have equal access to information.

Dr Torsh: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that’s a really good point. I’m really focused on health at the moment, but of course I think justice and also education but I am not a law person myself, so I often forget about justice. So I think that’s a really important space. So, what else did you find out once you did all this research and put these, I think, three case studies that you did together? What did you find out about multilingual urban communication that we haven’t already covered?

Dr Grey: Well, for the first study, I call it an audit. That’s the one that’s about sort of what legislation controls language of communication. I found, predominantly, that legislation in NSW doesn’t touch on choice of language and it certainly is not providing strong impetus for multilingual communications. It’s not forbidding it either. There are a few what are called government advertising guidelines that say that for various government information campaigns over various spending thresholds, a certain percentage has to be spent on what they call “culturally and linguistically diverse communities”. But it doesn’t go into details as to what kind of language that might entail or who should be involved or what the quality assurance processes are. I’ll come back to that issue in a minute, but that’s sort of what the first case study identified. And I have an inkling that it’s very similar in other Australian jurisdictions, but I didn’t get to complete my audit of these sets of laws. In terms of actual NSW language practices then, it’s probably not a surprise that the second case study found really great variability, but something I haven’t perhaps touched on is just the extent to which the NSW government sometimes uses so many languages. So, we looked at 24 websites of all 10 government departments and then a sample of government agencies. Across these websites there were 64 languages. And so most of those websites, in addition to English, if they were going to use another language would use some of the most frequently spoken languages in Australia, which are also most frequently spoken in NSW – Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese – but not always. For instance, I think it was at the time the Taronga Zoo website for the usual pattern, but not Arabic, for no obvious reason to me, you know, a great number of those, I think over half of those in this sample were only in English. Not a really clear pattern necessarily. We’re trying to look at is it public-facing government departments vs others, or various kinds of agencies vs others? But not necessarily. And then some websites, particularly Department of Health at the NSW level, that’s the one that’s creating this enormous list of languages, you know, up into the 60s, but on all those websites the information in English is both more voluminous and more up to date than the information in other languages. And then, you know, this might be sort of suggesting perhaps that there needs to be some more rethinking or some more quality assurance or some more community participation, you know, it suggests that there might be a problem. It doesn’t necessarily conclusively prove it. Then the Covid case study, the one in which I looked at international law and international organisations’ commentary on how those legal obligations should apply, I found there’s a really clear emerging standard, it’s not yet crystallised, it’s a very strong discourse in recent years, about planning for community involvement in at least crisis communications. Maybe more generally. So at least for health crises. Not just, you know, ad hoc, suddenly having to find “Who is our Nepali community, and how do we reach them?”, but in having training to raise the capacity of various members of that community. Of having pre-existing works and links and an idea of what media that group might consume, and a strategic plan as to how language might be used in communicating with that group. And so that’s advanced planning with community input, and that’s really emphasised in a rights-based approach that the international organisations are talking about. And you can understand why that might be something they want to encourage because it does, to my mind, seem to be an approach that might help with the kinds of problems that I’m empirically pointing out in Australia, particularly an absence of materials or very inaccessible materials, very disparate or unequal materials, and a legal framework that doesn’t really guide decision-making in that space. So I have said in my most recent paper that international guidance could be very useful for Australian government in terms of thinking about how to do their public communications better. And by “better” I mean not just reaching people in a way that is more effective, getting information across and getting people to act on it, but also more representative, building up a sense of affiliation or trust or social inclusion.

Dr Torsh: Yeah I think that is such an important point, that last point that you make, that it’s not just about the communication or information. It’s not just about, you know, getting people to get their shots on time and know when to enrol their children in school. But it’s also about including everyone in this imagined community of this country, and acknowledging that it’s not an extra that they are included. It’s not a special favour. It’s not tolerance. It’s genuine inclusion. I think that’s a really important point. And do you think that your next step is going to sort of continue that work? I know now that you are doing this fantastic work at the University of Technology. Is that something you’re going to take into your next project?

Dr Grey: Yes and no. My new project is just really commencing, but for our listeners, just sort of shifting headspace – a lot of the current thinking about indigenous policy and indigenous research really focuses on what we call a self-determination paradigm. You know, allowing people to not just have a say in matters that affect them, but have some level of control. And so my current project is looking at a different kind of inclusion. It’s looking at the space of language renewal, which is a space that Australian governments have, in recent years, made quite unusual steps into, both in terms of sort of policy support and legislative support for aboriginal language renewal. But it raises this sort of potential tension or question of “Is the state including indigenous people sort of in a paradigm or approach that the state itself is dictating, or is there a way of allowing indigenous people to take control of their own language renewal processes that might be different to different communities? And if that approach is taken, what is the role of the state?” So that’s a project that raises some different questions of social inclusion, but it all stems back to these bigger questions of language use in the public space. Things like naming of places according both to indigenous language and indigenous knowledges of place. Something I’m looking at very much at the moment – using indigenous languages in Parliament, which requires in most cases a change of the rules, which are called the standing orders that govern the parliaments themselves. And so again, there I’m looking at both sort of linguistic diversity and inclusion through this lens of political participation and representation.

Dr Torsh: Thank you for listening and thank you, Alex, for being here.

Dr Grey: Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks, Hanna.