Nativeness: The curse and blessings of genes, geography and cadence=Guest post=

by Ng Wan Qing Jessie

I am of Chinese descent, with dark hair and eyes. I was born in Singapore, raised in a trilingual family. My parents spoke to each other in their respective ‘dialects’ – Teochew and Hokkien, and spoke to us in Mandarin. A large part of my childhood revolved around these three languages, and it was not until I started attending kindergarten that I had to learn English. Boy, was it a struggle! I distinctly remember how, at the age of 5, I could not even tell the teacher that I wanted to go to the bathroom. It took the aid of a Mandarin-speaking teacher to do the appropriate translation before I could avoid the embarrassment of wetting my underwear.

Fast forward to 2014. I am now working as an English language teacher in a local secondary school, having completed the Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examinations, a Bachelor degree, a postgraduate diploma in Education, and a Master degree, entirely in English. Admittedly, I have not had the need to sit for IELTS (International English Language Testing System) or TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), so I cannot tell you about my language proficiency in those terms, but I would think that it is sufficiently high for you to be able to understand what I am rambling on about here. However, I am disgruntled that as a trained and experienced teacher of English, I regularly face the discrimination that I am not a competent one.

Competence in a language, for reasons unbeknownst to enlightened scholars, appears to be defined by DNA, accent or citizenship. My dark hair and eyes, as well as my Singaporean accent and, to some extent, the red passport I hold, seem to label me as a second-rate English language teacher. In my own country, the prejudice is not that bad, although once we had a Science teacher from mainland China joining our school and I overheard people gushing about how good she must be, because she has an ‘American accent’. Occasionally, I do hear random and, dare I say, ill-informed people on the streets making comments on how their child’s teacher is ‘better’ (presumably than typical, Asian-looking local teachers) because he is ‘ang moh’ – which literally translates to ‘red hair’ and is a popular local term used to describe Caucasians –, but that has, mercifully, decreased over the years. Ironically, this is probably aided in part by the rise of xenophobia among the young in recent years, which led to the sudden realisation that ‘non ang mohs’ could also be competent English teachers.

Or maybe I have just gone selectively deaf. In any case, when I started looking for opportunities to diversify my teaching experience overseas, I fell victim once again to the curse of my chromosomal makeup. I have read quite a few ESL/EFL (English as a Second/Foreign Language) teaching position descriptions with much enthusiasm, only to have my hopes shattered at the end when I realise that they were looking only for ‘native speakers’ or ‘native-sounding speakers’. In some instances, they would list the countries where the potential candidate’s academic certificates were obtained from as pre-requisites. So far, the only success I have had is in countries where schools offering the Singapore curriculum have been set up.

Recently, I have been harbouring suicidal thoughts. No, not of the literal sort, but the semi-literal kind. I have been feeling restless after completing my Master of Arts degree in June 2013, and slowly but surely, the fatal thought of enrolling in a PhD programme has been creeping up on me. Understanding the importance of casting my academic net far and wide, I pored over my options. It was to my dismay to discover that many institutions require me to submit either IELTS or TOEFL scores, even though I had completed both my undergraduate and graduate studies in English. It was even categorically stated by one particular institution, and I quote, 

“All applicants whose native language is NOT English or who have NOT received their undergraduate education in a country where the native language is English MUST submit scores from one of two internationally recognised assessments of English language proficiency, IELTS or TOEFL. Receiving your bachelor’s degree in a country that lists English as an official language such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Nigeria, or Singapore does not exempt you from the English language proficiency requirement.”

I guess many of the young Singaporeans who are raised in English-speaking homes, and hence would logically qualify as ‘native speakers’, would now be quite confused about their ‘native language’. I can hardly blame them, because I am confused too. Instead of being defined by the language spoken from birth, native language users seem to be defined by the country they took their first breath in.

All hope is not lost, however. Recently, I was invited to attend an interview for an English language teaching position in Japan. They were looking for Singapore-trained teachers. My interest was automatically piqued because this seemed to be in such contrast to what I have known all along. At the interview, I asked my interviewer why his company was specifically looking for English teachers in Singapore. After all, I probed, would it not be far ‘better’ to look for candidates from ‘native-speaking countries’? His response revived the dying flame in me that, with my profile, I could actually be considered as being on par with the traditional perception of a ‘native speaker’ as having certain skin pigments, accent or nationality. He spoke of his admiration for our education system, our working language as English, and our teachers having to go through rigorous training in a world-renowned teacher training institution. The parting line left a smile on my face: “I do think you are a native speaker, never mind if your accent is different!”

Ng Wan Qing Jessie is a Science-turned-English language teacher. She graduated from the National Institute of Education (Singapore) in 2013 with a Master of Arts (Applied Linguistics) degree, with a focus on multimodal discourse analysis. A copy of her dissertation may be requested from the NIE Digital Repository. She is currently working as an adjunct teacher in a secondary school in Singapore, while considering graduate school options.

© Ng Wan Qing Jessie 2014

Next post: The multilingual scapegoat. Saturday 13^th December 2014.

Mother tongue education or flexible multilingual education?=Guest post=

by Jean-Jacques Weber

Mother tongue education is often advocated as the ideal system of education for all children in our late-modern, globalized world. However, in this blog post I provide a critique of mother tongue education, arguing that it is not always the panacea it is frequently made out to be. This is also the theme of my new book, Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First, where I criticize mother tongue education programmes for being too rigidly fixed upon a particular language (the ‘mother tongue’), and explore more flexible and more child-focused forms of multilingual education.

A first problem with mother tongue education is what could be referred to as ‘the challenge of superdiverse classrooms’. Indeed, in many classrooms of today’s globalized world, there may be students with a wide range of different home languages, which makes mother tongue education increasingly difficult to implement. This allows governments to opt out of their responsibilities, by means of the commonsensical argument that in any case it would be impossible to organize mother tongue education for each individual child.

A second problem with the call for mother tongue education is that it can involve a kind of arrogance on the part of the (frequently white, Western European or US American) ‘expert’ who tells people what is good for them – e.g. that they should keep up their minority language. It has been too easy for researchers to take an attitude of superiority and to look upon (e.g.) South African parents who prefer their children to be educated through English rather than an indigenous African language as ‘victims of false consciousness’ or as ‘afflicted by an attitudinal malaise or syndrome’.

A third problem is that mother tongue education tends to lead to rather fixed multilingual education systems, because politicians, policy-makers and teachers often rely on a discourse of ethnolinguistic essentialism in attributing a ‘mother tongue’ to the schoolchildren. In many cases, however, attribution of a single mother tongue involves at least a simplification of an increasingly complex multilingual reality. The problem is that ‘mother tongue’ is a politicized concept, and hence not the best one for a pedagogical approach to be based upon.

There is therefore a need to move from rather fixed mother tongue education programmes to more flexible multilingual education. While mother tongue education tends to be focused on the standard variety (the ‘mother tongue’) ascribed on the basis of children’s perceived ethnicity, flexible multilingual education builds upon children’s actual home linguistic varieties, upon the whole of their multilingual repertoires including non-standard varieties, urban vernaculars, etc. Moreover, while mother tongue education tends to provide delayed access to a global language such as English, flexible multilingual education prefers very gradual shifts between local and global languages from an early stage (at least for children with multilingual repertoires).

Furthermore, there is a key difference in the primary aims of flexible multilingual education, as opposed to mother tongue education. The latter is often concerned with the revitalization of a particular local language, which is to be achieved through a struggle against the hegemonic encroachment of (usually) English. In the process, it sometimes overlooks the needs of particular groups of students such as migrant students. On the other hand, the primary concern of flexible multilingual education is to include all schoolchildren and to provide them with high-quality access to the languages that they need for educational and professional success. Take, for example, the mother tongue education systems in francophone Canada or Catalonia. The fact that the system may impede migrant students’ access to a global language such as English is ignored by the mother tongue education advocates, in whose eyes the maintenance of French or the revitalization of Catalan is the overarching goal, in front of which everything else pales in significance.

Finally, with its focus on the standard variety of the assumed ‘mother tongue’, mother tongue education frequently erases non-standard varieties or ‘dialects’, which as a result are not seen as worth preserving. This has happened in Singapore, where the focus on the ‘official’ mother tongue – Mandarin in the case of the Chinese community – involves the deliberate eradication of all other varieties of Chinese. Somewhat surprisingly, even academics tend to look upon this as a highly successful language policy to the extent that it has managed to supplant the different varieties – Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, etc. – with the standard variety, Mandarin. The same is happening in China, where nation-building efforts involve the imposition of standard Chinese – here referred to as Putonghua – and the marginalization of the other varieties of Chinese. In light of the political nature of the distinction between language and dialect, these are very disturbing policies and attitudes that seem to be encouraged by mother tongue education: only the standard variety is perceived as being in need of protection and preservation, whereas non-standard varieties are largely erased and considered to be worthless. Another example of this can be found in parts of South Africa, where some mother tongue advocates object to the use of mixed Xhosa-English varieties in the classroom – though these correspond to many urban children’s actual home linguistic resources – and aim to enforce instead the use of a ‘pure’, standard variety of Xhosa, even though this may seem like a foreign language to many students.

In my book, I explore these and numerous other case studies from around the world and show that flexible and child-centred multilingual education programmes would be preferable to mother tongue education, in that they would allow a full acknowledgement of the hybrid and transnational linguistic repertoires that people actually deploy in our late-modern, superdiverse societies.

Jean-Jacques Weber is Professor of English and Education at the University of Luxembourg. He has published widely in the areas of discourse analysis, multilingualism and education, including Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First (2014), Multilingualism and Mobility in Europe (2014), Multilingualism and Multimodality (2013) and Introducing Multilingualism: A Social Approach (2012).

© Jean-Jacques Weber 2014

Next post: Some languages are more languages than others. Saturday 26^th July 2014.

Language therapy or language tuition?

The titles Speech-language Therapist and Language Tutor name different job descriptions, different qualifications and, therefore, different professional competencies: speech-language therapists (or speech-language pathologists, in alternative terminology) do therapy, language tutors do tuition.

In practice, however, the distinct services that these professionals provide are sometimes not so distinct. One reason might be the resilient confusion between two meanings of the word language, in English and other languages. Both job descriptions include this word, although language therapists (let’s call them so) deal with overall language ability, whereas language tutors deal with specific languages. Another reason stems from both specialists being called upon to intervene in a child’s life because there is a problem, or a suspected problem: language therapy addresses problems which affect all of the child’s languages (e.g. language delay), whereas language tuition solves problems with specific languages (e.g. everyday or specialised exposure) which bear no relation to the child’s other languages.

Interestingly, the merger of professional competencies works one-way only: you probably wouldn’t dream of entrusting your child’s possible language disability to a qualified language tutor, whereas you do expect qualified language therapists to address deficiencies in particular languages. I’ve had reports of therapy-for-tuition services of this kind from a number of countries in Africa and Asia, although I doubt that they are restricted to these parts of the world. I would be very interested to know whether the same situation holds elsewhere.

Let me try to work out why this situation arises at all. Children naturally acquire the language uses around them, from elders and/or peers. These uses may not match what parents or schoolteachers deem to be desirable ones, where “desirable” means ‘standard’. In matters of language, the word “standard”, in turn, means ‘good’, whereby non-standard uses of language are ‘bad’, that is, in need of remediation. By the same reasoning which recommends clinical assistance for bad health, cure for bad language should also be sought from a qualified clinician.

I mean the word cure quite literally. An increasing number of typical child language features have also come to merge with features of disordered development, drawing on current standards of normality which are as usable, in practice, as current standards of physical beauty. Almost 70 years ago, in her Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy depicting life in the English countryside in the 1880’s, Flora Thompson saw it coming :

“The general health of the hamlet was excellent. The healthy, open-air life and the abundance of coarse but wholesome food must have been largely responsible for that; but lack of imagination may also have played a part. Such people at that time did not look for or expect illness, and there were not as many patent medicine advertisements then as now to teach them to search for symptoms of minor ailments in themselves.”

Any label which remotely hints at clinical disruption, tagged on to a child, will drive zealous caregivers to appeal to those whose job descriptions likewise include clinical labels.

Zealous teachers stand for the lion’s share of such moves, despite cautionary reports exemplified by Jeff MacSwan and Kellie Rolstad’s ‘How language proficiency tests mislead us about ability: implications for English language learner placement in special education’. The article reviews evidence that the bulk of referrals of young language learners to special education, in the US, has nothing to do with the learners, and all to do with assessment policies and poorly designed language tests. This is the case elsewhere around the world, as also reported in my book Multilingual Norms.

Misguided referrals of this kind count as false positives, where typical multilingual behaviour is mistaken for language disorder. In time, cumulative practices “identifying” multilinguals as disordered become standard practices, in yet another interesting meaning of the word “standard”: as Brian Goldstein quotes in a previous post: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” Accepted habits boost reluctance to revise mindsets and practices, with two consequences: overworked language therapists, squandering time and resources tuned to atypicality on typically developing children; and blindness to false negatives, which mistake disorder for typical multilingual behaviour and thus fail to identify disordered multilingualism.

A third consequence, perhaps the direst of all, is the stigma which sticks to the children who get singled out by means of special labels. Not just because “special” is Correct-Speak for ‘not-quite-up-to-par’, but principally because labels go on deciding our opportunities for us.

Next time, I’ll deal with the bit that I missed, in this post, in the label speech-language therapist.


© MCF 2012

Next post: Speech and language. Wednesday 12^th December 2012.

“Good”, “standard”, and other intriguing language qualifiers

We can start discussion of this topic with a little survey: what does it mean, to you, to speak “good X”, or “standard X”, where X stands for the name of a language that you speak? And what does it mean, to you, to be a competent, or proficient, or good user of a language? You can also ask your friends to answer these questions, and have some fun collating the results.

You will have fun, I promise you. Attempting to describe qualifiers like “good” and “competent” in connection with uses and users of language is extremely entertaining, in that you can spend your whole life trying to find “the” answer to these questions. It’s not just that these labels have all come to mean the same: I can safely guess that your survey will show, for example, that good X means standard X and that both mean correct X, or that competent users of X are proper and/or native-like or even accentless users of it, or vice versa. It’s mostly that these labels are judgemental – just think of what their opposites mean, on which you can also conduct a revealing survey. To a linguist like me, judgement values about language are interesting as expressions of personal opinions, not as expressions of linguistic facts, which is what linguists busy themselves with.

In this spirit, I once suggested a project topic to my class of beginner linguistics students in Singapore, where they were to survey what Singaporeans understood by labels like good English and good Singlish. The former label was readily accepted as a viable survey question, but the latter drew baffled silence. Singlish is a native Singaporean language which, according to official Singaporean takes on the matter, is neither native nor a language: it’s just ‘bad English’, a statement which is about as accurate as stating that Principense, say, is ‘bad Portuguese’. The students were reacting to my apparent ignorance in attempting to collocate an adjective like “good” with something that is as inherently “bad” as Singlish. So I decided to speak some Singlish, and the students again stared blankly at me – those who did not burst out laughing, that is. “That is not Singlish!”, some of them finally giggled. “It is”, I insisted, “it’s bad Singlish.” I think I was able to drive my point home, because the discussion of their survey results on both questions turned out to be extremely interesting.

The thing is that some uses of language have become associated with prestige, another judgemental label which has nothing to do with linguistic facts, and thereby assumed as the only “proper” uses of language. This is why standardised varieties of different languages also became synonymous with the labels identifying those languages by name, sometimes in ways that users of those languages find it hard to recognise, let alone implement in their everyday life.

What users of X do use, that fails to meet “the” standard X, is thus dubbed bad X, or improper X, or accented X. Multilingual mixes, that I’ve addressed several times before, are a favoured target of language guardians. But monolingual uses are fair game too, whether in grammar, prosody or vocabulary. So-called “contracted” forms (another intriguing label to which I’ll come back soon), for example, like aren’t and they’re, are also bad language, and so is what many of us call “slang”, a word which we often use even without knowing exactly what it means (yet again), but to which we nevertheless attribute overall negative connotations. You can do another survey, to check out what it means to say “That’s slang”. But if you do, don’t tell your informants about this newly published book, titled precisely Slang. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but its subtitle, The people’s poetry, and a look inside seemed to me to show that Michael Adams agrees with my definition of what lingualism is all about: it’s about what people do with their languages.

Persuasions and practices based on ill-defined judgemental labels don’t help us understand what’s going on and what’s required in language learning, for children and adults alike. They merely create the illusion that the labellers know what they’re talking about, which is probably the reason why they go on impacting language education policies. The articles collected in Multilingual, Globalizing Asia. Implications for Policy and Education give an appreciation of current language policies, in multilingual Asia. And Rosina Lippi-Green’s book, English with an Accent. Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, explains the role played by policy makers, schooling and even Disney cartoons in perpetuating myths about language uses as tenets of what she calls “standard language ideology”.

In particular, such persuasions and practices have little to do with fostering linguistic intelligibility which, to me, is the end purpose of learning to socialise through learning languages. I’ll come back to this matter next time.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Vocal intelligibility. Saturday 8^th September 2012.

Intelligibility rules

Fitting in involves making ourselves intelligible to other people. If we wish to bond with those who appeal to us, it makes no sense to not make sense to them. Conversely, if those people also find us appealing, they will want to make sense to us too.

As we grow up, we develop fluency in what characterises our linguistic territories. We speak the languages that speak to us, and we use them in ways that match our “self”, as we grow in and out of identities, in time, and step in and out of them daily, in space. You are not the “same” person(a) when you’re being a mother, a linguist, a wife, a teacher, a sister, a student, and so on. We act our parts by impersonating ourselves as we see fit, in order to fulfil the different roles that we play in life adequately.

Attempting to impersonate other people may meet with less success, however. When we make ourselves intelligible to someone else, by adopting their language(s) or their ways of using them, we’re also signalling belonging to a shared home. But linguistic competence comes complete with command of linguistic strategies which accommodate (or not) to the diversity of language uses around us. That is, awareness of our linguistic territories involves awareness of our power to refuse entry to them. The issue is that imitating someone else’s behaviour means that someone else is being imitated. Not everyone is pleased with having outsiders hijack their trademark idiosyncrasies: we’re trespassing.

Many of us react accordingly. One very effective way of asserting whatever privileges we associate with our hunting grounds is to put them in their place through deliberate creation of unintelligibility: we refuse to make ourselves intelligible, or to acknowledge others’ attempts at intelligibility. I’ve had native speakers of my non-native languages pretend not to understand me and comment instead on my abstruse misuse of them, or repeat verbatim, only louder and more impatiently, what they said that I failed to understand; and I’ve had fellow native speakers behave in exactly the same way towards my native uses, in academia, in public or private offices, or wherever and whenever anyone has felt the need to assert their power over me. A long time ago, I saw an interview on TV which describes quite accurately what I mean. The interviewee (a politician, granted) rambled on about a completely irrelevant issue, in reply to a question. The interviewer finally managed to point out that “That’s not what I asked”, to which the interviewee replied “But that’s what I answered.”

Bullying takes many forms, in other words. Human beings excel in the art of excluding other human beings, because we all know how deep the pain of rejection runs, and so how effective it is as a deterrent to further trespassing. Linguistic power arguably tops the scale of power relations: your quest for membership in exclusive clubs of friends or colleagues may fall short because of lacking credentials in the way you use your languages, in the languages that you use, or both.

An alternative way of dealing with what looks and feels like gaping differences is to bridge them. There’s always a shared way to come across, if we care to take the trouble to find it: what looks and feels different may in fact be same-same. One example (one of my favourites!) is this Singaporean approach to Christmas and Chinese New Year celebrations:

Photo: MCF

It takes two to tango, in short: the key to fitting in is mutual intelligibility, something I’ll come back to in a future post. We human beings are also experts at creating intelligibility – if we so wish. If we can and do make ourselves understood in tourist-brochure places whose food, entertainment and souvenirs appeal to us, and if we can in turn understand those who provide those exotic goodies that we desire, there’s no reason we can’t do it with anyone – if we so wish.

There nevertheless seems to be one intriguing exception to whatever goodwill we choose to exercise towards promoting mutual intelligibility, elsewhere. This is when, somewhat paradoxically, the “otherness” of particular groups of people strikes us as a form of modified “sameness” rather than legitimate otherness. Namely, with our neighbours. I’ll leave this matter for my next post.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Neighbourly matters. Wednesday 25^th July 2012.

Little multi-dialectals

Little multilinguals find themselves the object of much (undue) attention, because they are said to use different languages. Little monolinguals, in contrast, may fail to get (due) attention to their use of what is said to be their single language, which is taken for granted.

Myths surrounding monolingualism come complete with the notion that using one language means using it in the same way. I’ve addressed this issue before, for example in connection with (school) language learners: questions like “Do you speak X?” are loaded questions, because they take for granted the kind of X that you mean.

For those of us who are identified as multilinguals, the different uses that we make of language are said to be different languages – whatever “different languages” might mean). But all of us, including those of us who are identified as monolinguals, may be exposed to equally different linguistic uses in the same language – whatever “the same language” might mean. Whether in accent, grammar, vocabulary, or pragmatic features, different varieties of the “same” language can be as foreign to their respective users as “different” languages.

Children may grow up surrounded by different uses of language in different ways. So-called multilingual settings may be replicated in so-called monolingual ones: mummy may happen to be Honduran and daddy Peruvian, say, and everyone lives in Madrid, with a nanny who was born and raised in Andalusia. Schooling marks the beginning of a new life, including linguistically, because school environments are meant to standardise not only your knowledge, but also your uses of language.

Singapore is a case in point. There are four official languages, and education is bilingual, in that schooling takes place in the child’s (so-called) mother tongue, Mandarin, Malay or Tamil, and English. That is, schooling takes place in official versions of these official languages, which do not necessarily match the varieties used by the children at school start, because languages, like pineapples or prawns, change with the environments in which they are found.

Take the case of English, to give an example of a language which is familiar to you and me, in Singapore, which is quite familiar to me. The English which is spoken in Singapore is called Singapore Standard English, where the country name in the label indicates that this is a different English from other Englishes which are standardised elsewhere. There is also Singapore Colloquial English, commonly known as Singlish, and commonly described as an English-based creole. Creoles are languages which first emerged through contact of different languages, for adult purposes like e.g. trading, to then become native languages, passed on from adults to children.

Singlish is a native language in Singapore, and a de facto lingua franca melding the local pot of heritages and ethnicities. It reflects Singaporean culture: Singaporean is not a language name. Singlish is as much “bad” English as Swiss German is bad German or Kristang bad Portuguese, by the way. Similar judgements of value about language uses abound in the discourse of those who fail to realise that standardised varieties and real-life varieties of language(s) serve different purposes. That’s what they’re there for. Or those who remain persuaded that lingualism means engaging in a subtractive competition, where (certain) language uses are weeds depriving (certain) language uses of rightful nourishment. That’s not what lingualism is.

Singlish is the English, or one of the Englishes (if we insist on calling Singlish a “variety” of English), with which Singaporean children come to school. Anthea Fraser Gupta reported on what happens to the children’s Englishes in school, in her book The Step-Tongue. Children’s English in Singapore. More recently, Rani Rubdy’s study titled Singlish in the school: an impediment or a resource? found that Singlish mediation, in the classroom, may well favour school learning rather than detract from it. I address similar issues, specifically concerning accents, in a book chapter, Learning English in Singapore: pronunciation targets and norms.

This research also shows that coming to school with unofficial uses of language is true of teachers too, and I’ll return to this matter some other day. My point here is twofold. First, that school languages and school language uses can only be nurtured in school: a well-rounded education includes awareness of linguistic etiquette, that is, of what to say to whom, when, where and how – and why. Second, that we, educators, must meet the child where the child is, for schooling purposes, if schooling is to make any sense at all. Especially language-wise. Nobody can be schooled productively in Foreign-Speak. Especially in Foreign-Speak disguised under labels which call it “your” language.

The next post looks at one way of integrating the rich variety of linguistic resources that we discover around us, as we grow up, into a cohesive whole which makes sense of who we are.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Mixes & matches. Saturday 9^th June 2012.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do? =Guest post=

by Sunita Anne Abraham

Politeness and its counterpart, impoliteness, are twin issues that concern linguists and language users, monolinguals and multilinguals alike. Perhaps the most well-known work in this area is Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness: some universals in language usage, inspired by Erving Goffman’s (1967) notion of face work, derived from the Chinese notion of “face”. Drawing on data from a variety of languages, Brown and Levinson argue that politeness strategies exist in all communities as a means of managing our own and others’ face needs.

What counts as polite behaviour, however, and how this behaviour is enacted linguistically, varies across language varieties. Given that different languages have different social and linguistic norms, how is a multilingual speaker to decide whose norms to follow, when and where?

Consider, for example, the English politeness formulas please and thank you, which are more widespread in the UK than in many Asian varieties of English. Failure to mind one’s Ps and Qs can result in one’s being perceived as an uncivilised foreigner (or barbarian, to quote our Ancient Greek friends). I grew up in Penang, Malaysia, speaking English, Malay, Malayalam and Tamil; and, while my mother wanted us to mind our Ps and Qs, my father found the same behaviour laughably priggish and stand-offish.

More recently, a newly-arrived American colleague sent round an email chastising my colleagues and me for “failing” to address our elderly Malay cleaning lady by her given name. In Malay (as in Chinese, Tamil, and various other languages), it is considered the height of impudence to address one’s elders (and betters) by name. So, most of us had taken to addressing the aforesaid lady as Makcik (the appropriate Malay honorific for a woman of her advanced years). Indeed, one knows that expatriates in Singapore have acculturated to Singapore English when they address unrelated older people as auntie or uncle, as a mark of respect.

Brown and Levinson (1987) discuss two kinds of face needs and their corresponding politeness strategies. Positive politeness strategies attend to our positive face needs – our desire to be liked and admired – by emphasising solidarity (e.g. using in-group identity markers like nicknames), reciprocity, interest in and sympathy for one’s interlocutors.

Negative politeness strategies in turn attend to our negative face needs – our desire not to be imposed on – by showing deference, indicating pessimism about the likelihood of a request being granted (e.g. I don’t suppose I could borrow your umbrella for just a few minutes) or impersonalising directives (e.g. Patrons are reminded not to walk on the grass).

But, figuring out what counts as an imposition can be tricky. In the US, it’s generally considered polite for hosts to offer guests to their home a choice of refreshments. In Japan, the same behaviour would be perceived as placing a burden on one’s guest. There, the polite thing to do would be to “just serve the tea”, as a Japanese colleague recently told me.

Travelogues and textbooks on cross-cultural communication are full of stories about the strange and exotic customs of others. The question they don’t fully answer is how monolinguals and multilinguals decide whose norms to follow, when, where, and to what extent, in an increasingly globalising world.  

Sunita Anne Abraham is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, and a Fellow of the NUS Teaching Academy.

© Sunita Anne Abraham 2011

Next post: Socialising in tongues. Saturday 5^th February 2011.

Global individuals

I thought of talking a bit about globalisation today, for two reasons. First, because it is fashionable to talk about globalisation. And second, because I have no idea why it should be fashionable to talk about it.

Globalisation is currently hailed as an exciting, recent development, which is spreading like wildfire as we speak, or email, globally. Just like multilingualism, which is apparently as thrilling, new and infectious. But saying that being global and being multilingual are the fruits of our time forgets that we human beings have been there and done that over and over again since we started being human beings, and fails to interpret our history from these twin perspectives. Were the Islamic Golden Age, or the Viking Age, or the Roman Empire, or the Portuguese Expansion, for example, monolingual local phenomena?

Take another example. Elizabeth Wayland Barber is a linguist, an archaeologist, and an expert in ancient textiles (isn’t this a wonderful combination of interests, by the way??). In her book The Mummies of Ürümchi (or Urumqi, an alternative spelling), she writes, on page 184, that “By 40,000 B.C. people were also carrying far and wide such new language-mediated behaviors as religion and art”. Note: far and wide, language-mediated. People couldn’t possibly be all speaking the “same” language, whatever “same language” might mean.

Note also: thousands and thousands of years ago. It should perhaps not surprise us, then, that the youthful 4,000-year-old mummies that Barber studied turned out to provide evidence of other language-bound globetrotting: these mummies, found in Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin, in North-western China, are of tall, ginger-haired and in all likelihood blue-eyed people. The weaving techniques of the plaid woollen twills that they wore show striking similarities to the ones of contemporary Celtic tartan found in European archaeological sites.

Wow!, I thought, when I first read this book. But then I thought again: Wow!, why? What were these people doing that is remarkable? Travelling, and living and dying away from what we presume was their home? These future mummies couldn’t possibly be speaking just one language either, all the way through their cross-continent trek. But what is it that is remarkable about that too? My current guess is that 2,000 B.C. news reporters would be as excited to learn about Celtic clothes fashion in Tarim as we would nowadays to find remains of an Italian suit in a Brazilian tomb dating from the end of last century.

Perhaps what struck me then was the thought that these ancient peoples were being global without access to the technology, of the electronic and cybernetic kind, that we nowadays tend to associate with globalisation. But we’re not being global only when we fly, or when we opt for video conferencing because we cannot fly. If I walk to the next village, or if I take my vegetables to market on my donkey cart, I’m also being global – and so is the donkey. 

Cartoon © Dinusha Uthpala Upasena

In Cruz-Ferreira, M. Multilinguals are ...? 

As individuals, we can’t be global in any literal sense because we’re limited by space and time – our bodies, their stamina, their life-spans. Being global is rather a matter of being not-local. Just like when we talk about seeing “the world” we mean seeing a couple of places where we haven’t been before. Globalisation, in turn, cannot mean uniformity, not least because the “globe” is anything but uniform. We can be global in many different ways.

In order to be(come) global, we usually step on someone else’s territory, usually a territory of whose desirability we became persuaded. Since territories are peopled by individuals, and individuals speak particular languages, linguistic territories are high on the global wish-list. Along our recent Western history, we had to speak Latin, then French, and now English, in order to gain non-local visibility. Globalisation thus commonly collocates with multilingualism, which is probably to be expected, although it can do so in unexpected and even paradoxical ways. For example, if you want to matter beyond your own territory, learn languages; but if you want to take part in current global goodies, learn English and forget your other languages. I’ll have quite a few things to say about these matters in future.

Next time, I’ll attempt to explain how individuals who wish to become international (or global) communicators can be tricked by the uniformity that global territories appear to promise: I’ll be talking about whether “using one global language” means ‘using the same language’.

© MCF 2011

Next post: Using someone else’s language(s). Saturday 22^nd January 2011.

Schooling in tongues

Schools gather together teachers and pupils who, like everyone else, must use some language to communicate with one another. Since schools are meant to teach you, it follows that whatever you learn in school you must learn through some language.

In some parts of the world, the languages that schoolchildren naturally use are naturally catered for. The Swiss village Bivio is one example. Rebecca, “a curious Yankee in Europe’s court”, tipped me about this report (thank you!). I should perhaps add that the “linguistic curiosity” noted by the reporter in Bivio is not so curious around Africa and Asia, where it is routine to use several languages and several dialects of each language within the same community.

In other parts of the world, being multilingual and in need of schooling appears to belong, well, to different worlds. Below is a sample of comments that I’ve heard/read in different countries, and my own comments on them.

• Immigrant pupils need more attention from us because they are multilingual.

Isn’t it because they don’t know the school language? It is clear that you can’t learn chemistry in Khmer if you don’t speak Khmer, or the version of it that your school chose as standard. But it is also true that you can’t learn school things in Khmer if you haven’t been exposed to school ways of using Khmer, even if Khmer is your only language. We all need to learn that languages can be used to talk about school subjects, before learning to talk about those subjects in those languages.

• The language ability of minority children is limited.

Isn’t it their ability in one particular language? This comment reflects the ambiguity of the word “language”, in English and other languages, and blends its two meanings: language ability, which we all share alike because we’re all human beings; and ability in different languages, which we all share differently, depending on where and to whom we happen to be born. I will return to the bottomless lay and specialist confusion spawned by this ambiguity in a future post.

• In order to boost their children’s academic performance, parents should be encouraged to switch to the school language at home.

Does parenting involve academic nurturing? Saying that using one specific language in one specific environment makes that language usable in other environments too matches the twin and paradoxical beliefs that there must be one all-purpose language for every individual, and that all languages must serve all purposes. Parents are as much academic specialists as teachers are lay parents. If they were all the same, we wouldn’t need schools.

• Bilingual children learn better when school subjects are taught in their mother tongue.

Don’t monolingual children too? Any language can serve schooling purposes, if it is used for schooling purposes. Conversely, you can’t make a language fit for use in school contexts if you don’t use it in school contexts. Comments such as this one usually come up in discussions of children’s deficient resources in a mainstream language, like specialised vocabulary or written composition skills. These resources don’t develop spontaneously: written composition skills, for example, develop by practising written composition skills in the places where developing written composition skills is deemed of relevance.

Aside from contradictions that emerge from comments like these, taken together, they reflect the perception that the children’s “many languages” are the complicating factor in their schooling, and the source of academic (or other) underachievement. Schooling involves school-bound initiation rituals, including specific uses of language, regardless of the linguistic resources of the initiated. The complication may lie instead in spending time and effort addressing multilingualism as a complicating factor.

I will come back to schooling issues in future, including how a child’s natural multilingualism may be disregarded in favour of curricular, so-called “second language” learning. The next posts deal with a different school-bound issue, the prestige of the printed word as reflected in budding literacy. 

Meanwhile, like many schools at this time of year, I will take a break while I attend to a number of multilingual and multicultural traditions. 

Happy English New Year to all of you, as I’ve heard it wished outside of the Western side of the world.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Speech passes, print endures. Wednesday 5^th January 2011.

Outsourcing language products

The question of why we should wish to adopt standards of linguistic behaviour becomes doubly interesting in the context of imported standards of language. This refers to situations where a language is used in countries other than its country of birth, so to speak. Through continued use, the language naturally acquires new features, and so a new descriptive standard. This is what happened to English in America and Singapore, among other places, whereby we now talk about Singapore English, Australian English, Indian English and so on.

All of these are geographical varieties, duly identified by labels that refer to locations. But there is a difference, in that some of these varieties seem to be more standard than others, in the Instructions Manual sense of the word standard that I mentioned in my previous post. Japanese or Portuguese school learners of English, say, will seldom be presented with Nigerian English, say, as a possible linguistic role model. That some language standards indeed appear as more desirable than others is probably why we qualify the word standard when we talk about Kenyan or Malaysian English standards: we call them “local standards”, whereas we do not call “local” other local standards like British or American English. (In case you’re wondering why I’ve been talking so much about English, the reason is that this is the language that you and I have in common for purposes of this blog. I also use it as a handy source of examples of what goes on in other languages.)

Singapore and its English are quite familiar to me. By Singapore English I mean the Singaporean equivalent of Nigerian English and Indian English, in their respective locations. I do not mean Singlish, the other English used in the country, of whose vocabulary and other richness you can get a glimpse in the Coxford Singlish Dictionary. Singapore is an officially multilingual country in four languages, Mandarin, Malay, Tamil and English, where individual multilingualism is also the norm. 

This is a sign commonly found around building sites in Singapore.

It is not an injunction against multilingualism.

Photo: MCF

Multilingual Singapore is well known for exporting academic standards in maths and science, among other things. Singaporean standards of these and other kinds must obviously be expressed by Singaporeans but, as obviously, they must be expressed in English, in order to become exportable. So, given the excellence of local academic standards expressed in English, I’ve often wondered why local Singapore English is not the preferential standard of English in Singapore.

I think I may have found a reason. Users of “non-local” standards of language are often represented, in the specialised literature and in the popular imaginary, as belonging to a special category which has acquired a prestigious status of its own, “native speakers”. I will have quite a lot to say about natives some other day, but what I want to say here is that native speakers are implicitly, but consistently, portrayed as monolinguals. Native speakers are those of us who don’t use local languages used by other natives, whereas speakers of “local” standards do. This may well be what makes these local standards both less desirable and un-exportable: their users are multilinguals. Makes one also wonder whether striving to achieve “native” standards, a goal shared by many foreign language learners and teachers, doesn’t in fact mean striving to achieve monolingual standards. Just a thought.

Contrary to my habits, I won’t tell you this time what I will talk about next time. Perhaps I don’t need to, either.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Little Perfect-lingual and the Big Bad Funny-lingual. Saturday 13^th November 2010.