Have you ever wondered why those of us
who move to work in a different country are sometimes called expats
and sometimes immigrants? The labels can’t reflect distinct
purposes behind the move, because both groups leave previous stomping
grounds to seek (perceived) better conditions elsewhere. So I thought
of trying to understand the reason for the choice of different
labels.
We could start with standard dictionary
definitions. Expat(riate): ‘one who lives outside their
native country’. Immigrant: ‘one who comes to live
permanently in a foreign country’. I wonder why these definitions
can’t be swapped, in that neither expats nor immigrants live in
their “native” country
– or both are “foreigners” in their new country, if we prefer.
The word “permanently” appears to hint at a difference,
portraying immigrants as having moved for good, whether intentionally
or not. I also wonder. Many immigrants leave their country not
because they’ve ruled out returning to it, but because the only way
to return to it and survive in it involves spending time elsewhere
creating the means to do so. On the other hand, if expats count as
temporary visitors, I go on wondering what to make of families like
mine (we rank as expats, not immigrants), who’ve stayed put in the
same country for decades as permanent residents. How permanent
is “permanent”?
We could try integration
into the host community. Maybe not a good differentiator, on second
thought, in that my thesaurus gives ‘alien’ and ‘outsider’ as
head synonyms of “foreigner”. Whether quartered in dedicated
compounds or roughing it out there in the mainstream jungle, neither
expats nor immigrants are renowned for assimilation skills.
Perhaps because we all tend to build our home even, or perhaps
especially, when away from home?
I, for one, don’t see any difference between these two scenarios
where I happened to play the role of confidante, the immigrant lady
fussing about (substandard) standards of personal hygiene in her new
country, and the expat lady who was devastated by her realisation
that her favourite (home) brand of coffee wasn’t available where
she had moved to.
Could a differential (or do I mean
deferential?) guest status in a host nation be it? The word expat
does carry nicer connotations than the word immigrant, but connotations have
nothing to do with what we are: whatever the labels we go by when
we’re working in a new country, we’re aliens. We represent a nation
within someone else’s nation, a foreign body in someone else’s
eye. Even when we are officially recognised as citizens of more than
one country, like my Swedoguese children, that citizenship is always
hyphenated
and therefore always “special”. Vaidehi Ramanathan’s book
Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship
explains the art of using citizenship as a weapon and/or shield, as
needed. It is as if the countries ruled over us, people. So no
difference there, either.
And then it hit me. The difference must
lie in our entitlement to the languages we brought along with us in
the move. Expat children attend schools featuring their home language.
More often than not, these “international” schools offer
monolingual schooling, which means that it’s fine for little
expats to stick to remaining monolingual, if they so are and they so
wish. Immigrant children attend schools featuring the mainstream
language. More often than not, these local schools also offer
monolingual schooling, which means that little immigrants must, in
principle, become multilingual. I say in principle, because what
happens in practice, more often than not, is that little immigrants
find themselves discouraged to stick to any other language than the
mainstream one.
There might be a few blurry edges here,
though. Like immigrant families, multilingual expat families
may also need to actively assert their right to keep their languages
in good working order, as I report in my book Three is a Crowd?.
Matthias Hüning, Ulrike Vogl and
Olivier Moliner put it this way, in their book Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History:
because of “the principle of ‘one language, one state, one
people’ [...], multilingualism came to be viewed as an undesirable
aberration.”
So how do our linguistic “aberrations”
further impact the way we are treated, in more than one sense of this
word? I’ll look at this next time.
© MCF 2014
Next post:
Accent, dialect, or disorder? Saturday 8th
February 2014.
