Contemporary transnational diasporas are much larger and more dynamic than before, and their presence can mean that nations such as Australia are far more linguistically diverse than ever. This linguistic diversity enriches societies but also brings challenges in terms of inclusion and equity.
Concurrently the English language has become even more dominant—if an individual does not speak English, and/or the dominant language of their home nation, they may find it difficult to maintain and build social, cultural and economic lives.
Ingrid Piller is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is an internationally recognised expert in sociolinguistics and intercultural communication. She has researched and written widely about linguistic diversity, social disadvantage and social justice and her work examines how language interacts with power, identity, and inequality.
She spoke with Melbourne Asia Review’s Managing Editor, Cathy Harper.
English is a world language of communication. But what is its oppressive effect, or what oppressive effect can it have, on other languages and cultures?
Everyone says that English is the language of global communication but that’s not quite true. The majority of the world’s population don’t speak English, even if it’s being taught in schools around the world. And even if people have learned English in school that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are comfortable communicating in that language or doing high stakes things in that language. There is usually a differential between people who speak English really well, oftentimes so-called ‘native’ speakers, and people who’ve only learned it to lower proficiency levels and who don’t have much confidence in expressing themselves, so that obviously creates a power differential in any interaction.
How does that play out in the Australian context?
We’ve just finished a book Life in a New Language which is a longitudinal ethnographic study that looked at 130 migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds from 34 different countries who arrived in Australia between 1970 and 2013. We looked at their language learning experiences. Most arrived with a fairly decent level of English language proficiency, because in order to get a visa to Australia, such as an independent skills visa or a student visa, you need to prove that you’ve got fairly high levels of English. That’s usually documented through a language test, either the IELTS or the TOEFL or another test. So, their level of English has been certified by a testing body, and they think “the Australian Government gave me a visa because my English is so good” and then they arrive here and they feel like they don’t understand a thing: struggling with spoken English, struggling with specific aspects of Australian English (because most people who learn English overseas learn British or American English). Not being able to have these interactions means they may lose confidence because it is really hard to rent a house, find a job or get a phone contract.
We also had a lot of people in the study who came from post-colonial contexts mostly in Africa, where English has official status and is the language of schooling. Communicating in English in their everyday lives was not new to these people. But what they found when they came to Australia was their English was really devalued and that they were treated like they were not able to speak English, particularly if they had low levels of formal education.
The Asian participants were in a bit of a different position because most of them are skilled migrants, so there’s a real difference with the refugees. We had a couple of Asian women who arrived in Australia on a tourist visa or a working holiday visa. For instance, a woman from Japan, we called her Kimiko, had spent 10 years traveling the world. She had worked in the UK for a while and had spent a year in Australia traveling around and working. She then met an Australian man and they fell in love and she wanted to stay here. She had been really successful in taking on one job after another, supporting herself, but after her marriage she wanted to build a career. She put in all kinds of job applications, but she received very few callbacks and those who did call back felt that her English probably wasn’t good enough. She retrained as a childcare instructor, but after finishing the course potential employers still felt her English might not be good enough. She completely lost confidence and ended up giving up on finding a job and decided to start a family and be a stay-at-home mum. Another issue is that often there is a lack of skills recognition—if you have an overseas qualification it takes a really long time to get re-established. So, we have this perverse pattern relating to women from countries you would think are less egalitarian than Australia, but they end up being in a much more dependent relationship on a man than they used to be back home.
Could you discuss the intersection of gender, race and class in this sort of situation?
Language never operates in isolation and English language can easily become a pretext for not hiring someone which is actually more related to race. There were a fair number of people in our study who had their English language proficiency questioned because they were not white. There is an assumption in Australian society that only white people can speak English. There’s really good experimental psycholinguistic evidence for this pattern. For instance, there is a study on when our visual perception conflicts with our aural impression, then our visual sense always takes over. This is called the McGurk Effect. In the context of embodied appearance, in one famous study a lecture was recorded and played to different groups of undergraduate students. The lecture was recorded in a standard American accent and shown with the image of a Caucasian woman and an Asian woman to two different groups; so one group had the impression that a Caucasian woman was speaking and the other that an Asian woman was speaking. Then the undergraduate students had to fill in a questionnaire about the lecture. Those who saw the Caucasian woman said things like “the lecture was reasonably clear, I understood everything, it was well organised, I had a good learning experience”. When they thought the Asian woman was delivering exactly the same lecture, exactly the same recording, then suddenly we get responses like “I couldn’t understand what was being said because of her accent”, “the lecture wasn’t clear” and they rated their learning experience as inferior. It was the same standard American voice. So that’s experimental proof that people hear with their eyes. Our research was looking at everyday manifestations of this pattern. What does it mean for migrants to be heard as an Asian speaker and what does it mean to live as an Asian-looking person in Australia? How does this play out in people’s language learning trajectories and particularly in their employment experiences? As I’ve said, there were many negative experiences reported to us.
What can be done? It’s a very big question, but what do you think is possible?
It’s a question that we really need to ask because at the moment in our society we don’t take linguistic diversity seriously. People come here, they learn English, and they can speak other languages at home. But as a public we are an English monolingual society and that kind of ideology has negative consequences for people who, for whatever reason, don’t speak perfect English, or who are perceived as not speaking English very well.
What we need to do is have better recognition that we are not only a multicultural society, we are also a multilingual society, and to accept multiculturalism involves also taking language seriously. It is valuable to maintain those languages, and not just for maintaining community identity, which is important, but also for reasons of social cohesion. If the second generation of migrants no longer speaks the heritage language that is an extreme tear on family relationships between parents and the younger generation/s, especially when the parents become elderly you have real communication barriers within families. It’s also economically, culturally and diplomatically valuable for our position in Asia and the world to maintain those languages. We have this diversity, but then we don’t maintain it and so our schools end up producing monolingual people when it wouldn’t take all that much effort and planning to grow children’s diverse language repertoires.
The key thing that needs to change, in addition to the recognition of linguistic diversity of course, is educational policy, and that means get languages into the school curriculum. Australia is really behind in that, because in most places in the world you need to learn at least one foreign language in the school system. There’s enough space in the syllabus to actually teach one or two (in Finland they teach five additional languages!) to a very high level. In Australia we somehow don’t do that, and if you don’t learn a language in school, even if you speak that language at home all the time, you still miss out on all the academic literacy. You often don’t learn how to read and write, and that is what really extends your knowledge of the other language. We need to support people in the school system to learn a language other than English to high levels and maintain heritage languages through the school system. That’s really where we need to change, and that will have so many flow-on benefits in all kinds of areas related to culture, social cohesion, inclusion, business and diplomacy.
Do you think the changes in the educational system that you’ve suggested would help with the kind of underlying racism that is present in Australia and that the assumptions that people make about others in terms of their English language proficiency?
That’s hard to say. Australia is a multicultural society and multiculturalism is highly valued, but it is a multiculturalism without language. Having the experience of learning another language goes a long way to also creating some empathy with people who are struggling with English. Sometimes people get frustrated if someone doesn’t speak English and they feel that it’s the learner’s fault. Whatever language problem we are confronted with, we tend to regard the language learner as the problem and that they haven’t learned it well enough. I think many Australians who haven’t had this experience of trying to make a life in a foreign country with another language just don’t have an understanding of how hard it is to live one’s life through the medium of a language that does not always roll easily off the tongue. I think if we had better language instruction in schools we would probably have a bit more empathy and that would be a good thing.
If Australia were to prioritise one or two languages other than English, such as perhaps Japanese and Chinese, would that have a dampening effect on the visibility and vitality of languages other than English?
I don’t think so. At the moment we are prioritising English. I don’t agree with the view that if we can’t provide services in every language, we should be providing services in none.
In school, you need to prioritise a couple of languages because you need qualified teachers, you need resources, and you can’t change that frequently, you need continuity. I think one of the big problems that we’ve had in language education in Australia is that there has been a lot of change. Language policy needs long term commitment, because teacher training, developing good teaching materials and establishing relationships with partner schools takes a long time. If you’re changing these things too often you won’t see good outcomes. We need to overcome this short-term thinking.
The ideal scenario probably is for Australians to prioritise one or two languages in the school system. That’s similar to what the rest of the world does. Of course, for the rest of the world it’s an easier decision because they prioritise English as the foreign language—if you’re in China and South Korea and Japan, or anywhere in Europe the first language that is taught through the school system other than the local language or the national language is English. It’s a bit different in the English-speaking world, where you need to make a decision related to what is most advantageous. There is a good argument to be made that it should be the largest language, Chinese, but it could also be others. There are the traditional languages that we’ve had in Australia, the European languages, Japanese, Indonesian, and others. You choose one or two or three languages depending on the State and depending on the area and then you provide good programs in those languages.
Additionally, community school language programs need to be provided. Most languages are not randomly distributed across the nation. Communities centre in particular places and in particular suburbs. You can easily have, for example, an Arabic program in particular suburbs and a Japanese program in another suburb or have a Vietnamese program where lots of Vietnamese people live. You provide good programs at the local level for heritage speakers and others.
The dominance of English in Australia has also greatly affected Indigenous languages. It would be really interesting to hear your thoughts on that.
In terms of Indigenous languages there are different problems in different parts of the country. There are parts of the country—particularly in the Northern Territory, but also parts of South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland—where we still have vibrant, Indigenous languages that are spoken in the community, and also Creole languages. Where Indigenous languages are still spoken in communities, we need to make sure that we have bilingual programs in schools so that children can maintain both their home languages and learn English to high levels. The Northern Territory had a really good bilingual program for Indigenous languages and English, but in recent years that’s been rolled back and now English is prioritised again. One thing that we know from lots and lots of studies from around the world is that one sure step towards educational success for minority children is to start formal education in the mother tongue. Otherwise, it’s kind of this sink-or-swim experience at school and they may or may not succeed. Education should start with mother tongue instruction as a priority, something in the order of having 80 percent mother tongue in the first year in kindergarten and year one, and then starting with English as a formal language, and then gradually transitioning and reducing the role of the mother tongue in learning and increasing the role of English. That’s best practice in minority education. As I said, the Northern Territory did that from the 1970s onwards until not so long ago. Now, because it always becomes a political football, it has rolled back mother tongue-based instruction and it’s pretty much all in English now from day one. That’s really harmful to educational success. If you’re a little kid who starts school, and you’re not only learning new things in the classroom you also have to do that through a language that you haven’t yet mastered, that’s a really difficult dual challenge of learning new content and learning the new language simultaneously.
It’s different in parts of the country such as most of Victoria and Melbourne where Indigenous languages are no longer widely spoken. I think many communities aspire to revitalise their languages and there are good revitalisation language programs going on. It certainly behoves all Australians to learn a couple of words in an Indigenous language. At least, to be able to say an acknowledgement of country and a few other key terms in the local language of the country of which they are part. I think that would be a good thing and part of reconciliation.
The Chinese language is shaping cultural identities within China and among Chinese diaspora communities. How do you see Chinese interacting with English and other languages in the global context?
I think it’s an interesting question, because obviously, the rise of China means that the Chinese language is also on the rise, and we certainly see more and more Chinese language learning in some parts of the world, not necessarily in Australia, but in Africa; and in various parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia Chinese is becoming very popular. That’s been historically always the case when you have a language rise and fall with the strength of their speakers. In the long term, every language that became a global language also fell in the end. If we look back to Latin, for instance, there was a time with the Roman Empire and then the Catholic Church, when Latin was learned by everyone in Europe, similar to English today globally. Now, hardly anyone learns any Latin and it’s essentially a dead language. I’m sure if we survive climate change long enough the same will happen with English. Whether the next language will be Chinese we don’t really know at the moment. I think what we can confidently say is that Chinese is being learned much more than it used to be. The advantage that English has is that it has been learned so widely by second language speakers, so English is no longer being carried by native speakers. As I said earlier, globally native speakers are the minority—American, British, Australian, New Zealand these native speakers of English have become the minority. But so many other people in the world have invested so much in their English that they want to protect that asset. Learning a language is hard, it’s a big investment of time, effort, and money. It’s actually a huge investment that you make as an individual and a society. That’s why nowadays so many people in the world have a stake in the continued success of English and that’s why English will be top dog for a while to come. I don’t think at the moment we are seeing anything like a threat from Chinese. Having said that, of course, more and more people are sort of being entrepreneurial about Chinese. But again, on a global scale the second language speakers of Chinese are minuscule, and that’s a real difference between Chinese and English—that most speakers of Chinese are native speakers, and even with increasing interest in the Chinese language across the Global South in particular, the number of those who’ve learned Chinese as a language later in life is very, very small.
Perhaps we could finish by discussing the theme of the edition of Melbourne Asia Review in which this interview will be published—how marginalised languages can be made more visible.
The education system is key. I’ve just spoken about how much of an investment it is to learn another language, and that our society needs to gear up to make that investment in school, at a young age, for the next generation. We send children to school so that they learn and that they are prepared for whatever comes in adulthood and to have a prominent place for language learning in school is vital. That’s the key to everything. Beyond that there are symbolic things that we can do such as increasing the visibility of marginalised languages such as having them present on street signs, for instance, having bilingual street signs, or Indigenous language names to mark country. We use street signs to mark the country so why shouldn’t those be bilingual? We are making some good efforts—airports nowadays often have their Indigenous name, such as Narrm for Melbourne. So that’s a way to increase visibility. I think these things also can happen for migrant languages. Punjabi is really increasing in a part of Sydney, Harris Park, and in a similar area in Vancouver the street signs are bilingual in English and Punjabi. That’s something easy to do, to acknowledge and make visible another language, a symbolic valorisation which is really valuable because recognition matters, but I think it’s secondary to what needs to happen in the school system.
Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh. Life in a New Language.
Image: People at a shopping centre in Box Hill, Melbourne. Credit: Alpha/Flickr.
