Language in a Globalised World: Social Justice Perspectives on Mobility and Contact 3030770869, 9783030770860

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Language in a Globalised World Social Justice Perspectives on Mobility and Contact Khawla Badwan

Language in a Globalised World

Khawla Badwan

Language in a Globalised World Social Justice Perspectives on Mobility and Contact

Khawla Badwan Department of Languages Information & Communications Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-77086-0 ISBN 978-3-030-77087-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Language diversity has been historically under the influence of two contrasting myths: in the name of Babel, humankind has been punished with the confusion of the languages. In the name of Pentecost, the plurality of languages is on the contrary understood as a gift to humankind. Political power, in both its aristocratic and democratic modes, has always strived to force us to abandon the Pentecostal swarm of plural tongues for a single language, before Babel —Roland Barthes in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, January 7, 1977

For Ashraf, Omar and Shams

Foreword

The way language is studied and who gets to study it reflects the values of an age and of its academies. For centuries it was for the mothers to breathe first greetings to the children, to surround them with conversation and command, with craft and carefulness around speech. Mother tongues. Those who were considered worthy of more textual or oratory work with language were primarily men, freed from domestic tasks so that they could work at the page. Whilst there are exceptions to this rule this pattern predominated. Equally, for centuries the academies were formed in Europe around monastic patterns, where scriptoria held the books that were copied laboriously, then printed with the advent of the press, and gradually academies changed to reflect who might attend to language in the abstract, whilst still retaining the distinction of mother languaging for the home and father languaging for the public square, and for the lecture hall. It’s only in the last century that this pattern has really begun to break down under pressures of democratisation, in some parts of the world, with an awareness of the exclusions and intersections of race, gender and class. Working class people, people for whom English was not native or was a colonial tongue began to take up roles within the academy and ix

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began to turn language over and consider it from their own subject positions. Women for whom perhaps oral forms of knowledge were important in their geographical experiences began to challenge the way language was presented to them. Children’s language acquisition came into view. People who had been subject to colonisation began to question what was meant by “Good English” (Sithole, 2015) and to deconstruct the meanings of English as a Foreign Language, as a Global Language, as a World Language, as a Lingua Franca from a variety of perspectives. The static, solid, lumpen quality of a portion of language hewn from the rock of world language which could be declared to be English or French or Arabic or Ewe or Gaelic began to disintegrate under the pressure of attention from people deemed to be of race, or of gender or of class. It showed itself to be made up of so much more in terms of time, manner of making and space, as well as its visible contours in language. As deconstruction took hold then the reasons for seeing some positions as ‘normal’ and ‘incontrovertible’ and others as ‘women ‘or ‘black’ or ‘minority’ came into critical view. The marked term vs the unmarked term showed the extent of inequality and injustice with regards to access to knowledge and to language regimes. How language was taught, what constituted language pedagogy and who were the learners also changed. From being an elite pursuit of the upper classes the learning of languages changed to reflect political priorities of a different nature, the Entente Cordiale in post war Europe, the need for trade and diplomacy, the work of international development and humanitarian aid, the growth of globalisation and an industry of English Language Teaching. Caught as collateral in these changes are people and languages, shifting their bodies to make room for languages which are shifting as people move and change. It’s like trying to chase the wind, chasing the way in which a tongue makes its patterns on the breath. It’s a never ending task and as such it is an exhilarating prospect. It is this prospect that Khawla Badwan has seized with her research which preceded and then continued during the global pandemic of 2020 and 2021. She represents a new cadre of scholars in the academy, mobile, global thinkers whose English reflects the ways they have moved and changed with its shape, and whose experiences have brought vital insights into changing paradigms. Badwan reaches into language, and English in

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particular, and like many scholars before her, from Pennycook (Pennycook, 2007; Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004) through my own work and with Mike Gonzalez finds language to be more capacious and to have greater integrity as a verb, not as a noun. It’s wonderful to see this move from a position fifteen years on from my own explorations, to see it applied to a different set of conceits and problems and for the concept to open up the text to spatiality, to meta-discursive analysis and to decolonising perspectives which were mere dots on the horizon when I was first working with these ideas. What Badwan tells us about English and about languaging goes to the heart of questions of linguistic justice and how it might be fostered today. From the hostility and micro-aggressions encountered when she spoke, to the way she was fair game for everyone’s commentary, as the ‘marked term’, with the ‘marked speech’ intersecting with other marks of race, gender, class and religion, her experiences have shaped a monograph of depth and integrity. When Badwan tells us from whence she comes into her work we have a voice which has known siege, marginalisation and exclusion and has found a gracious scholarship of tenacity and development from which to offer expanding paradigms for the sociolinguistic study of mobility and contact. Language in a Globalised World: Social Justice Perspectives on Mobility and Contact is a book to make you think again about what you thought you knew or what you thought you have received from the study of language, and to come to it afresh from a different angle. It is a book which exudes desire for change, for practicality, for a goodness between listening and speaking human beings who might find a way of relanguaging the fragile, dangerous, beautiful world we hold in trust. And to find words strong enough for the task, and kind enough for its enduring. Glasgow, UK February 2021

Alison Phipps UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts

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References Pennycook, A. (2007). Global Englishes and transcultural flows. Routledge. Phipps, A. & Gonzalez, M. (2004). Modern languages: Learning and teaching in an intercultural field. Sage. Sithole, T. (2015). Good English. Showman Media.

Preface

I have learned through writing this book and reading other books that books are reflections of the biographical, academic and professional experiences of their writers. Language in a Globalised World has helped me come to terms with my own wonderments about language and the works of language in societies. Through engaging with the complexity and intersectionality of language that involves the individual, social, cultural, political, spatial, onto-epistemological and ideological, I started to relearn, un-learn, raise awareness, protest and resist. Language in a Globalised World has offered me a space to summon and question normative discourses about language in order to see anew. This is a hopeful project: written with hope and about hope. The hope to exist differently and do things differently in language education. My interest in language in a globalised world started well before I was able to articulate my voice in an academic manner. I grew up with feelings of in-between-ness and transience which were usually invoked on the basis of language. I am Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, where I lived until the age of 12. I attended Saudi governmental schools and spoke

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‘perfect’ Saudi Arabic. At home, my parents insisted that I speak Palestinian Arabic, so from a young age I learned how to change the way I speak depending on where I was in an attempt to minimise comments on my language. I still have memories of school classmates asking me why I spoke Saudi Arabic when I was not a Saudi. All I could remember is that I wanted to ‘fit’ in. I longed to belong and language was a key marker of belonging for me as a child. During the summer holidays, my parents took me to Palestine. Those were the times when I hoped that I could possibly develop stronger feelings of belonging. Surprisingly for that teenager in me, my Arabic was subject to criticism because I was not speaking a ‘proper’ Palestinian variety. What is a ‘proper’ variety? My father’s side of the family are refugees who were forced to leave their lands in the Nakba of 1948. They speak a rural Palestinian variety, whereas my mother’s side of the family speak an urban Palestinian variety. All that I knew, as a teenager, was that my father spoke differently because he is a man and as a girl, I should speak like my mother. My language variety kept on attracting criticism, reminding me of issues of belonging, affiliation and identity. After that, I became talented at switching varieties depending on whom I was with and what impression I wanted to make; I was consciously and strategically ‘languaging’. When I started learning English at the age of 11, I thought English was English and it was one ‘monolithic’ thing. Gradually, schooling became more serious and teachers drew a distinction between two varieties of English: American and British. I decided I wanted to sound American like many language learners in Palestine who believed that American English is more accessible, understandable, and fashionable. After graduating with a degree in English arts and literature, I worked at an American language centre. I valued my American English as an expensive asset that offered me a prestigious job in a community where speaking American English makes one happy, rich, and prestigious. I never dwelled on the issue of who I was as a speaker of American English. I was not aware of that until a big event changed my linguistic views altogether. In 2009, I left Palestine to study in the UK. Taking my English for granted, I assumed that my English would not attract attention in the UK. During the first week of my Master’s course, my colleagues made

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comments on my English and how American it must have sounded to them. ‘I really wanted to know what Palestinian English was like. I did not know Palestinian English is American’ was a typical comment. A week later, a colleague and I were talking about a new hat I was wearing in a public park when a British seven-year old girl happened to overhear our conversation and suddenly shouted, ‘that’s an ugly hat, you American!’. I decided to work on my /r/ to sound less American. I returned to Palestine as a university lecturer. The first module I taught upon my return was English pronunciation to first-year undergraduate students. For them, my English sounded ‘too British’, and they were not satisfied with the choice of British English in their pronunciation course. Many of them did not pronounce the words the way I did because they wanted to sound American. I was aware of how language, identity and ideology are related. For that reason, I was perplexed by the choice of the English I wanted to teach. Can I ever give them the chance to decide for themselves? Gradually, I reached the conclusion that I did not want to sound either British or American. I want to sound like myself. Instead of feeling proud when receiving comments on how American or British my English was, I started to feel disturbed that my English was always placed under a category to fit already-held social labels: American, British, Standard, etc. These categories are always at play, and I am never positioned as a Palestinian speaker with ‘good’ English. But then, who decides what ‘good’ English is? As an academic, I engage with my students and colleagues in discussions about our lived experiences of and with language in order to learn, unlearn and relearn sociolinguistics. While doing this, we collectively share the puzzlement of challenging traditional and static approaches to language, of raising awareness about language in place in increasingly diverse societies, and of creating new understandings of language based on the primacy of mobility, liquidity and non-essentialism. Through this book, I reflect on these endeavours and puzzlements by creating a space for engaging critically, reflectively, linguistically, socially, politically and culturally with how language is intertwined, in complex and nuanced ways, with history, economy, ideology, race, as well as the liquidity of contemporary changing societies.

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Finally, I would like to acknowledge that the sociolinguistic views I discuss in this book were developed in dialogue with students and colleagues. Classroom debates, wonderments and disagreements endured during moments of confusion, uncertainty and vulnerability have indeed enabled new ways for talking about language, and for appreciating the transformative power of the language about language. To all my students over the past few years, thank you for our collaborative decreation. I hope I have done it justice in this book. I look forward to continuing these discussions in the future. Manchester, UK

Khawla Badwan

Acknowledgements

The writing of this book has come to fruition mainly through reflections on learning and teaching language, experiences of discomfort and vulnerability, discussions, arguments and observations. As I write it, I hear the voices of many significant others in my own voice. And as I begin the beautiful work of thanks, I am conscious that this work often misses more than what it can capture. Therefore, I would like to start by thanking all my friends whom I have not named here. I am indebted to the support of James Simpson, Chris Hall and Rachel Wicaksono who have helped me identify my passion for sociolinguistics and globalisation debates. Over the years, I continued to re-hear your voices and I would like to thank you eternally for believing in me, and for the wonderful impact on my development as a researcher and language educator. I wish to acknowledge and thank Alison Phipps, whose passion, activism, always inspiring intellectual work and vibrant presence continues to pioneer a path for other women scholars like myself. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Rob Drummond for his generous mentorship, intellectual collegiality and encouragement.

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I am grateful to the support of colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the warm and rich exchange of ideas with John Bellamy, Idoya Puig, Kate Pahl, Derek Bousfield, Yasmin Hussain, and Fereshte Goshtasbapour. I owe a special thank you to Cemi Belkacemi for his continuous support and encouragement. My thanks also go to the many students I was fortunate to work with over the years. They were not only note-takers but were constantly inspiring my own notes through their own research, insights and countless discussions in our classrooms and in my office. I am grateful for all the learning we have done together and I hope this book acts as a gentle reminder of the wonderments we puzzled about together. In particular I thank Ahmad Al-Shahma, Abdullatif Al-Shatti, Andrew Campbell, Caroline Collier, Derek Wilcock, Hannah Dahly, and Shehnaz Rafiq. Far from my current home, but always close to my heart, I thank my mother, Amna Abu Seedo, and my father, Mohamed Badwan, for a lifetime of unconditional love, support, care and trust. They have always given me the courage to leave my family home in the Gaza Strip: Palestine and build a new life in pursuit of my academic and professional dreams. Thank you for always reminding me that I can achieve whatever I seem to be complaining about. To my sisters: Israa, Maryam and Asma, thank you for a lifetime of fun, laughter and quarrels. You have always been there to share my moments of pride and sadness. I continue to hear your jokes when things get dark. To my wonderful husband and friend, Ashraf Hamad. No words of appreciation will ever suffice to thank you for your love, endless support and encouragement. This book happened because of you. Thank you for always asking me, ‘how is your book going?’. Thank you for bearing with me for bringing language discussions all the time. Your critical engagement with my ideas has always pushed me to go further. To my children, Omar and Shams, whose creative languaging has never ceased to fascinate me and has continuously opened my eyes to see language differently. Omar has always been a brilliant artist who is obsessed with bringing things to life by giving them new and different meanings. He teaches me new ‘cool’ words and corrects me if I mispronounce them. And Shams has continued to impress me with her ability

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to pick up American ways of pronouncing words (thanks to the TV). With a cheeky smile, she proudly says, ‘I don’t want to speak properly’. Thank you, Omar and Shams, for decorating the walls of our house with your amazing drawings, paintings and messages. Your (mis)spelled words have always been magic that has transformed me from a linguist obsessed with correcting words to an observer fascinated by how language manifests itself in our lives. With your love, joy, and curiosity, I continued to learn about language in the world. To all my teachers in the different countries and places where I lived, thank you. To the strangers with whom I exchanged small talk at conferences about language, place and social justice, your insights, agreements and disagreements have given me the strength to go on. Manchester January 2021

Khawla Badwan

Contents

1

Introduction 1.1 What Is This Book About? 1.2 Language, Not Languages? 1.3 The Structure of the Book 1.4 A Note on Tone and Style Changes References

1 1 4 7 10 11

2

The Global Spread of English: Intersecting Perspectives 2.1 Colonialism and Imperialism 2.2 Neoliberalism and Late-Capitalism 2.3 Problematising Globalisation Chapter Summary References

15 16 18 21 24 25

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Language and the Sociolinguistic Market 3.1 Principles Governing Language Value in Interaction 3.2 Changing Exchange Rates

29 30 35

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Chapter Summary References

37 37

4

Language as Becoming in the World 4.1 Humanising Language 4.2 The Language About Language Chapter Summary References

41 42 47 49 50

5

From Language to Languaging 5.1 Imagining Language 5.2 Language with a Name: Linguistic Purity 5.3 Re-imagining Language Chapter Summary References

53 54 58 75 84 84

6

Language and Semiotic Mobility 6.1 Multiple Narratives 6.2 Scale Theorisations 6.3 Blommaert (2010) on Scale and Semiotic Mobility 6.4 Canagarajah (2013) on Agency and Negotiation 6.5 Badwan (2015) on Ecological Orientations to Sociolinguistic Scales 6.6 Ecological Factors and Semiotic Mobility Chapter Summary References

89 89 91

101 102 109 109

The Spatial Turn in Applied Linguistics: Language, Place and Ethics of Foster-Ship 7.1 Language in Relation to Place and Spatiality 7.2 Language and Symbolic Violence in Place 7.3 Ethics of Care and Fostership in Place 7.4 Unmooring Language Chapter Summary References

113 114 126 132 137 142 142

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Contents

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Language and Identity in a Globalised World 8.1 Not Fitting the Mould 8.2 Languaging and Identity 8.3 The City and Place Identity: A Site of Diversity or Segregated Networks? Chapter Summary References

147 147 155

Language and Social (In)Justice 9.1 Language and Social Justice 9.2 Language and the Protected Characteristics 9.3 Awareness 9.4 Solidarity 9.5 Activism 9.6 Grievable Language, Grieveable Lives 9.7 Strategic Essentialism, the Community and the Other Chapter Summary References

175 175 177 183 188 189 191

163 171 171

194 198 199

10 Teaching Language in a Globalised World: Embracing and Navigating Vulnerability 10.1 Grappling with My Professional Home 10.2 Living with Vulnerability 10.3 Reimaging Mastery Through Discomfort 10.4 Shaking Classroom Ghettos and Hierarchies 10.5 Towards Sustainable Pedagogies and Hope Chapter Summary References

203 203 207 210 213 214 216 216

Conclusion: Surviving the Language Blocks

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Index

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1 Introduction

1.1

What Is This Book About?

Language in a Globalised World is a protest and a discussion about how language manifests itself in different spheres of public life at individual, national and transnational levels from historical, political, ideological, and socio-linguistic perspectives. Individuals do not have to be experts in linguistics to notice the significant impact of language in their lives. Think of when things went well or went wrong in a communicative task, of messages being lost in translation, of comments on your language or accent, of attempts to speak in a second language, of being denied a job because of misspelled words, of having an accent, or not sounding like a suitable candidate. Think of crossing borders and becoming ‘foreign’, of language confirming or denying your foreignness. Think of moving from a rural place to an urban city and of how language could produce sentiments of (un)belonging to the new place. Think of assumptions people make about your language based on your appearance, and of assumptions about your life history based on your language. Think of the traces of the different places you have inhabited and how they are reflected in your language. All of these scenarios, and many others, are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Badwan, Language in a Globalised World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7_1

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about language in everyday contexts of mobility and contact. This is a book about the language about language in everyday life. It draws attention to how language is used and what underpins dominant language ideologies and linguistic labelling. As such, it critically engages with ‘sociolinguistic arrests’ by drawing attention to the social injustices caused by, and endured by, language with a hint of moral censure (Rymes, 2020). While doing so, it brings to the fore the linguistic injustices and prejudices endured by language, and inflicted on its speakers, in a world of an increasingly migratory life with growing divides between the elite and the non-elite. Globalisation, migration and increasing levels of inter-city and international mobility in contemporary societies has changed the way we talk about language. To this end, a new research paradigm called ‘a sociolinguistics of globalisation’ (Blommaert, 2010), also referred to as ‘new sociolinguistics’ (Jaspers & Madsen, 2019), has been undergoing major conceptualisations over the past two decades or so. This paradigm is based on embracing the primacy of mobility and complexity (Badwan & Simpson, 2019; Blommaert, 2010, 2016), fluidity (Jaspers & Madsen, 2019), modernity (Bauman & Briggs, 2003; Heller, 2007; Makoni & Pennycook, 2005), and uncertainty (Phipps, 2013) in order to produce new ways of conceptualising language in contexts of increasing mobility and contact with hyper-diversity. As such, it has benefitted from ‘other’ social disciplines such as human geography, anthropology, philosophy and sociology and its scope is wide-ranging. Not only does it theorise language in motion, but it also explores the ways in which languagebased inequalities, social divisions and power structures affect the lives of mobile individuals. This book stems from, and contributes to, this sociolinguistic paradigm that critically engages with shaking the confidence in what we already know about language, while uncovering the nuances of how language is used and abused in social (in)justice contexts that affect millions of mobile people around the world. But why do we need a new paradigm of sociolinguistics? There are two immediate responses to this question. First, since the world is becoming increasingly mobile, we are required to revisit our ontologies of language to reflect our new social reality (Nail, 2019), a task many applied linguists have engaged with as part of the ‘ontological

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turn’ in applied linguistics (Hall & Wicaksono, 2020). Contributing to ontological debates about language, this book is an attempt to ‘melt the solids’ (Bauman, 2000) in order to develop more liquid and less assertive descriptions of language in contemporary societies. Nowadays, there are more people who commute to work; who move from one city to another within the same national borders. There are also more mobile individuals who cross national borders. Their experiences of bordercrossing are varied depending on the passports they hold, the social positions they have, the languages they speak, and the ethnic identities they embody. There are also variations in the circumstances under which people go mobile. These result in new types of bordering and social divisions i.e. ‘elite’ mobile individuals versus ‘non-elite’ mobile individuals. In the former category, we can think of mobile businessmen, academics, researchers, and tourists. In the latter, we can think of skilled and unskilled migrants, asylum seekers and of people with ‘undesired’ passports, religions and/or ethnic identities. Not only do all these mobile individuals carry language with them, they are also faced with different linguistic expectations. The ‘elite’ are usually faced with less linguistic expectations. They have a linguistic privilege that enables them to continue to use their language—perhaps English as a lingua franca— or to access translation and interpretation services without being shamed for not being willing to integrate in the community that hosts them. The ‘non-elite’, on the other hand, are faced with much higher linguistic expectations by virtue of their unprivileged social positioning. They are expected to master the language of the host community, to consciously make endless one-way efforts to integrate, and to hide the ‘other’ languages they speak in public domains, which significantly diminishes their cultural and linguistic identities. All these discussions about language and mobility are part of this new paradigm of sociolinguistics. Second, I add my voice to Nail’s (2019) when he makes the point that, ‘the expectation that the world of mobile bodies will conform to static models of states, borders and political behaviour is causing millions of people around the world to undergo immense suffering’ (Nail, 2019: 2). This suggests that a new paradigm of sociolinguistics that challenges traditional, fixed understandings of language is a social justice imperative. Challenging these understandings permits new ways

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and possibilities of thinking about language. This approach is referred to as (de)occupying language (Alim, 2019), following the cultural and socio-political connotations of the Occupy movement: The Occupy movement occupied language, transformed oppressive “statist language” … The movement made occupy its own. And importantly, people from diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds participated in this linguistic de- and re-occupation. (Alim, 2019: 185– 186)

As such, the (de)occupy endeavour aims to take language back from its ‘self-appointed masters’ to transform how we have been thinking about language in the past, and to enable new ways of thinking about language now and for the future (Alim, 2019). Indeed, by engaging creatively, critically and reflectively with the different experiences mobile people have with language, the paradigm of sociolinguistics of globalisation can produce expansive and socially just conceptualisations of language, while it innovatively and epistemologically responds to the ontological challenge of conceptualising language based on the primacy of motion.

1.2

Language, Not Languages?

The use of the singular form of ‘language’ as opposed to ‘languages’ in the title and most of the discussions presented throughout the book is a purposeful attempt at invoking an understanding of language not as a bounded, discrete, socio-political construct with a certain name (e.g. Arabic, English, French, etc.), but as a means of expression and performative being that transcends the boundaries and constraints of named languages. These boundaries are ideological claims (Pennycook, 2020: 360) and since applied linguistics has inherited the discreteness and plurality of language for decades, we now ask different questions about what constitutes language. By and large, I use language in this book with a performative view, and hence my focus on ‘languaging’. When I discuss the function of language, I stress that it is not only a means of communication but also a marker of belonging, a choice of

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being, an emerging decision on fluid affiliations, and a means of being an individual who not only uses language to communicate but also to think, reflect, dream, sing, resist, negotiate, and exist in the world. This language consists of all the possible ways of communication that individuals have at their disposal. While this understanding is aligned with Blommaert and Backus’s (2013) definition of ‘linguistic repertoires’, it goes beyond its focus on individual and biographical ways of communication to also include emergent properties that come to life as a result of inter/intra-acting with people, places, objects, artefacts and digital affordances (cf. Pennycook, 2018a). This understanding of ‘language’ aligns itself ontologically and ideologically with some recent discussions in ‘new sociolinguistics’ (Pennycook, 2018b). These discussions are characterised by an emphasis on language as a verb, ‘languaging’. It is important to note that this term is not new since it has been used as a psycholinguistic notion to refer to ‘the process of using language to gain knowledge, to make sense, to articulate one’s thought and to communicate about using language’ (Li & Hua, 2013: 519). In addition, it has been used as an ontological frame to refer to socially embedded processes that refer to actual communication (Hall, 2020). Drawing on these understandings, the term ‘languaging’ has also been developed as a sociolinguistic notion to refer to the ability to employ whatever linguistic features language users have at their disposal with the intention of achieving their communicative aims (Jørgensen, 2008). Another term that has gained currency in these discussions is ‘translanguaging’ which highlights the notion of linguistic fluidity that transcends named languages. One of the most commonly cited definitions of translanguaging comes from Otheguy et al. (2015: 283) who refer to it as ‘the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages’. What can be noted about these two terms is that they both emphasise ‘linguistic features’ and ‘linguistic repertoire’. However, the over-reliance on the linguistic dimension of communication has been recently contested. For example, Hua et al. (2017: 413) challenge the supremacy of language by extending the term ‘translanguaging’ to refer

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to ‘a repertoire of multilingual, multimodal, multisensory and multisemiotic resources that language users orchestrate in sense- and meaningmaking’. I draw on this expansive understanding of communication in the way I use the term ‘languaging’ in this book. Why ‘languaging’, not ‘translanguaging’? While the way I use the term ‘languaging’ agrees with recent theorisations of translanguaging (García, 2020; Li, 2018), I predominantly use the term ‘languaging’, with some exceptions where I use ‘translingual’ and ‘translanguaging’ to refer to multilingual speakers. I have three reasons for using ‘languaging’ in this book. First, I use language as a verb and a process without the need for the prefix ‘trans-’ which reinforces the process of transcending entities and crossing borders while arguing that it gives no regard to such borders. Second, the term ‘translanguaging’ is often used to refer to bilingual or multilingual repertoires. However, the use of ‘languaging’ refers to the social process of using communicative repertoire that include different codes and registers within and across what is commonly known as named languages. That is to say, individuals are languaging all the time and as part of this process, they draw on a range of codes, registers and ways of speaking which may or may not include more than one named language. Monolinguals, a problematic label which embodies a social myth (Grambling, 2016; Shohamy, 2006), are also languaging in their everyday life. They use different varieties and registers of language depending on where they are, who they are with, and what impressions they are trying to make. So unlike the ‘translanguaging’ concept, using ‘language’ as a verb offers an inclusive understanding of how individuals use their linguistic and semiotic resources to make meaning, exist, make sense of their world and present themselves to others. I revisit this discussion in Chapter 5 “From Language to Languaging”. Third, Li and Hua (2013) explore the dynamic dimensions of multilingual practices and introduce three reasons for the use of the prefix trans-: to go between and beyond, to transform linguistic skills and to underline transdisciplinarity to understand multilingual practices in an integrated and holistic way. Inspired by their discussion, I use the term ‘languaging’ in a way that is transformative and consequential. It is transformative because I attempt through the term to transform the way we think and talk about

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language. Languaging here has no boundaries: open, dynamic, overlapping, creative, responsive, proactive, human, post-human, and always in the making. This conceptualisation challenges the static, rigid and idealised expectations of language that are placed on individuals. I refer to these expectations as ‘language blocks’ (“Conclusion: Surviving the Language Blocks”) and I explain the pain and suffering associated with the constant need to survive these blocks in social life. Moreover, there are social consequences to this transformative thinking about language. They challenge the ways in which ‘language’ in used and abused in public discourses and the frames that inform comments and judgments about language and speakers as we live an increasingly migratory lives. I elaborate on this in Chapter 7 when I discuss the spatial turn in applied linguistics.

1.3

The Structure of the Book

Chapter 2 provides a brief historical overview of the circumstances under which English has become the current global lingua franca in the world. It discusses the influence of colonialism, imperialism, globalisation, neoliberalism and late capitalism on (re)producing and reinforcing dominant language ideologies that privilege the status of English vis-à-vis other languages. This chapter argues that the social realities of language as we know them today are heavily shaped by historical and ideological processes that intersect and intertwine in nuanced and complex ways to affect individuals’ views about the world of language and language in the world. These historical processes are sometimes hard to observe because they are contextual, indexical and not explicitly referenced or talked about. Yet, they shape and influence normative thinking about language in societies and therefore any discussion about language in an age of globalisation should start with drawing attention to historical and political processes that affect how languages are valued and perceived today. Chapter 3 contributes further to understanding the language about language as we observe it in public discourses today. It discusses principles and concepts that underpin the construction of a sociolinguistic

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market in an age of globalisation. This metaphorical market is located in societies and speech communities and strongly affects how language is talked about, what language is seen as valuable, and what is not. The chapter explains how the sociolinguistic market influences the positionality of individuals in societies based on how they project themselves in and through language. The chapter engages with conceptual constructs that explain the links between language, power, legitimacy, exchange value and the social stratification of language. Chapter 4 is dedicated to presenting a different narrative about language away from the metaphoric and symbolic market produced by neoliberal discourses about language value and language as a commodity. In a way, the chapter is a protest against these dominant discourses that have occupied how individuals think of, and talk about, language in their lives. The chapter argues that language is not all about value and usefulness. Rather, language is about being and becoming in the world. Chapter 5 discusses ontologies of language as a normative noun, a performative verb and a political marker of (un)belonging, highlighting the challenges caused by dominant discourses of linguistic essentialism. The chapter also engages with applied linguistics’ attempts at changing normative thinking about language through engaging with transdisciplinary conceptual lenses such as posthumansim, new materiality, affective feminist perspectives, and chronotopic contextualisations in order to develop expansive understandings of language with a performative view, as captured in the term: ‘languaging’. Chapter 6 addresses language in relation to mobility. In particular, it engages in thinking processes about how we can talk about what happens to language when individuals move across time and space in an age of globalisation. Some of the earlier attempts of discussing semiotic mobility in relation to language and globalisation come from Blommaert (2010) where he emphasises the usefulness of sociolinguistic scales. In response to this, Canagarajah (2013) argues against the rigid nature of scale theorisation by opening conceptual doors for individual agency. My research with mobile languaging subjects (Badwan, 2015; Badwan & Simpson, 2019) presents an ecological orientation to theorising semiotic mobility. In this chapter, I present these different views on language and

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mobility and what they could possibly mean for the mobile languaging subjects. Chapter 7 explores an exciting marriage between applied linguistics and social geography. Researchers in social geography have explored the relationship between space, place, people and time in an age of globalisation (Massey, 2005; Massey & Jess, 1995). They emphasised the compression of time and space and the intricate connectedness between the local and the global, and how this problematises the construction of place identity and emphasises the role of power in claiming ownership. This discussion was further extended in sociolinguistics with studies raising questions on the relationship between language and place, the role of language in the carvings of (un)belonging, and the continuous debates on linguistic rights and symbolic violence. In this chapter, I discuss notions such as ‘place’, ‘spatiality’, ‘hospitality’, ‘foster-ship’, and ‘(un)mooring’ and how they feed into discussions about the links between language, identity and place in contexts described as ‘diverse’, ‘super-diverse’ or ‘hyper-diverse’. Chapter 8 engages with the question, ‘who are we in an age of globalisation and mobility?’. To answer this question, I first discuss identity at an individual level before I move on to discuss place identity in contexts of linguistic and ethnic diversity. The chapter discusses identity struggles, feeling strange and being in-between in the face of socially desired moulds, established through normalising discourses and public education. In addition, it addresses how languaging enables and prohibits identity subjectivities mediated through power structures and emotions. Furthermore, the chapter problematises the ‘city’ as a site for language contact and linguistic diversity and argues for the importance of researching different ‘levels of granularity’ (Schneider, 2020) in order to understand actual linguistic behaviour in place which can substantially inform and transform narratives about place identity, as well as narratives about those who inhabit a certain place. Chapter 9 introduces and discusses language as a concern for social justice. It starts by outlining different approaches to social justice, and how these approaches inform language education in different and contradictory ways. After that, it addresses the inseparability of language from all the protected characteristics in the UK anti-discrimination law,

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arguing for the need to protect language from oppressive and discriminatory ideologies and practices. The chapter moves on to present a roadmap for language advocacy based on awareness, solidarity and activism before it ends with a problematisation of ‘grievable’ language (Butler, 2009) and ‘strategic essentialism’ (Pennycook, 2002). Chapter 10 offers some reflections on my experience of teaching Language in a Globalised World , as a taught postgraduate module. The chapter discuses my own wonderments about my role as a language educator and presents some critical moments in my professional language teaching career that have led me to do things differently. In addition, the chapter addresses two types of vulnerabilities in the context of teaching about language: personal and collective. These vulnerabilities, coupled with a pedagogy of shaking the confidence and challenging notions of mastery, have produced creative de-colonised epistemologies that have taken my students and me on an unpredictable journey towards resilient and hopeful entanglements.

1.4

A Note on Tone and Style Changes

The book exhibits different tone and style changes between—and sometimes within—its chapters. I think of these changes as normal ways of discussing, debating and presenting different lines of arguments. They occur as I engage with academic debates, research data, personal observations and professional struggles. They also occur as the chapters perform different functions: to inform, to debate, to discuss, to provoke, to resist, to wonder, to protest and to raise awareness, etc. These tone changes embody powerful emotional meanings. After all, emotions, Boler (1999) reminds us, are a primary site of social change, political resistance, and social movements of liberation. As I embrace these tone and style changes to let emotions be known, I rationalise this emotional foster-ship as a productive and necessary step for exploring social justice and language education. I do this echoing Greene (1988: 9) when she said, ‘when people cannot name alternatives, imagine a better state of things, share with others a project of change, they are likely to remain anchored or submerged, even as they proudly assert their autonomy’. Through style

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and tone changes, I have been able to affectively and intentionally engage with the process of naming, imagining, and constructing a hopeful vision for a better world for and with language. In addition, the tone and style changes are also observed as part of the dialogic becoming of this book (to borrow Bakhtin’s [1981] term) that is enacted through engaging with other authors, ideas, concepts, responses, feelings, worries and arrests. And with each chronotropic dialogue (Bakhtin, 1981), I emerged with a different tone reflective of my emotional and rational state of mind. I hope that my readers will enjoy these tone and style changes and will be able to feel with me the pains and struggles that language and language speakers endure as a result of oppressive normative frames in structures thought to be just.

References Alim, S. (2019). (De)Occupying language. In N. Avineri, L. Graham, E. Johnson, R. Riner, & J. Rosa (Eds.), Language and social justice in practice (pp. 184–192). Routledge. Badwan, K. (2015). Negotiating rates of exchange: Arab academic sojourners’ sociolinguistic trajectories in the UK (PhD Thesis). University of Leeds. Badwan, K., & Simpson, J. (2019). Ecological orientations to sociolinguistic scale. Applied Linguistic Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/ 10.1515/applirev-2018-0113. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. University of Texas Press. Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. (2003). Voices of modernity. Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity. Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2016). From mobility to complexity in sociolinguistic theory and method. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 242–262). Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J., & Backus, A. (2013). Super diverse repertoires and the individual. In I. deSaint-Georges, & J.-J. Weber (Eds.), Multilingualism and

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multimodality: Current challenges for educational studies (pp. 11–32). Sense Publishers. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. Routledge. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war. Verso. Canagarajah, S. (2013). Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. Routledge. García, O. (2020). Foreword: Co-labour and re-performances. In E. Moore, J. Bradley & J. Simpson (Eds.), Translanguaging as transformation: The collaborative construction of new linguistic realities. Multilingual Matters. Grambling, D. (2016). The invention of monolingualism. Bloomsbury. Greene, M. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. Teachers College Press. Hall, C. (2020). An ontological framework for English. In C. Hall & R. Wicaksono (Eds.), Ontologies of English: Conceptualising the language for learning, teaching and assessment (pp. 13–36). Cambridge University Press. Hall, C., & Wicaksono, R. (2020). Approaching ontologies of English. In C. Hall & R. Wicaksono (Eds.), Ontologies of English: Conceptualising the language for learning, teaching, and assessment (pp. 13–36). Cambridge University Press. Heller, M. (2007). Bilingualism as ideology and practice. In M. Heller (Ed.), Bilingualism: A social approach (pp. 1–22). Palgrave Macmillan. Hua, Z., Li, W., & Lyons, A. (2017). Polish shop(ping) as translanguaging space. Social Semiotics, 27 (4), 411–433. Jaspers, J., & Madsen, L. (2019). Critical perspectives on linguistic fixity and fluidity. Routledge. Jørgensen, J. (2008). Polylingual languaging around and among adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism, 5 (3), 161–176. https://doi.org/10. 1080/14790710802387562. Li, W., & Hua, Z. (2013). Translanguaging identities and ideologies: Creating transnational space through flexible multilingual practices amongst Chinese university students in the UK. Applied Linguistics, 34 (5), 516–535. Li, W. (2018). Linguistic (super)diversity, post-multilingualism and Translanguaging moments. In A. Creese & A. Blackledge (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language and superdiversity (pp. 16–29). Routledge. Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. (2005). Disinventing and (re)constituting languages. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 2(3), 137–156. https://doi. org/10.1207/s15427595cils0203_1. Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage.

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Massey, D., & Jess, P. (1995). The conceptualization of place. In D. Massey & P. Jess (Eds.), A place in the world (pp. 45–86, xi–xii). Oxford University Press. Nail, T. (2019). Being and motion. Oxford University Press. Otheguy, R., García, O., & Reid, W. (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review, 6 (3), 281–307. Pennycook, A. (2002). Mother tongues, governmentality, and protectionism. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 154, 11–28. https://doi. org/10.1515/ijsl.2002.009. Pennycook, A. (2018a). Posthumanist applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 39 (4), 445–461. Pennycook, A. (2018b). Repertoires, registers and linguistic diversity. In A. Creese & A. Blackledge (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language and superdiversity (pp. 3–15). Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2020). Pushing the ontological boundaries of English. In C. Hall & R. Wicaksono (Eds.), Ontologies of English: Conceptualising the language for learning, teaching, and assessment (pp. 355–367). Cambridge University Press. Phipps, A. (2013). Unmoored: Language pain, porosity and poisonwood. Critical Multilingualism Studies, 1(2), 97–118. https://cms.arizona.edu/index. php/multilingual/article/view/20/58. Rymes, B. (2020). Students as Sociolinguists. Phi Delta Kappan, 101(5), 8–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/0031721720903821. Schneider, B. (2020). The Urban Myth: A critical interrogation of the sociolinguistic imagining of cities as spaces of diversity (Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, Paper 267). Shohamy, E. (2006). Language policy: Hidden agendas, new approaches. Routledge.

2 The Global Spread of English: Intersecting Perspectives

Historical processes produce historically contingent ontological frameworks that affect individuals’ understanding of the world. Gradually, they produce normative thinking about different subjects including language. However, it is useful to note that these frames of normative thinking are not stable or continuous. Commenting on this, Butler (2009: 4) explains that ‘normative schemes are interrupted by one another, they emerge and fade depending on broader operations of power’. This is why there needs to be ongoing narratives regarding the global status of English. This status has been always empowered or favoured by one historical process after the other. Hence, the answer to the question, ‘why English?’ is never fully addressed by looking at one interpretation or normative scheme. In this chapter, I present an intersectional perspective that sits on the borders of the political, economic, ideological, historical, and social. The aim is not to offer a fully-fledged narrative about English in the world, as I believe the narrative is still unfolding and will continue to do so. In what follows I explain how historical processes affect contemporary understandings of what are viewed as powerful, useful, beautiful, barbaric, loud, or empowering languages. Most of these views are underpinned by people’s experiences of/with language in the world, which are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Badwan, Language in a Globalised World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7_2

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ultimately affected by wider historical processes that have contemporary social, political and ideological influences as I explain in this chapter and discuss further in Chapter 3 where I talk about theorising the market in sociolinguistics.

2.1

Colonialism and Imperialism And who in time knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent, T’ enrich unknowing nations with our stores? What worlds in th’yet unformed Occident May come refin’d with th’accents that are ours. (Samuel Daniel [1599] Musophilus, cited in Leith, 2007: 117)

Daniel’s vision for sending the ‘treasure of the English tongue’ to strange, unknowing nations became a reality through a history of colonial and imperial intrusions which took place within and beyond the British Isles. The colonisation process within the British Isles targeted the Celtic territories for political and religious motives (Leith, 2007). Beyond the British Isles, Leith (2007) maintains, the motives of colonisation were threefold: economic, social, and political, and they led to more than 300 years of colonisation, affecting four continents. In addition, he identifies three types of English colonialism: displacement, subjection, and replacement. An example of the first type is the settlement of English native speakers in North America. The second type, subjection, entails allowing some of the precolonial population access to learning English e.g. in Nigeria. The last type refers to replacing indigenous populations by new labour from West Africa through slave trade, which depopulated many African territories, and sent around 11 million Africans to the New World, where they could not use their native languages (Gramley, 2011). This colonisation process caused significant and ever-lasting linguistic consequences which not only led to the emergence of new varieties of English in many parts of the world, but have also contributed to establishing a linguistic hierarchical stratification that underpins the governing principles of the sociolinguistic market that we experience these days,

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as will be discussed in Chapter 3. But why starting with this dark side of history when the world today undergoes immensely globalising processes? The most straightforward answer is that the dark side is not over yet. English with its colonial history, ideological hegemony, economic power, political authority, and social dominance is currently the language of the globalised world. How it managed to obtain and preserve this position is still an ongoing debate in the literature. To start with, the current international dominance of English is one of the observable consequences of colonialism. In his discussion about linguistic imperialism, Phillipson (2009: 1) argues that ‘language is one of the most durable legacies of European colonial and imperial expansion’. Whenever globalisation is mentioned, language is triggered because ‘it is partly language that is globalising and globalised’ (Fairclough, 2006: 3). Traditionally, imperialism was chiefly linked with economic and political dominance (Hobson, 1902), leading to an unequal distribution of resources between the Centre and Periphery and between social classes (Holborow, 1999). In the contemporary world, language merges with economic and political dominance. It privileges people in the Centre by virtue of their linguistic competence in certain languages and assigns unequal benefits in a world system that legitimates this modern exploitation (Phillipson, 1992). Those who argue that English is a means to keep all countries engaged in the modern world economy and advancement, Phillipson (2009) argues, seem to overlook the point that this engagement entails becoming part of a ‘Western-dominated globalisation agenda set by the transnational corporations, the international Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organisation’ (4). On the other hand, some scholars argue that the global spread of English cannot be solely explained as a colonial attempt to subjugate other nations or individuals. Brutt-Griffler (2002) argues that British colonialist education did not show any consistent endeavours to promote English. Instead, English was viewed as the language of the elite, and access to it by the general public was not meant to be an easy quest. This suggests that the spread of English could have been a counterdiscourse to resist colonialism. That is to say, ‘[t]he natives were using

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the language of the master only to curse him more effectively’ (Canagarajah, 2000: 126). These views accentuate the role of agency, resistance and appropriation in facing structural powers. Eventually, irrespective of whether English was empowered directly by colonialism or indirectly as a means to resist colonialism, colonialism continues to be an inevitable and controversial factor when discussing the global spread of English.

2.2

Neoliberalism and Late-Capitalism

Neoliberal and capitalist discourses have been influential to applied linguistic discussions about language. Neoliberalism promotes liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within the scope of the free market and trade (Harvey, 2005) at the expense of economic equality. Holborow (2012) maintains that neoliberalism is the official policy of several Western governments, whereas Block (2012) refers to it as the dominant economic ideology involved in all manners of activities. Flores (2013) distinguishes between the macro-level of neoliberalism (institutional) and the micro-level of neoliberalism (individual). He refers to the former as ‘the merging of the state and the market in a new form of corporate governance’ (2013: 502) in a way that promotes the free flow of capital and the benefits of economic elites. He argues that this level of neoliberalism is the most cited and discussed and in spite of its significance, it overlooks an important aspect of neoliberalism that operates at an individual level, i.e. the conceptualisation of the ‘ideal subject’. The corporatisation of the subject involves establishing an ‘ideal subject’, who is flexible, autonomous and willing to adapt rapidly (Besley & Peters, 2007). Keeley (2007: 13) goes on to explain that the ‘ideal subject’ is a lifelong learner and comments: ‘to go on working, we’ll need to continue updating our skills throughout our working lives. Why? Because the skills we need in the workplace are evolving’. This understanding has shifted the concept of employment from ‘a job for life’ to ‘employability for life’ (Tomlinson, 2005: 7). Kubota (2011: 249) elaborates on this by explaining that:

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In order to stay employable, learning is considered to be an important means for success…. An expansion in human capital contributes to both individual economic benefit and corporate and national economic growth. Under the neoliberal discourse of individual accountability, each individual is seen to be responsible for developing through lifelong learning in the knowledge and skills required to be fully employable.

Unlike the industrial economy that emphasised manual work, new capitalism highlights the importance of language and communication skills. This is largely because of the rise of service and creative industries, which place higher pressure on individuals (Cameron, 2002). Following Thatcherism, which commands individuals to look after themselves above all else, individualistic orientations value personal aspirations above the collective work (Jones, 2011). Consequently, the contemporary focus on communication skills has given rise to ‘communicative imperialism’ (Phillipson, 2009) because it involves ‘a one-way flow of expert knowledge from dominant to subaltern cultures’ (Cameron, 2002: 70). Part of this ‘expert system’ (Giddens, 1991) is linked with the mastery of forms and genres of communication that cut across geopolitical boundaries, and these genres include those of transnational news media, websites of international organisations and corporations (Fairclough, 2006). The mastery of English remains at the heart of all of this because it functions as the world’s ‘working language’ (Gray, 2002). In light of this understanding, individuals’ quest for valued skills such as advanced English repertoires springs from institutional and individual motives that seem to promise a better life for those who dedicate more time, effort, and money to reach a higher level of English proficiency. It is, therefore, not surprising that English has been described in the applied linguistics literature as positive investment (Norton, 2000), potential consumption (Kubota, 2011), an object of happiness (Ahmed, 2010), and an object to ‘desire’ (Motha & Lin, 2014). With that sense of optimism comes a call for caution from Liyanage and Canagarajah (2019: 432) who argue that, there is ‘no guarantee that English proficiency will improve or change people’s life conditions’. This warning challenges the non-thinking associated with normative neoliberal ways of talking about

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the value of English. It is a call to break free from a normalised view that illusively equates English with better life chances. In spite of that, English continues to be described as a valuable commodity that enables what appears to be a ‘democratic’ access to a free global market. This being the case, individuals are made to believe that widening their linguistic repertoires, which should include English, will increase their linguistic capital and cultural awareness, thereby their chances of employability and promotion. Commenting on this, Phillipson (2012: 410) reminds us that, ‘within an individualistic paradigm of choice in a supposedly free market, choice is assumed to be rational, as in mainstream positivist science’. This rationality is usually linked to political ideologies that lie at the core of neoliberal governance, while individuals continue to be under the illusion that they have freely chosen their way of life. English in not only the current international lingua franca in the globalising world, it is also fiercely competing with other languages, cultures and sub-cultures through its role in education. Language education is not a neutral activity because ‘every education system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it’ (Foucault, 1972: 226). Joseph (2004) asserts that language teaching/learning is political because it always involves two languages and two cultures, with one of them gaining more prestige and power. Shohamy (2006) notes that while linguists describe speech and language use, politicians, educators and others in control prescribe how language should be used. To apply this understanding to English, Pennycook (1998, 1994) highlights the colonial discourse in language education by asserting that language education perpetuates the effects of colonialism in its focus on the superiority of the English-speaking Self and the inferiority of the ‘Other’. While it is supposed to be a place of diversity, heterogeneity, and fluidity, language education is a platform where language, culture, and identity are presented to be standardised, homogenised, and rigid to meet the interests of the white elite (Pennycook, 1998). I argue elsewhere (Badwan, 2020a) that English language education is a tool for perpetuating the positive attitudes associated with middleclass, standard varieties of English. Doing this entails the marginalisation

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of other varieties which are stigmatised as ‘non-native’ or ‘non-standard’. Such practices give rise to what Flores and Rosa (2015) call ‘prescriptive ideologies’ which impose a particular way of using language, privileging certain voices and practices and stigmatising others. As a result, language learners become driven by certain ‘ideological imaginings of language, culture, identity and political structure’ (Blommaert, 2016: 244). These ideological imaginings are influential as they typically coincide with what is viewed as ‘good’, ‘acceptable’, and ‘high-quality’ English. Such imaginings are historically and politically entrenched; they are socially reproduced, colonially conditioned and they continue to operate in insidious ways to affect individuals’ views about language in the world. I address the implications of these ideologies on social justice and civic participation in Chapter 9.

2.3

Problematising Globalisation

Globalisation is a buzz and fuzz word, described by Kumaravadivelu (2006: 1) as ‘a slippery term which carries different meanings to different people at different times’. Historian Robbie Robertson (2003: 3) reminds us that globalisation ‘as a human dynamic has always been with us, even if we have been unaware of its embrace until recently’. Although globalisation has been with us for over 500 years (see Robertson [2003] on waves of globalisation), it is still discussed as a recent phenomenon that has resulted in unprecedented levels of migration and mobility, leading to more contact, mixing and mingling between individuals, nationalities, cultures, and named languages, with no clear rules of engagement or behaviour. This ‘vogue word’ (Bauman, 1998) continues to be opaque and its complexity is what this book aims to embrace, rather than deny or try to capture or frame. It is important to be reminded of Fairclough’s (2006) comments on globalisation discourses whereby he cautions against being misled by discourses which, on the one hand, tend to misrepresent and mystify the term, while on the other contribute to falsely shaping people’s understanding of what globalisation is. For instance, one of the most dominant discourses of globalisation is the focus on ‘mobility’, ‘crossing borders’,

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‘flexibility’. Still, it is important to acknowledge and problematise the dangerous liaison between globalisation and mobility, freedom and flexibility. That is to say, globalisation as a project has benefitted some and disadvantaged others. Since there are winners and losers, globalisation has produced new forms of social divisions (Bauman, 1998) between the ‘globals’, who are free to roam the world and enjoy the hybridity and the colourfulness of the global village, and the ‘locals’, who are confined to, and sometimes imprisoned within, local corners and for whom mobility is still a dream. Globalisation has also resulted in new types of bordering. Sassen (2013) cautions against the borderless world narrative by arguing that globalisation has created new types of bordering that are transversal and some are impenetrable. In addition to traditional borders which are cut across in very different ways depending on the status of who is crossing them (e.g. a tourist with a visa, a migrant worker, an asylum seeker); there are new types of transversal bordering within and beyond the nationstate. Sassen (2013) gives an example of transnational professionals who move with the protection of global trade regimes and comments on this by saying, ‘the professionals who move through this regime are in a space that separates them radically from working class and poor migrants. It is a border that cannot be crossed’ (69). Not only is globalisation paradoxical because it has created very different and sometimes very conflicting experiences of bordering and crossing, but also because it has produced contradictory attitudes towards it. For instance, there are arguments that the globalisation project is a way to ‘homogenise’ the world under the umbrella of ‘modernisation’. Critical of this approach, Robertson (2003: 182) contends that: [d]espite decolonisation, the ‘civilizing’ zeal of former imperialists was far from dead. In Britain and the United States a new mantra emerged: Western values, Western institutions, Western capital and Western technology. Only by Westernising could former colonies hope to achieve a modern future.

In fact, many globalisation critics and writers address the influence of international economic organisations and transnational corporations

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on globalisation and some equate globalisation with ‘Americanisation’ (Campbell et al., 2004; Kumaravadivelu, 2006) or ‘McDonaldisation’ (Ritzer, 1993). While these views are critical of globalisation and its impact on local cultures, Llosa (2009) makes a case for a different role that can be assigned to globalisation when he argues that ‘globalisation does not suffocate local cultures but rather liberates them from the ideological conformity of nationalism’. Irrespective of whether globalisation is a threat or opportunity, it is often associated (and sometimes conflated) with ‘cosmopolitanism’. To clarify the difference, Vertovec and Cohen (2003: 1) explain that some contemporary writers perceive cosmopolitanism as a ‘vision of global democracy and world citizenship’. Others use it to advocate post-identity politics to ‘challenge conventional notions of belonging, identity and citizenship’ (ibid.). Ultimately, it is a concept that needs to be called upon during discussions about globalisation, nationalism, migration, mobility and multiculturalism. Schoene (2009: 6) distinguishes between globalisation and cosmopolitanism explaining that while the former refers to a process affecting the whole of humanity, the latter refers to ‘a corresponding body of political ideas’. Such ideas can be ‘cruel’ as the cosmopolitanism dream can be seen as an optimistic ‘good life fantasy’ (Berlant, 2011: 14). Another key concept to discuss as part of problematising globalisation is migration. Singh and Rajan (2015: 2) explain that ‘migration is an important factor in the erosion of traditional boundaries between languages, cultures, ethnics group[s], and nation-states’. At the same time, the current global political arena is experiencing a resurgence in old nationalism, sovereignism, populism and far-right movements (Bauman, 2016). This has fuelled hate crime, hate speech, cultural anxieties and xenophobia. Moreover, notions of ‘belonging’ are often called upon in political agendas almost everywhere in the world (Yuval-Davis, 2011: 2), leading to questions such as who is a ‘stranger’, a ‘foreigner’, and ‘who does not belong’ to a place. Language is a crucial reference point in these discourses where it is not necessarily foregrounded for its communicative value but for its ideological and political significance (Cameron, 2013: 61). In other words, the social and political anxieties that surround migration debates and encounters with ‘strangers at our door’ (Bauman,

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2016) are manifested in comments about language, proficiency, accented speech, sounding foreign, speaking a ‘foreign language’, and being from ‘there’ (Badwan, 2020b). All of these, and many more, are political statements about who has the right to a place, who is ‘of place’ as opposed to ‘in place’ (Bauman, 2000). Because language is a tool for inclusion, exclusion, privilege and discrimination, it is important to problematise the celebratory discourses of flexibility, superdiversity and mobility that often accompany the term, globalisation. In this section, I explored the new forms of social divisions and orderings created as a result of globalisation. At the same time, I wanted to emphasise the importance of critically engaging with language debates and discussions about winners and losers, which are becoming all the more relevant to researching language in a globalised world. This is a golden thread that will hold together the different chapters of this book.

Chapter Summary In this chapter I discussed how different historical processes namely, colonialism, imperialism, neoliberalism, late-capitalism and ongoing globalisation have contributed to the current international status of English vis-à-vis other languages today. I would also argue that these processes apply to discussions about the status of other languages as well. That is to say, the closer a given language is to the positive consequences of these processes, the higher its socio-political status is. Think of other colonial languages in the world such as Spanish or French. Think of other languages which are closely related to capitalism and global economy such as Mandarin Chinese or Arabic. These processes shape thoughts and inform individuals’ actions. That is why a discussion about language in the world requires some sort of a historical overview that operates as an interpretive lens for explaining the work of language in our life today and for highlighting the role of historical processes in the contemporary framing of language.

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References Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press. Badwan, K. (2020a). Mobility and English language education: How does mobility in study abroad settings produce new conceptualisations of English? In In C. Hall & R. Wicaksono (Eds.), Ontologies of English: Conceptualising the language for learning, teaching, and assessment (pp. 335–352). Cambridge University Press. Badwan, K. (2020b). Unmooring language for social justice: Young people talking about language in place in Manchester, UK. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2020.1796485. Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalisation: The human consequences. Polity. Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity. Bauman, Z. (2016). Strangers at our door. Polity. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. Besley, T., & Peters, M. (2007). Subjectivity and truth: Foucault, education, and the culture of self . Peter Lang. Block, D. (2012). Economising globalisation and identity in applied linguistics in neoliberal times. In D. Block, J. Gray, & M. Holborow (Eds.), Neoliberalism and applied linguistics (pp. 56–87). Routledge. Blommaert, J. (2016). From mobility to complexity in sociolinguistic theory and method. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 242–262). Cambridge University Press. Brutt-Griffler, J. (2002). World English: A study of its development. Multilungual Matters. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war. Verso. Cameron, D. (2002). Globalisation and the teaching of ‘communication’ skills. In D. Block & D. Cemeron (Eds.), Globalisation and language teaching (pp. 67–82). Routledge. Cameron, D. (2013). The one, the many and the other: Representing multi- and mono-lingualism in post-9/11 verbal hygiene. Critical Multilingualism Studies, 1(2), 59–77. https://cms.arizona.edu/index.php/multiling ual/article/view/17/56. Campbell, N., Davies, J., & Mckay, G. A. (2004). Issues in Americanisation and culture. Edinburgh University Press. Canagarajah, S. (2000). Negotiating ideologies through English: Strategies from the periphery. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Ideology, politics, and language policies: Focus on English (pp. 121–132). John Benjamins Publishing.

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Fairclough, N. (2006). Language and globalisation. Routledge. Flores, N. (2013). The unexamined relationship between neoliberalism and plurilingualism: A cautionary tale. TESOL Quarterly, 47 (3), 500–519. Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85 (2), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. Pantheon Books. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Polity Press. Gramley, S. (2011). The history of English: An introduction. Routledge. Gray, J. (2002). The global coursebook in English language teaching. In D. Block & D. Cameron (Eds.), Globalization and language teaching (pp. 151– 167). Routledge. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. Hobson, J. (1902). Imperialism: A study. Allen and Unwin. Holborow, M. (1999). The politics of English: A Marxist view of language. Sage. Holborow, M. (2012). What is neoliberalism? In D. Block, J. Gray, & M. Holborow (Eds.), Neoliberalism and applied linguistics (pp. 14–32). Routledge. Jones, O. (2011). Chavs: The demonisation of the working class. Verso. Joseph, J. (2004). Language and politics. In A. Davies & C. Elder (Eds.), The handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 347–366). Blackwell. Keeley, B. (2007). Human capital: How what you know shapes your life. OECD Publishing. Kubota, R. (2011). Questioning linguistic instrumentalism: English, neoliberalism and language tests in Japan. Linguistics and Education, 22(3), 248–260. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2006). Dangerous liaison: Globalization, empire and TESOL. In J. Edge (Ed.), (Re-)locating TESOL in an age of empire (pp. 1– 26). Palgrave Macmillan. Leith, D. (2007). English-colonial to postcolonial. In D. Graddol, D. Leith, J. Swann, M. Rhys, & J. Gillen (Eds.), Changing English (pp. 117–152). Routledge. Liyanage, I., & Canagarajah, S. (2019). Shame in English language teaching: Desirable pedagogical possibilities for Kiribati in neoliberal times. TESOL Quarterly, 53, 430–455. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.494. Llosa, M. (2009). The culture of liberty. [Online]. https://foreignpolicy.com/ 2009/11/20/the-culture-of-liberty/. Accessed 30 November 2018.

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Motha, S., & Lin, A. (2014). ‘Non-coercive rearrangements’: Theorizing desire in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 48(2), 331–359. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning. Pearson Education Limited. Pennycook, A. (1994). The cultural politics of English as an international language. Longman Group Limited. Pennycook, A. (1998). English and the discourses of colonialism. Routledge. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford University Press. Phillipson, R. (2009). Linguistic imperialism continued . Routledge. Phillipson, R. (2012). How to strengthen the sociolinguistics of globalization: A review article based on challenges in the sociolinguistics of globalization. Critical Discourse Studies, 9 (4), 407–414. Ritzer, G. (1993). The McDonaldisation of society: An investigation into the changing character of contemporary social life. Pine Forge. Robertson, R. (2003). The three waves of globalisation: A history of developing global consciousness. Zed Books. Sassen, S. (2013). When the centre no longer holds: Cities as frontier zones. Cities, 34, 67–70. Schoene, B. (2009). The cosmopolitan novel . Edinburgh University Press. Shohamy, E. (2006). Language policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches. Routledge. Singh, A., & Rajan, S. (2015). Politics of migration. Routledge. Tomlinson, S. (2005). Education in a post welfare society. Open University Press. Vertovec, S., & Cohen, R. (2003). Conceiving cosmopolitanism: Theory, context and practice. Oxford University Press. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. Sage.

3 Language and the Sociolinguistic Market

One of the early theorisations of the linguistic market comes from Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) work on the value of language where he establishes that while languages are linguistically equal, they are socially unequal. That is to say, there are no linguistic features that determine the supremacy of language and its potential to be a global lingua franca. Yet, there are social and political factors that come into play when it comes to determining the social value of a given language in society. Communication through language is not a neutral act; it is a site of struggle mediated, negotiated, and sometimes imposed through power dynamics: ‘One does not speak to any Tom, Dick or Harry; any Tom, Dick or Harry does not take the floor’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 649). This establishes a strong connection between the social position of individuals and the perceived value of the languages they speak. Following Bourdieu (1977), there are two principles to consider when discussing the value of language. I present them in the following section.

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Principles Governing Language Value in Interaction

First, ‘a language is worth what those who speak it are worth’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 652). This principle highlights the relevance of factors such as social and economic power and dominance in the world of language. While there is nothing linguistically superior about the language of the powerful, their social position dictates de facto social acceptance in another display of how language continues to be a site of struggle. Such power dynamics work similarly at different levels. At a macro level, if we look at the status of languages in the world, we can observe how the status of a language is intertwined with the political and economic power of the countrie(s) where it is spoken. One of the most prominent imaginings of the world is inspired by the seminal work of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) who introduced World System Theory. The theory describes the power hierarchy between powerful and wealthy societies, known as ‘the core’, and weak and exploited societies, known as ‘the periphery’. In other words, developed countries are the core, and the less developed are in the periphery. World System Theory explains how the current description of the world is a product of history. History, through colonialism and then imperialism, places weak regions in the periphery and subjugates them to the hegemonic dominance of the core that aims to maintain the status quo as long as it is to their advantage. With this hegemony comes a global class struggle (Wallerstein, 2000). Language is part and parcel of this global class struggle and the ongoing hegemonic attempts to maintain the power and the privilege of the core. As a result, the languages of the core, i.e. most colonial languages and languages associated with economic power, are more socially valued. On the other hand, the languages of the periphery continue to be marginalised and deemed less valued and less useful. Such uneven distribution of linguistic, cultural, social and economic capital in the world is further exacerbated in the current context of global migration and ongoing citizenship processes. One of the manifestations of this linguistic hierarchy is evident in lists of the most ‘influential’ or ‘powerful’ languages in the world. I recently

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came across the ‘Power Language Index’ (PLI) developed by Kai L. Chan (2016) from INSEAD Innovation & Policy Initiative. Commenting on the idea, Chan (2017) says, ‘I created the Power Language Index (PLI) as a thought experiment: If an alien were to land on Earth, what language would serve it best? This scenario assumes that the alien would have similar ambitions as humans’. The PLI measures five basic opportunities afforded by language: geography, economy, communication, knowledge & media, and diplomacy. The five top languages are English, Mandarin, French, Spanish and Arabic. Being on top of this list means that these languages offer the most ‘opportunities’ to their speakers. Chan (2016: 2) identifies the following opportunities brought by powerful languages: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The ability to travel widely The ability to earn a livelihood The ability to communicate with others The ability to acquire knowledge and consume media The ability to engage in diplomacy

If we look closely at these opportunities, we realise the influence of the economic and political power of the nation-state in determining the value of its language. One might ask but why does this hierarchy matter? It matters because it determines who is heard and seen on the global stage. While at a micro level ‘any Tom, Dick or Harry does not take the floor’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 649), at a macro level not any country takes the floor and very few have the power to impose reception (Bourdieu, 1977: 649). As I discussed in Chapter 2, the current status of English is not a coincidence that continued to exist even after the ex-colonies gained their independence. English remains a powerful language because it is the language of political powers and financial centres in the world. It is a desired commodity in a neoliberal order that encourages individuals to continue to look after themselves by investing in acquiring English language skills and communicative competences. Power remains in the hands of the developed countries which continue to exercise their control over the countries of the periphery; most of whom are former colonies (Lin & Martin, 2005). This control is mainly regulated through

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the soft powers of aid and charity, and it has numerous consequences including linguistic ones. This suggests that while researching language in post-colonial contexts, we simply cannot be blind to class interests, historical complexities and political affiliations (Badwan, 2021). There will always be winners and losers because while engaging in decisions about assigning power or status to a certain language, ‘we indulge in political linguistics’ (Blommaert, 1996: 217). This takes me to the second principle of the sociolinguistic market: When one language dominates the market, it becomes the norm against which the prices of other modes of expression, and with them the values of the various competences, are defined. (Bourdieu, 1977: 652)

This means that the dominant language not only benefits from becoming a highly valued linguistic commodity, but it also determines the value of other languages in the metaphorical sociolinguistic market. This is why there are growing concerns in sociolinguistic research associated with how colonial languages threaten local and national languages and how they can contribute to language loss (Bilaniuk 2005; Canagarajah, 2005; Desai, 1995; Phillipson, 2003). At the same time, individuals are aware of what language is beneficial and non-beneficial to them in their daily life (Block & Corona, 2019: 3). This awareness is created via dominant language ideologies, reproduced through the education system, media and film industry, employment practices, as well as local and global job market demands. And yet, this metaphorical market does not have a metaphorical influence. Its reach potentially impacts all aspects of communication in liquid societies (Bauman, 2000). It directs individuals to invest in certain languages, it degrades the value of other languages and their speakers, and it creates new types of social divisions which are configured based on access to the language that dominates the market. In most cases, this access is facilitated via social class affordances because ‘the distribution of linguistic capital is related in specific ways to the distribution of other forms of capital…which define the location of an individual within the social space’ (Thompson, 1991: 18). At the same time, one’s language continues to indicate one’s worth in the society: ‘how one speaks, and

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writes is one basis for deciding one’s worth as a scholar, an employee, or a potential marriage partner’ (Heller, 2010: 102). Gradually, this creates linguistic inequalities and limits the civic participation and representation of voices that are perceived as ‘deviant’ from the dominant language, a theme I visit in Chapter 9. It is important to remember that the above two principles of the sociolinguistic market also operate within the realm of named languages. The examples I presented earlier discuss how a named dominant language such as English affects the value of other named languages. However, I want to emphasise that the same process of layering and stratification (Piller, 2016) takes place within the boundaries of what is socio-politically known as named languages. Within this level, the focus is on the linguistic varieties of a named language. In most named national languages, there is one variety that is recognised as the ‘Standard’ variety or the dominant variety against which the value of other varieties is measured. Like dominant languages, dominant varieties are associated with power: the elite, the educated, the rich, the intellectual, and the influential. The remaining varieties are usually assigned derogatory labels such as ‘non-standard’, ‘regional dialects’, ‘slang, ‘local’, ‘colloquial’, etc. Nonetheless, the term ‘standard’ is used differently in different speech communities; this is possibly why societies vary in their degrees of language policing and shaming when it comes to accepting ‘nonstandard’ varieties in education and at work. For example, in the UK, Standard English is the outcome of the deliberate standardisation of a particular regional dialect. Commenting on this, Trudgill and Hannah (2013: 2) explain, ‘the upper classes quite naturally wrote in their own dialect, and then were in a position to impose this way of writing on society at large’. This is why they refer to Standard English as a ‘social dialect’ (Trudgill & Hannah, 2013: 2). Since this variety has been historically associated with power, status and prestige, it is the kind of English that language users and learners use to read and write. For example, schools in the UK expect teachers and students to adhere to the sociolinguistic norms associated with Standard English. Cushing (2019) discusses how language policing in UK schools could lead to stigmatising speakers of ‘non-standard’ varieties and highlights the importance for educators to uncover the ideological and political packages that dominate

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the way English is taught at schools as well as the implications of such policing on supressing the regional identities that school children try to project during play time and group activities. I return to this point in Chapter 9 with a more detailed discussion on social justice and language education. I now move on to discuss another example of how ‘standard language ideologies’ (Lippi-Green, 2012) operate in other societies. In many Arabic-speaking countries, there is a wide social recognition that Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the most elevated and articulate variety of Arabic. There are different views on the evolution of MSA (Holes, 2004). Some believe it is a natural continuation of the literate classical Arabic. Others argue it was standardised by linguistic committees in the 1890s when they attempted to simplify Classical Arabic to facilitate its use in everyday conversations in the Arab world, a reaction against French colonisation and against efforts to make French the formal language in its occupied territories. Following the orders of Mohamad Ali Pasha in Egypt, linguistic committees facilitated the use of Standard Arabic in government transactions and the media, resulting in the spread of a simplified version of Classical Arabic: simplified lexicon with a reduced use of case and mood endings when spoken. This variety was considered a prestigious form of Arabic because of its use in literary arts in the nineteenth century. It was mainly accessible to the educated elite and therefore it started to emerge as a social class marker. However, nowadays MSA is freely accessible through mandatory education which uses it as the medium of instruction. It is still not clear how this free access will impact on the future social status of MSA. Will it be less valued? Or will it continue to maintain its social value? Some argue, see for example Theodoropoulou (2018), that certain Arabic dialects are now gaining prestigious weight which is mainly linked to social class within national boundaries. Comparing the social status of Standard English with Standard Arabic provides some interesting sociolinguistic insights. While both varieties are used in formal education, MSA is gradually losing its social status to other emerging Arabic dialects which are associated with social class (Theodoropoulou, 2018). Such a comparison potentially highlights the wider impact of class struggles at national levels and how these struggles

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are manifested in language ideologies and wider practices of language policing. Substantially, national class struggles continue to play a significant role in regulating the sociolinguistic market as we experience it today.

3.2

Changing Exchange Rates

I have explained the principles governing the sociolinguistic market and how the metaphorical value of languages—and varieties within these languages—is associated with the power, prestige and status of their speakers. This goes both ways; the privileged status of a speaker affects the perceived social value of their language. And due to historically entrenched factors, the perceived value of an individual is associated with their ability to sound like a scholar, a leader, a writer, a wealthy/fashionable person and/or a trust-worthy individual. This sounding is ideological, shaped by socio-political views of what language and variety is deemed suitable, articulate, sophisticated, eloquent and worthy of trust and respect. Yet, it is important to understand that the metaphorical value of language is not fixed. It is dynamic, changing and contingent, as it interacts with numerous ecological and social factors in liquid speech communities (therefore liquid markets). Within this understanding, Nino-Murcia (2003 in Seargeant, 2012: 19) describes English as a ‘dollar’, which is ‘the currency for social and geographical mobility in the world’. However, this dollar does not have a stable rate of exchange, as it differs according to where it is used, to whom it is addressed, and all of this depends on wider socio-political and socioeconomic contexts. What matters politically is understanding who defines the ‘values of linguistic commodities or more broadly who regulates the market’ (Heller, 2010: 103). Applying the same ‘dollar’ metaphor to individuals’ linguistic capital, it is expected that the values of speakers’ linguistic repertoires are changing, dynamic, relational, and emergent, and hence the plural form in ‘exchange rates’. There are many factors that regulate the sociolinguistic market such as social domains, power distance between the interlocutors, the purpose

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of the interaction and the impression sought. Adult language users are usually aware that the way they language is affected by the ecology of the languaging task—the what, when, where, who, why of interaction. Successful communicators deploy their linguistic repertoires strategically and this suggests that individuals do have agency to negotiate the regulation of the sociolinguistic market. This, however, requires two types of competence: first, socio-pragmatic competence defined as the ‘ability to accurately interpret and appropriately express social meaning in interaction’ (Holmes & Riddiford, 2011: 377). As such, it entails the ability to assess what linguistic norms and features work well or do not work well in a given interaction. These are usually consolidated in response to the expectation of the factors that regulate the micro-market during the interaction. The second competence is related to communicative relativity (Hymes, 1974) which requires pre-requisite access to a range of linguistic repertoires that can then be deployed strategically. While this sounds theoretically feasible, there are yet two challenges. The first challenge is that not everyone has equal access to a broad repertoire of linguistic resources, codes and registers. That is to say, not every speaker has the ability to shift from standard to non-standard varieties of a language, or the ability to shift from one language to another. The metaphor of wearing a language suitable to the occasion is theoretically possible but it hypothetically assumes that all individuals have access to different types of clothes to wear according to the occasion. While some have this languaging ability, many others do not, which is another reminder of how language continues to be a site of struggle. This indicates that there will always be winners and losers in the sociolinguistic market. In most cases, the winners are those who benefit from this entrenched linguistic stratification (Piller, 2016). The second challenge is that many individuals find in this act of strategic languaging a threat to their ‘true identity’. To address this challenge, it is important to raise awareness that identity is not something we have, but something we do, perform and socially construct as we interact with places, objects and individuals. During my lectures on language and identity, many students often ask me, ‘who am I as a languaging subject?’. Such questions suggest that individuals with fixed perceived identities are

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more resistant to the idea that our ways of using language are ecologically dependent. Following Gee’s (2001) identity theoretical framework whereby he discusses discourse identity (D-identity) as we are who we are because of how we are recognised by others, I would like to emphasise that this social recognition is mediated through language and other forms of semiosis. And since we possess fluid identities—we are seen differently by different people and we act differently at the presence of different people—our usage of language is expected to be similarly dynamic, albeit it requires the overcoming of the first challenge regarding access to a broad range of linguistic repertoire. With this understanding comes the recognition that individuals do not possess fixed ‘true’ identities. I return to the discussion of language and identity in Chapter 8.

Chapter Summary In this chapter, I explained the principles underlying the sociolinguistic market and how it is socio-politically regulated during talk and interaction. This metaphorical market is configured through power dynamics. However, this does not mean that the market is pre-determined and that individuals have no room for agency and manoeuvre. While individuals’ agency is possible, it requires two types of linguistic competence: sociopragmatic competence and communicative relativity. It also requires embracing a liquid understanding of identity so that individuals are able to strategically engage with the different interactional events they find themselves in. Indeed, language continues to be a site for struggle and a medium through which this struggle is enacted and actualised.

References Badwan, K. (2021). Agency in educational language planning: Perspectives from higher education in Tunisia. Current Issues in Language Planning, 22(1–2), 99–116. Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity.

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Bilaniuk, L. (2005). Contested tongues: Language politics and cultural correction in Ukraine. Cornell University. Block, D., & Corona, V. (2019). Critical LPP and the intersection of class, race and language policy and practice in twenty first century Catalonia. Language Policy, 1–21. Blommaert, J. (1996). Language planning as a discourse on language and society. Language Problems and Language Planning, 20, 199–222. Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information, 16 (6), 645–668. Canagarajah, S. (2005). Reclaiming the local in language policy and practice. Routledge. Chan, K. L. (2016). These are the most powerful languages in the world . [Online]. http://www.kailchan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/KaiChan_Power-Language-Index-full-report_2016_v2.pdf. Accessed on 8 April 2020. Chan, K. L. (2017). The world’s most powerful languages. [Online]. https:// knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/the-worlds-most-powerfullanguages-6156. Accessed on 8 April 2020. Cushing, I. (2019). The policy and policing of language in schools. Language in Society, 49, 425–450. Desai, Z. (1995). The evolution of a post-apartheid language policy in South Africa: An on-going site of struggle. European Journal of Intercultural Studies, 5 (3), 18–25. Gee, J. (2001). Identity as an analytic lens for research in education. Review of Research in Education, 25, 99–125. Heller, M. (2010). The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 101–114. Holes, C. (2004). Modern Arabic structures, functions and varieties. Georgetown University Press. Holmes, J., & Riddiford, N. (2011). From classroom to workplace: Tracking socio-pragmatic development. ELT Journal, 65 (4), 376–386. Hymes, D. H. (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. University of Pennsylvania Press. Lin, A., & Martin, P. (2005). Language-in-education policy and practice: Decolonisation, globalisation. Multilingual Matters. Lippi-Green, R. (2012). English with an accent. Routledge. Phillipson, R. (2003). English-only Europe? Challenging language policy. Routledge. Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice. Oxford University Press.

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Seargeant, P. (2012). The politics and policies of global English. In A. Hewings & C. Tagg (Eds.), The politics of English (pp. 5–35). Routledge. Theodoropoulou, I. (2018). Social status, language, and society in the Arab World. In E. Benmamoun & R. Bassiouney (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Arabic linguistics (pp. 371–386). Routledge. Thompson, J. (1991). Editor’s introduction. In P. Bourdieu, Language and symbolic power. Polity. Trudgill, P., & Hannah, J. (2013). International English: A guide to varieties of standard English. Routledge. Wallerstein, I. (1974). The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: Concepts for comparative analysis. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16 (4), 387–415. Wallerstein, I. (2000). The Essential Wallerstein. The New York Press.

4 Language as Becoming in the World

I have always struggled with talking about language in neoliberal terms. It is not because I could not understand them or teach them but because they have elusive powers to erase and undermine other aspects of language. They can easily dominate normative thinking about language in the world. As much as I tried to avoid these discussions in my teaching about language, I find myself obliged to revisit the historical processes that shape our normative thinking about language in the world today. These historically contingent ontological frameworks are alive and kicking. They make us rationalise how language operates and how winning and losing through language occurs. However, in this chapter, I try to step away from the rationalising of language by inviting the emotional and the human in language. That said, I do not see these two as binaries. The neoliberal perspective is not the only rational one, or that the only alternative to it is a non-rational/emotional one.

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Humanising Language

Language is ‘the first sharing that occurs in human life between the child and parent, the first whispered words of hospitality’ (Phipps, 2019: 7). When children are introduced to the world of language, they are introduced to ways of sense-making, referring, communicating, connecting, singing, shouting, dreaming, complaining, and the list goes on. As children start speaking their first words, they teach us the meaning of connection, sharing and bonding. Language is not just about communication; it is about becoming and being in the world. Cameron (1998: 272) demonstrates that ‘people are who they are because of (among other things) the way they talk’. This suggests that individuals’ repertoires open up different possibilities for different enactments of the self in the world (Valentine et al., 2009). Neoliberal discourses of language are mainly about investing in valuable languages in order to become employable, or continue to be so. How about languages not deemed ‘valuable’ in a global system that legitimises inequality? These languages are equally valuable to the being and becoming of their speakers. These languages are the threads that connect disenfranchised individuals trying to maintain ties with their heritage, legacy, history and ways of beings not accessible through dominant languages. The example I present now comes from my own personal experience of parenting while trying to teach my children Arabic to digitally connect with their family members in Palestine. My six-year-old son, born and brought up in the UK, has the privilege of speaking English fluently but his Arabic repertoire is still limited. He is still learning to inhabit new ways of being in the world facilitated through speaking Arabic. Since he started attending an Arabic supplementary school every Saturday, he started asking about the geography of the world and the distribution of language across geopolitical regions. It has not occurred to him that language moves with people as they move. He only knows that his Palestinian grandparents speak Arabic because they are in Palestine. He speaks English because he is in the UK. His world of language is still framed around his limited knowledge of geography. Every time he Skypes with his grandparents in the besieged Gaza Strip,

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my parents use the same set of questions that their limited English repertoire permits: how are you? What are you doing? Do you love me?, etc. I look at my father’s eyes as he tries to retrieve some English to communicate with his grandson and I find a sense of vulnerability, inability to speak, loss, and a painful struggle to communicate. Likewise, my son battles the disconnectedness and the banal repetition of the usual dialogue. It is the enactment of the loss of ‘words, self and voice’ (Scarry, 1985: 35) while the eyes and the smiles try to send unspoken words of the beautiful bond that has been physically impossible due to impassable geopolitical borders. This loss, however, started to gradually disappear. Thanks to language. My son’s Arabic vocabulary is growing and he is consciously making efforts to learn it so that he can impress his grandparents over the weekend, the time when we usually Skype. With pride and hopeful pain, I watch him as he says ‘ana bahebak ya sedo’ = ‘I love you, grandpa’ for the first time. Even though he said the equivalent English sentence thousands of times before, the first time he said the Arabic sentence to my father brought immense happiness to him. His eyes lit with joy and hope of connectedness. His unspoken words to me were a message of how much he misses us, and how he misses to have a ‘normal’ conversation whereby he can bond with his grandson. As for me, the proud mother whose son speaks a valuable language with a standard accent is also a confused mother who is trying to bridge the disconnectedness and the separation from the land through nurturing a linguistically mediated bond. It is not the usual separation of living in the diaspora. It is a stubborn separation caused by the closed borders of the besieged Gaza Strip. A closure that did not allow my parents to see me or my children for years—and I am still counting as I write this book. It is words—sounds transmitted through air and communicated via Skype—that take me to another world; a distant place which I have not physically visited for almost ten years. It is words with their accompanying rhythmic tones that challenge the tyranny of impassable borders and the violence of separation. It is words that reunite me with a younger me in a distant but close home, full of surprising memories. I am thankful to these words as I try to give more of them to my Englishspeaking children who, unlike me, do not have the painful privilege of

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having another home (yet). These words are significant to my being even though they are not a valued commodity. But that should not matter because language is not all about the market, value and power. Part of this book was written during the COVID19 global pandemic that has forced most countries around the world to impose national lockdowns and restrictions on non-essential travel. Locked in the house, as per the government advice at the time, my husband, two children and I spent all the time together. I was juggling my academic job with home-schooling. The languaging practices in our house changed significantly. We then had more time to expose our children to Arabic input, and we Skyped more frequently with family in Palestine. The children started to use more of their Arabic repertoire when talking to me and my husband while using English repertoire when playing with one another. A lockdown immersed programme has done wonders as they were exposed to Arabic most of the time for the first time since toddlerhood. However, Arabic repertoire were not the only repertoire they developed. The children had more screen time than what we would ever tolerate under normal circumstances. Interestingly, they picked up new linguistic features to be added to their repertoire. For example, my threeyear old daughter was using an American educational application that teaches letters and sounds. She started to pronounce words like ‘water’ as / wO dђr/. My son who was passionate about an adventure programme on TV started using /jђ/ for ‘you’, to indicate that he is in a rush while imitating the main protagonist in his favourite programme. What these examples indicate is that language is still on the move even though people are physically static and immobile during a global pandemic. Language in our networked and complexified world is actively moving around and moving us around, leaving traces of places in our voices. These traces are not always about the market, value or power; they are about growing and becoming in the world. Another interesting linguistic observation that I noted during the COVID19 global pandemic is the potential for language to act as therapy during anxious times characterised by uncertainty and worry about what is yet to come. Gardening during lockdown provided a lifeline and a way to de-stress after long online meetings. I live in a multilingual part of the metropolitan city of Manchester (UK), and while doing some gardening,  

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I could hear the kind of music my neighbours were listening to while they were also doing some gardening work. The sound of Arabic songs played by my husband in our garden was met by the sounds of Urdu, Hindi and Greek songs played by our neighbours. It is worth noting that all my immediate neighbours were born and raised in the UK and they are expert users of English. Intrigued by the multilingual soundscapes, I greeted my Indian neighbour and had this short conversation: Khawla: What is it about Hindi songs these days? My neighbour: It is soothing. It takes me to a different place far away from this miserable lockdown. It takes me to a different world. You know what I mean? I guess it is the same for your husband. I can hear his Arabic music. Khawla: I should ask him, I guess.

And once again, language moves around and moves us even though we could not move around. It creates ‘sticky spaces’ (Ahmed, 2014) filled with emotions and memories. It has soothing powers as individuals navigate through the uncertainty of the lockdown. However, I am careful not to romanticise language during a global pandemic. In Chapter 9 where I discuss language in relation to social (in)justice, I discuss how language during the COVID19 pandemic can be not only limiting, disadvantaging and hurting but can indeed be a matter of life or death. The neoliberal metaphors and discourses that prevail in our understanding of language should not hide the human value of language. Language education, therefore, should not be mainly about investing in a commodity in the linguistic market and knowledge economy. Language education is also about family, heritage, pride, bonding, exploring and sharing. We need to bring back the human in this highly commodified business. The danger is real because normative ideologies that commodify language are normalised and treated as a neutral and harmless way to talk about language. I am here reminded of an interesting TV incident1 that took place on the UNESCO’s International Mother Tongue Day of 2020. A guest who speaks 15 languages, including Welsh, 1 https://nation.cymru/news/language-expert-left-speechless-after-sky-news-suggests-welsh-is-poi

ntless/.

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was asked by a Sky News presenter, ‘which is the most pointless?’ with reference to language. She then carried on saying, ‘People in my ear just said Welsh. That’s insulting’. The guest responded, Well, I love the Welsh language and I love going to Wales… I don’t think there’s such a thing as a useless language. If you can use a language to speak to people, it’s useful. If you can use a language to learn about people’s culture, it’s useful. It doesn’t matter how big or small that community is.

The guest and the presenter exchanged some comments about what happened on social media. Defending her position, the presenter wrote, ‘I’m married to a Welshman – it was clearly banter. Oh well’. There are several takeaways from this event but the most important one is that the way many people perceive the importance of language in our life has been immensely commodified. While some might argue this event is an example of harmless banter. It is unfortunately an example of the ‘language turn’ described by Fairclough (2000) who warned against using language to impose the new neoliberal order, to represent it and to win acceptance for it, with the ultimate goal of effectively participating in it. The thought of a ‘pointless’ language, let alone ranking languages in terms of being ‘the most pointless’, is a reflection of the evasive nature of a normalised neoliberal order. Likewise, the misleading construction of ‘pointless language’ is politically and ideologically tied to the circulation of troubling normative frames about language and its purpose in human societies. Another example of the language turn (Fairclough, 2000) that is commonly used as a harmless label is the term ‘heritage language’. Commenting on this, García (2009: 60) wonders, ‘And what connotations does the term “heritage” have? We think of old, ancient, in the past, when in fact, we are speaking about languages of the future’. Teaching children other languages is about allowing future possibilities for becoming, growing, exploring and connecting. While the term is used to romanticise languages and invokes nostalgic connotations of (re)connectedness, it also produces the connotation that heritage languages are outdated and linked with primitivism (Baker & Jones,

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1998). Another challenge with the term is that it is used differently in different contexts. While it was first used in the Canadian context to refer to any language other than English or French (Cummins, 1991: 601–602), Fishman (2001) expanded the definition by introducing three categories of heritage languages: ancestral, colonial and immigrant. Using this understanding, the term covers a wide scope and can be used to refer to any language in any place. However, the practicalities of labelling and choosing are not far from being political. A heritage language in one geographical place is not necessarily perceived as a heritage language in another. For instance, in Europe there are heritage languages that enjoy a legal status of protection whilst others do not. Those that enjoy protection are seen as indigenous or regional languages which are linked to the geographical place before the establishment of the nation-state (Piller, 2016). On the other hand, languages that do not enjoy the same protection are deemed as refugee or immigrant languages. Therefore, the term is problematic as it can be used to foreground either notions of being outdated or notions of being foreign in place.

4.2

The Language About Language

The discussions I present in this chapter highlight the power behind the language about language. It is a power that influences thought and action and shapes normative thinking about language. I wish to draw a distinction here between language as lived experience (from below) versus language as described in dominant discourses (from the top). While the former refers to individuals’ experiences of socialising, living, feeling, being and becoming through language; the latter dictates how language is talked about in official discourses. Language descriptions such as valuable, useless, heritage, prestigious, uneducated, etc. are also comments on, and judgements about, their speakers and the social positions they hold. Likewise, descriptions of language users such as ‘non-native’ speakers, speakers with ‘foreign accents’, speakers of ‘regional dialects’ and ‘unstandardised’ varieties, speakers of ‘foreign languages’, speakers with ‘poor/bad’ English, etc. are examples of derogatory labelling which

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might seem ‘harmless’, yet it is based on installing linguistic terms rooted in stigma and negative stereotypes. The language about language is consequential; it is not only normative but is also transformative. Commenting on this Rosa (2019: 35) indicates, ‘language is not merely a passive way of referring to or describing things in the world, but a crucial form of social action itself ’. That is why it is crucial to critically engage with discourses about language in order to break free from neoliberal and discriminatory discourses about language and to uncover the injustices inherent in what seems like harmless labelling. The struggles to change the language about language require a lot of willing from different parties and effective allies in order to liberate language from hegemonic discourses that have colonised it for a long time. It is a struggle to bring language back to the human, the lived. Early pioneer of decolonisation, Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o (1986: 108) in the context of maintaining and promoting the African novel, discusses how decolonising work requires resilient willing from different stakeholders such as writers, translators, publishers, progressive states, and widening readership. The same goes with reference to de-colonising language or what Alim (2019) refers to as de-occupying language. These calls (among many others) aim to bring language back to the humanist domain, away from metaphors about profit, value and exchange. I take the position that while we cannot undermine the relevance of power to languaging acts, it is important not to be silenced by power and not to be weakened or demotivated by it. Furthermore, liberating language from these discourses entails uncovering, and challenging, the injustices of mundane labelling and banal descriptions. I have always wondered about the adjectives ‘banal’ (to borrow from Billig, 1995) and ‘mundane’. These adjectives can be misleading because the social issues they describe e.g. banal nationalism, banal labelling are anything but mundane and banal. I would like to conclude this chapter with the eloquent words of Phipps (2019: 29) when she maintains, ‘language can be a refuge, a shelter house and a home, but only if it is itself given refuge, shelter and home, most especially when under attack, or forced, in the bodies of its speakers, into exile’. Our languaging can be generous and caring; it produces endless means of communicating, expressing, connecting and

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growing while it cares for us; our feelings, our voices, our thoughts, our prayers, our eloquence, as well as our fears, and our dreams. It is the magic through which we externalise our means of being human, and internalise new ways of understanding and growing. To do this and much more, language needs to be protected, cared for and respected. It needs to be liberated from the powers that colonise it, occupy it, misrecognise it, shame it, and manipulate its significance to us (see Chapter 9). All of these decreating processes start with us making a decision to care for language. An initiative eloquently summarised in the following poem by Komska et al., (2019: 140): Make a decision To care for language As it is used In human and nonhuman interaction In complex, multi-layered ways In Times of Great Need And Spaces of Great Suffering Whether this language Is an act of labour, work, Leisure, pleasure, Or something else. Care for this language Always in its recursive relation To reality.

I emphasise the lines ‘In times of great need- And spaces of great suffering’ because they encapsulate the contemporary characteristics of ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 2004) that surround language and the language about language in an age of living an increasingly migratory life with growing social divides and political tensions.

Chapter Summary This chapter has provided a resilient response to the dominant neoliberal narrative about language as value and commodity. It presents a humanist

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approach to language by drawing the attention to language as a means of living, connecting, feeling and being human: language as we live with it in our daily life. It also highlights the struggles embedded in the language about language and the need to engage with linguistic advocacy and activism to care for language, a theme I revisit in Chapter 9 on language and social (in)justice.

References Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Routledge. Alim, S. (2019). (De)occupying language. In N. Avineri, L. Graham, E. Johnson, R. Riner, & J. Rosa (Eds.), Language and social justice in practice (pp. 184–192). Routledge. Baker, C., & Jones, S. (1998). Encyclopaedia of bilingualism and bilingual education. Multilingual Matters. Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. Sage. Cameron, D. (1998). Performing gender identity: Young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual of masculinity. In J. Coates (Ed.), Language and gender: A reader (pp. 461–483). Blackwell. Cohen, S. (2004). Folk devils and moral panics. Routledge. Cummins, J. (1991). Introduction. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 47 (4), 601–605. Fairclough, N. (2000). Language and neoliberalism. Discourse and Society, 11(2), 147–148. Fishman, J. (Ed.). (2001). 300-plus years of heritage language education in the United States. In Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national resource. Center for Applied Linguistics & Delta Systems. García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Wiley-Blackwell. Komska, Y., Moyd, M., & Gramling, D. (2019). Linguistic disobedience: Restoring power to civic language. Palgrave Macmillan. Ng˜ug˜ı Wa, T. O. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. East African Educational Publishers. Phipps, A. (2019). Decolonizing multilingualism. Multilingual Matters. Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice. Oxford University Press.

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Rosa, J. (2019). Contesting representations of migrant ‘illegality’ through the drop the I-word campaign: Rethinking language change and social change. In N. Avineri, L. Graham, E. Johnson, R. Riner, & J. Rosa (Eds.), Language and social justice in practice (pp. 35–43). Routledge. Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world . Oxford University Press. Valentine, G., Sporton, D., & Nielsen, K. (2009). The spaces of language. In J. Collins, S. Slembrouck, & M. Baynham (Eds.), Globalisation and language contact: Scale, migration and communicative practices (pp. 189–208). Continuum International Publishing.

5 From Language to Languaging

It was not easy for me to decide on where to locate this chapter in the book. While common sense suggests that I could open a book about ‘language in a globalised world’ with a chapter on ontologies of language, I was compelled to delay this discussion for two reasons. First, I wanted to establish an understanding of some public discourses of language in the world starting with historical processes that have produced normative schemes of thinking about language, moving to neoliberal discourses about language which I later challenge in the subsequent chapter. Second, I wanted to foreground the struggles caused by language and the ones endured by language and its speakers in societies. In doing so, I aimed to use the first four chapters as a broad contextual discussion that not only sets the scene for this chapter but also creates some curiosity to puzzle about this thing we call ‘language’. In this chapter, I start by discussing how language is commonly imagined and how these conceptualisations of language produce several displays of linguistic purity that hide the complexity of language. After that, I engage with recent conceptualisations that aim to develop expansive understandings of language using posthumanist, feminist and chronotopic perspectives in order to suggest new ways for re-imagining language. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Badwan, Language in a Globalised World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7_5

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5.1

Imagining Language

Language is a word we commonly use with confidence because we constantly use language in our everyday lives. We think that we know what language means. Yet, it is a word that defies singular definitions because it corresponds to a series of ontological categories and types pertaining to different yet related entities (Hall, 2020). Among these categories is what Hall (2020) refers to as the N-Language which coincides with widely held ‘folk’ understandings and imaginings of language in social domains. The ‘N’ suggests national, native, named and normed . Categories that gained currency due to imagined national conceptions (Anderson, 1983). This N-language is governed by regulative norms (Searle, 1969), perceived as a monolithic system and a single linguistic code (Hall, 2020). This singularity explains the use of the word ‘language’ as a count noun in the first definition of the word according to the Oxford English Dictionary: The system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc., typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure.1

What I find particularly interesting in this definition is that it tightly links language with a human collective, be it a country, community, neighbourhood, etc. This is a feature of the N-language category understood as an abstract symbolic system closely linked to group identity (Hall, 2020). This ontological category is sustained and perpetuated through national ideologies. One of the most pervasive social imaginings of the world is framed around the notion of the nation, which, in its collective sense, ties its members together through joint history, culture, customs, and language. Therefore, language is crucial to nationalist ideologies which seek to perpetuate the imagining of a community with a collective identity through which they seek political power in the form of a state or a nation-state (Spencer & Wollman, 2002: 3). National ideologies are both rational and highly emotive (Humphreys, 1 https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/105582.

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2001). They draw on perceived aspects of sharedness such as common descent, historical memories, culture, homeland (Guibernau, 1996) to rationalise the presence of a homogenous entity and to utilise nostalgic yearning to romanticise such entity. Language becomes imbricated in these discourses. Not only is it the means through which the rationalising and romanticising occurs, but it also constitutes a shared spoken or written medium that reinforces national collectivism, the iconisation of the national ‘we’, and the carving of national belonging. One of the linguistic manifestations of national ideologies is the normalisation of the one-language-one-nation ideology. There are old and recent examples of this ideology in different parts of the world. For example, in 1794, during the French revolution, Bertrand Barère, a prominent member of the National Convention said, ‘for a free people the language must be one and the same for all’ (Wright, 2012: 60). A similar message was found in a 1919 letter by the American president, Theodore Roosevelt, who said: ‘we have room for but one language here, and that is the English language’ (Piller, 2016: 39). Commenting on this ideology, Bauman and Briggs (2003) explain that European populations were regarded as civic or modern because they were perceived as monolingual and monocultural. This led to the ‘dogma of homogeneism’ (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1992: 195) which continued to dominate the socio-political spheres as European nation-states fought tooth and nail against local customs and dialects to promote unified languages at the expense of communal tradition (Bauman, 2000: 173). Language for the nation-state is a primary icon of loyalty, patriotism and good citizenship (Shohamy, 2006), therefore, it is utilised as a gate-keeping mechanism as far as national membership is concerned. Recent examples of the one-language-one-nation ideology come from the UK. One was a call by the UK government’s former integration tsar, Louise Casey, to set a deadline by which everybody in the UK should speak English (BBC, 2018). Another is a speech delivered by the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, where he pledged to make all immigrants learn English. In a 2019 speech,2 he said: 2 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/05/johnson-pledges-to-make-all-immigrants-

learn-english.

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I want everybody who comes here and makes their lives here to be, and to feel, British – that’s the most important thing – and to learn English. And too often there are parts of our country, parts of London and other cities as well, where English is not spoken by some people as their first language and that needs to be changed.

This ideological narrative underpins pervasive national discourses of language which are normatively linked to the one-language-one-nation ideology. Not only does it equate Britishness with the English language, but it also insists on requiring English to be the ‘first language’ of those who decide to ‘make their lives here’. How can speakers of other languages ever make English their first language? How can learners of English ever change their language history and grant English the ‘first language’ status as required by the Prime Minister? The above examples, and many more, suggest the processes whereby national ideologies have produced stubborn normative schemes of thinking about language in social life. Language is used and abused as a political invention, a guardian of the nation-state, and an icon for loyalty. Such expectations of linguistic conformity have strong social, moral and political undercurrents (Cameron, 1995). Commenting on the role of language in civic life, Stroud (2008) discusses the concept of linguistic citizenship explaining that the relationship between the state, its citizens and civic society is linguistically mediated, organised and sustained. At the same time, it is not unusual for this relationship to include struggles over language and linguistic rights. Other non-European nation-states have a slightly different approach to language. In the Arab World, a term that indoctrinates a supranational imagining, Walters (2018) argues that Arabic was the unifying factor for all Arabs even though they do not share one ethnicity, race or religion. This was confirmed by Dawisha’s (2003) theorisation of Arab Nationalism in the twentieth century where he explains that Arabic was an icon for the political unity of the Arabic-speaking nation. As such, the Arab world was described as ‘people who spoke a unitary language, have one heart and a common soul’ (Dawisha, 2003: 2). Language plays a major role in creating and sustaining this supranational imagining and because Arabic is also charged with religious connotations, language intersects

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with religion and history to produce collective imaginings quite different from the European ones. The discussion about language in national discourses is heavily reliant on perpetuating an imagined, homogeneous nation that subsumes a rather monolithic cultural and linguistic life. This is described by Holquist (2014: 8) as the linguistic monism principle: Linguistic monism, as a positive belief system, conceives the world as consisting of geographically dispersed common languages each of which has a unique separate identity of its own that is both stable and unitary. In its aspect as an ideology of denial, monism thus opposes the reality of change; each of the distinct common languages it recognizes as a solid entity is of course at an unstable point in its history as a system.

Linguistic monism conceals and freezes the mobility and diversity of people’s lives. It offers confidence in the languages of people and places and emphasises social cohesion, consensus and coherence. It is, therefore, an ideology of denial nurtured by the grand narratives of solid national cultures (Berger & Luckmann, 1979). While some might argue that this nineteenth century European grand narrative of the nation state is part of the past, its ideologically motivated views about language are zombies, alive and kicking. Not only that, but also these ideologies have become part of the normative thinking to talk about language in the world and the world of language. Through such ideologies, language becomes geographically dispersed in accordance with the geo-political borders of the nation-state. This language is viewed as pure, monolithic and shared by all members of the nation-state. This language has a name, often labelled as the ‘national language’, or the main official language. The above discussion of what language is springs from a dominant imagining of language in the world. As I explained, this imagining is fed and maintained via national discourses of linguistic monism. It is not only factually wrong as I will explain in the next section, but is socially non-inclusive as I discuss further in Chapter 7. This chapter functions as another reminder of the need to challenge top-down discourses about

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language in everyday life. In the next section I discuss a key sociolinguistic arrest (Rymes, 2020) caused by discourses of linguistic monism: linguistic purity.

5.2

Language with a Name: Linguistic Purity

There are several displays of the ideologies of linguistic purity which are heavily reliant on the logic of linguistic monism. I here discuss three aspects: 1. Valuing standard varieties of named languages 2. Insisting that a speech community has one shared language 3. Labelling languages as L1, L2, etc. In our world of language each language has a name. If you think of language names such as Arabic, English, French, Spanish, etc., these names do not have a clear reference. For some, these names refer to all the linguistic varieties (accents and dialects) associated with these names. For example, Arabic, as a label, entails Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, North African Darjah varieties, and so on. As such, the name refers to a galaxy of different stars; some of them are shinier than others depending on their social value and status. Nonetheless, this attractive galaxy metaphor is problematic because it subsumes the discreteness of separate stars, whereas the linguistic use of a language such as Arabic entails the creative leakage of one variety into another, or even of one (or more) language into another. Is leakage the right metaphor? Not necessarily. This is another example of how language defies descriptions including the most creative ones due to its amorphous nature. With this understanding, the name of a language refers to a rather broad range of linguistic varieties associated with a given language. However, if we refer to grammar books and dictionaries of a given language, this complexity almost disappears in favour of reducing language to its standard version. Suddenly the diversity of the linguistic galaxy is shielded by the tyranny of the standard version. Arabic becomes

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Modern Standard Arabic, English becomes associated with middle-class Standard English. This understanding of language is the one usually used in formal education which acts as a loyal guardian of the standard varieties of national languages. When teachers or students deviate from the standard, they are likely to be accused of lowering educational standards and of corrupting language. For example, during a press conference in 2015, a former education minister in Algeria proposed using Algerian Arabic during the first two years of primary education (The New Arab, 2015).3 The rationale was to use this variety as a tool to gradually introduce Standard Arabic in the following years of primary education. This proposal attracted a lot of national criticism with accusations of dishonouring the memory of the Algerians who lost their lives fighting the French colonialism. This example indicates that Arabic in education was understood in a rather monolithic way to mean Standard Arabic only. Algerian Arabic is perceived as being at odds with the standard version of the language. This ideology of linguistic purity pins down the whole complex linguistic system called Arabic into one highly valued variety called Modern Standard Arabic. However, during my teaching and field visits, I was able to speak with numerous primary school teachers in different countries such as Algeria, Tunisia, Kuwait and Palestine. Talking to them about their linguistic practices when they teach children, it became clear to me that teachers already use regional varieties of Arabic to teach primary school children about the grammar and use of Modern Standard Arabic. However, they do not feel comfortable admitting this to head teachers and school inspectors because they want to maintain their academic professionalism which is essentially measured against their adherence to the alleviated form of Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic. Examples of linguistic purity come under what Lippi-Green (2012: 67) refers to as the ‘standard language ideology’ defined as: A bias towards an abstracted, idealised, homogeneous spoken language which is imposed and maintained by dominant bloc institutions and

3 https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/features/2015/8/5/algeria-school-language-reform-hits-nat

ionalist-raw-nerve.

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which names as its model the written language, but which is drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper middle class.

This bias stems from a narrow and monolithic understanding of language that denies and conceals the sociolinguistic complexity of language in formal education. This display of linguistic purity shows how languages are ideologically and socially constructed. While the name of a language does not have a fixed linguistic reference in everyday language use, it has a clear bounded and protected understanding in official discourses about language whereby it is mainly measured against adherence to the rules of correctness in the standard version. Commenting on this Lippi-Green (2012: 68) wonders: How do the dominant bloc institutions manage to convince whole groups of human beings that they do not fully or adequately possess an appropriate human language? And more mysteriously, why do these groups hand over this authority?

These are important questions and they deserve further reflections. The short answer is language is a site of struggle and power dynamics, an area I discuss in Chapter 3. Language control is about reinstating order, stasis, cohesion and consensus because structures of power and hegemony cannot cope with complexity, uncertainty and motion. At the same time, language control is about class struggles, about winners and losers. Education is one of the most effective tools to protect the linguistic privilege of the winners by making it the educational target for everyone, with no regard to recognising other voices and representing them in civic life. Marginalised and stigmatised groups did not willingly hand over this authority to these institutions that use their power and status to reproduce their ideological apparatus. Rather, these groups were forced into this struggle by virtue of needing to sail through different gate-keeping processes in order to secure job offers or educational places. Language remains a central criterion in the gate-keeping process. Language here means the ability to adhere to the spoken and written rules of the standard version of a given language.

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This reductionist approach to language in education, or what I call elsewhere the ‘neat packaging of language’ (Badwan, 2020) has communicative and social justice consequences. I shall discuss some communicative consequences for language learning here and I will revisit the social justice implications in Chapter 9. In my research with UK-based academic sojourners who had learned English for several years before coming to the UK (Badwan, 2015, 2020), it was obvious that English for them, prior to arriving to the UK, was reduced to a single monolithic variety (Hall, 2013). However, this monolithic imagining of language was challenged by experiences of mobility for study abroad purposes. The following example comes from Mahmoud, an Emirati student studying an undergraduate degree in engineering in a UK university: I have a problem: here my tutors always ask us to speak in academic words so what I was learning in my school? Is that normal English or what? I have a question: did we learn English or not? Here they say, no, English must be used with different words unlike the normal words. This frustrates me.

This student is grappling with the ontology of English and questions such as: what is English? What did I study before? What am I expected to use now? All of these are questions associated with the understanding of what is in the name of a language. Like millions of language learners around the world, this student was exposed to a bounded, monolithic understanding of language. In other words, the student’s ontological view (the way he is thinking about how English exists in the world) which was developed through epistemologies of English in education (i.e. ways of knowing how something exists) has led to the realisation that there is one single thing out there called English. The ways in which these stances are developed are not neutral; they are ideological. Commenting on this, Pennycook (2020: 357) calls us to ask ideological questions to push the ontological boundaries by considering for example how certain actors and interests produce images of what English is. Mobility in study abroad contexts, however, can shake the confidence in learners’ long held views of what English is and how it is spoken in the world. Living in the UK and experiencing language, not as a school

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subject but as a discursive practice, Mahmoud started to come to grips with the ontological diversity of English and the understanding that the name of a language does not only refer to the Standard version but also includes different registers, genres and varieties. I discuss this educational challenge in Badwan (2017) where I present some suggestions for a more pedagogically honest description of language in societies. The suggestions entail cultivating conscious learning through raising ideological, sociolinguistic, and socio-pragmatic awareness about the liquidity of language and its amorphous nature. In addition, I encourage embracing plurilithic conceptualisations of English (Hall, 2013) in order to offer a more realistic representation of the linguistic diversity and complexity beyond classroom spaces and examination halls. In other words, I stress the importance of challenging discourses of linguistic purity that tend to equate a language with its standard variety. In doing so, I echo Rymes’ (2014: 37) position when she asserts that, ‘we cannot pretend that giving a student a frozen, standardised version of another language in addition to their mother tongue will prepare them adequately to be a full participant in the contemporary world’. The second display of linguistic purity is linked to how speech communities are described and thought of. Many multilingual communities in different parts of the world live with linguistic fluidity that defies the boundaries of a language with a name. Commenting on this, Romaine (1994: 12) argues that: The very concept of discrete languages is probably a European cultural artefact fostered by procedures such literacy and standardisation. Any attempt to count distinct languages will be an artefact of classificatory procedures rather than a reflection of communicative practices.

Many communities in the global south are translingual, drawing fluidly on many languages which are usually labelled using a name that conceals this linguistic fluidity. In Tunisia for example, while Arabic is known to be the national language of the country, Tunisians are highly translingual. The Tunisian Arabic (also known as Tunisian Darjah) consists of a mix of Arabic, French, Italian, English and Berber. These are used flexibly and

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fluidly that it becomes almost impossible to give an accurate linguistic description or label to this fluidity. This is a linguistic norm in many African communities where language is understood as translingual practice. Yet, it seems that there is a process of ideological shaming regarding admitting this fluidity. This is particularly pertinent in education. All the mixing, mingling, meshing and switching that language endures is often denied in favour of linguistic purity that submits to the hegemony of a language with a name. During my fieldwork observations of Tunisian university classes as part of a research project with the British Council to explore the linguistic practices associated with university instruction, I noticed how my presence as a British Council affiliated researcher affected the languaging practices of the teachers and students alike. Class discussions were predominately in English, with some whispered Arabic words as students support one another with the tasks they were working on. Even though I reassured the teachers and the students that my research is not only about English, and that I was looking at the use of language in education, including all the languages that teachers and students use to support their learning, my affiliation was stronger than my statements about my research. I observed the struggle of some students as they were trying to adhere to a silently agreed English only policy, yet I was reassured to see some students whispering in French, or Tunisian Darjah. This struggle, the hesitation, the thinking, the silence, the pain are caused by the hegemony of a language with a name. A problematic yet pervasive view, which is at odds with how these speakers and millions of others use language in their everyday lives. After these observations, I conducted interviews with some university lecturers and students to ask them about their linguistic practices during classes. I have noticed that when asked about language in education, the majority of teachers talked about using one language. The following quotation comes from a mathematics lecturer in a public university, and it generally represents the views expressed by the lecturers I spoke to: In teaching I use English. When they interact they use English too but when they are tired, I stimulate them with Arabic words to bring some

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movement and dynamic interaction in the group. More than 95% of our interaction is in English.

When I asked the teacher about the kind of Arabic she uses in classes, she explained that she refers to Tunisian Arabic (Darjah) which she explains as: I think that if you don’t know some French words that are frequently used in Tunisia you will not understand part of the Darjah communication.

These responses highlight how the linguistic fluidity of Tunisia can be overlooked when speakers are reliant on using named languages. These names are used as ‘classificatory procedures’ (Romaine, 1994: 12) and do not do justice to the complexity and fluidity of languaging performed by Tunisian lecturers and students. On the other hand, some Tunisian students seemed more open to talk about their fluid languaging practices. The following quotation comes from a business undergraduate student in response to my question, ‘how do you use language at university?’: During breaks we mainly communicate in Tunisian Arabic. Class discussions when teachers are not observing discussions we use three languages. We take notes in English, with comments in French and Arabic to explain the information. We also add drawings to remind us of some examples.

Not only does this quotation refer to the different named languages used by Tunisian university students, but it also directs the attention to other semiotic resources such as drawings. The examples I present from Tunisia are not very different from many other communities in the global south where linguistic fluidity is the norm, rather than the exception. Such complexity, however, is often shielded through the use of concealing and misleading labels such as ‘Arabic’, ‘French’, etc. The tyranny of named languages and the hegemonic discourses of linguistic purity are brought into question in the following quotation from Pennycook (2010: 121):

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Perhaps it is time to question the very notions that underpin our assumptions about languages … to ask whether the ways we name and describe languages as separate entities, the ways we view bi- and multilingualism, are based on 20th century epistemologies that can no longer be used to describe the use of languages in a globalizing world.

In line with the above quotation, in challenging the language about language, applied linguists can create decolonising spaces that treat language as a verb and a performative noun that resides outside the boundaries of socially invented discrete linguistic entities. As such, they can reconstruct and recreate new discourses that enable translingual communities in the global South and in other parts of the world to actually affirm their histories, heritages, traditions, struggles, legacies that are embedded in, and enacted through, their hybrid linguistic practices, which defy painful linguistic reductions caused by insisting on using a language with a name. Such monolithic reductions also fail to acknowledge the proficient linguistic repertoires of translingual speakers who are expected to meet monolingual standards of linguistic proficiency. A case in a point comes from my fieldwork in Tunisia. When I asked many university lecturers to talk about the communicative repertoires of their students, many lamented the decline of linguistic standards among Tunisian students. The following quotation from a university lecturer summarises this view: The level of speaking in Arabic, French and English in Tunisia has gone down in spite of years of instruction. What does that tell you? In spite of all the resources we put into teaching these languages, we are not producing anything. If this were a business, it would shut down.

The above quotation represents a monolithic view of what it means to speak a language. When students’ language proficiency is measured by standardised tests that do not test their ability to language and communicate, rather, their ability to adhere to monolithic discrete systems, the results are likely to demonstrate low proficiency in all languages. This could cause significant educational and professional challenges for these individuals, who in spite of their rich communicative repertoires, are not

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deemed proficient in any language. These pervasive monolithic understandings of language are problematic because they force individuals to deliberately perceive their languages as separate entities even though, ‘there is no wall between languages’ Rymes (2014: 31). Forcing a wall between languages makes it harder for individuals to talk about the relationship between these languages i.e. which one is closer to their heart? Which one is their first or second? Which language they speak more fluently? etc. Said’s (1999: 401) Out of Place documents this struggle to settle with language: I have never known what language I spoke first, Arabic or English, or which one was really mine beyond any doubt. What I do know, however, is that the two have always been together in my life, one resonating in the other, sometimes ironically, sometimes nostalgically, most often each correcting, and commenting on, the other. Each can seem like my absolutely first language, but neither is. I trace this primal instability back to my mother, whom I remember speaking to me in both English and Arabic, although she always wrote to me in English—once a week, all her life, as did I, all of hers. Certain spoken phrases of hers like tislamli or mish "arfa shu biddi "amal? or rouh"ha—dozens of them—were Arabic, and I was never conscious of having to translate them or, even in cases like tislamli, knowing exactly what they meant.

This quotation sheds light on the inbetweenness that language creates and the fluidity of linguistic affiliation multilingual individuals experience. These dynamic encounters of being in and out of language all the time make it hard for individuals to answer seemingly simple questions such as ‘what is your first language?’. These examples highlight the tyranny of linguistic purity and the normative thinking about speaking a language with clear borders that protect it from the influence of another linguistic system. As I highlighted in this section, a language with a name is a problematic framing of language that makes individuals feel at odd with their multilingualism and linguistic fluidity. This discussion takes us to another epistemological challenge: how can we then talk about speech communities? Traditionally, a speech community is defined as a ‘human aggregate characterised by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs

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and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage’ (Gumperz, 1968: 381). Even though this definition does not include monolingual references nor does it subsume a one-language— one-community formulation, it is not uncommon to understand speech communities in these terms. This is because ‘linguistic units come to be linked with social units’, languages with people (Gal & Irvine, 1995: 970). These social units are ideologically and politically ‘imagined’ (Anderson, 1983) as homogenous, leading to the boundaries of exclusion and the production of othering. There have been different sociolinguistic arguments that comment on speech communities as a term. For example, Rampton (2010) explains that modern sociolinguistics has been preoccupied with redefining the term ‘speech communities’ to develop a more hospitable and diversified view of communities. As such, there is a growing emphasis on treating linguistic communities as ‘emergent ones, constantly being reshaped by the interactive dynamics of their members’ (Mufwene, 2010: xii). This understanding, however, is far from folk understandings and imaginings of speech community as language continues to be a mechanism for othering through which difference is ideologically constructed. Proponents of linguistic purity would like to insist on the purity and homogeneity of their speech communities; a vision that contradicts the real experiences of contemporary liquid communities. Key to the reproduction of the one language, one speech community formula is sociolinguistic research that stem from methodological nationalism. In her discussion of methodological nationalism in linguistics, Schneider (2019) cautions against sociolinguistic bias that assumes homogeneous national societies to be the unmarked, normal and natural way of human beings, and therefore, treats ethnically and nationally defined communities as a taken-for-granted starting point for research. She demonstrates that methodological nationalism is based on the imagining of language as an outcome of national discourses. Such imagining is linked to the linguistic monism principle (Holquist, 2014) I discussed earlier. In Chapter 7, I turn the attention to spatial conceptualisations in sociolinguistics and the role of linguistic monism and purity in configuring language-based symbolic violence.

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The third manifestation of linguistic purity is embedded in the labelling of languages as L1, L2, etc. This labelling stems from monolingual epistemologies of language. Commenting on this, Gramling (2016) explains that monolingual individuals transfer their monolingual ideologies of language to their use of other languages. Such monolingual epistemologies perpetuate the discreteness of languages, an understanding that underpins questions such as, how many languages do you speak? What is your first language, second language, etc.? These questions reflect reductionist beliefs about language. In the complex and fluid world of language, it is not uncommon for translingual individuals to struggle with these questions. For example, many migrants in the UK use English repertoire in their professional and sometimes personal lives. I asked many multilingual academics in the UK about what they would deem as their first language. Many of them found it hard to decide. English repertoire seemed to be the most dominant since some have English-speaking partners, children attending English schools and they spend almost all of their academic and professional time using English. They talk about the languages they acquired during their childhood as old friends whom they visit from time to time but they are not sure if these languages are still their ‘first’ languages. These responses somehow echo the sentiments of Juan Goytisolo, a Spanish writer who spent most of his life away from Spain and for whom Spanish became the ‘authentic homeland in his exile’ (Bauman, 2000: 205). Another issue caused by monolingual epistemologies that underpin the labelling of language as L1, L2 or main language was observed in discussions about the government’s census question on language in England and Wales. The question: ‘what is your main language?’ was first introduced in 2011. Back then, 8% of the population declared a ‘main language’ other than English or Welsh. According to the Office for National Statistics Topic Report on Language4 (2016: 6), the focus on language was justified in the following ways:

4 https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/censustransformationprogramme/consultations/the2021censusin

itialviewoncontentforenglandandwales.

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Data from these questions have been used to identify people for whom English is not their main language and to identify areas where a particular language is in use… Data are also used for targeting the delivery of services such as language support, translation, and study programmes at a local level to promote integration and cohesion within communities, to help eliminate discrimination, and to ensure that people are treated fairly.

While it is important to collect data on language for the reasons reported above, it is not surprising that many respondents found the question unclear which led an undercount of people with multilingual repertoires. Here is an example of one of the report’s (2016: 6–7) quotations on the lack of clarity associated with the question on language: Many D/deaf people who use BSL are still unclear about whether they should select English or BSL. Many struggle to read or speak, but they still have to use English with family and work, so they have told us that they still selected English. This changes/ oversimplifies, and ultimately distorts, the impact of the numbers of BSL users.

Since the question approaches language from a monolithic, monolingual perspective which is essentially at odds with the linguistic fluidity experienced by the census respondents, many were faced with the challenge of choosing one language with a name. This is because their range of linguistic repertoire are too complex to be framed within the boundaries of one named language. In his critique of the language census question, Matras5 (2019) calls for changing the language question in order to generate accurate data about language in communities. He states that: Amending the census question would give us a sharper picture of the country’s multilingual reality. It would also signal a break with the monolingual mindset that has been guiding policy in England so far. That would be an important step toward repairing community relations as

5 http://blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk/growth_inclusion/2019/04/improving-the-census-question-

on-language-could-help-repair-community-relations-and-britains-international-image-post-bre xit/.

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well as an international image that have both been badly damaged by the Brexit decision.

This is indeed a very important yet challenging task. Amending the question entails looking for creative ways to challenge and transform normative thinking about language in order to direct the attention to languaging, language as a verb. Language is dynamic, expanding, proliferating and in continuous flux. This applies to both the language of individuals and the language of communities. Can we ever develop an approach that captures language? I use the verb ‘capture’ here in order to reflect similar concerns to those expressed by Butler (2009) when she discusses how the cameraperson with their camera zoom chooses to capture what suits their narrative of an event. This capturing is never neutral and is never to be seen as a full reflection of the whole scene. Language researchers are camerapeople capturing language in societies. This capturing cannot fully represent what language capacities individuals have at their disposal. There are at least three reasons for why this is the case: 1. Individuals tend to have certain perceptions of what counts as a language; 2. Language is biographical, expanding as we grow and move in and out of communicative fields, styles, registers and modes of acceptable communicative behaviour; and 3. Language is not only biographical but is also interactional, developing through our social interaction with others. When individuals are asked to answer questions such as, ‘what language do you speak?’, they are asked to talk about language as something bounded and singular that they pick up from their pre-ordained cultural roots. Similarly, if the question uses the plural form of language, individuals are expected to talk about more than one discrete linguistic system. Often when individuals are not confident about their linguistic proficiency in a language, they become hesitant to add it to the list of the languages they speak even if they have good communicative abilities in this language. This is partly because of what Rymes (2014) calls

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the ‘linguistic monolith’ approach to multilingualism. In her research with schoolteachers in the US, she found that the majority of teachers reported that they spoke no Spanish. However, when she asked them to make a list of Spanish words they know, the lists had at least 20 words. Commenting on this, she explains that the ‘linguistic monolith’ approach emphasises the separation of languages, treats linguistic communication as bounded within nation-state boundaries, highlights notions of correctness and standardisation, and equates knowing two languages as ‘double monolingualism’ (Heller, 2006). This approach to understanding language in the world conceals a great range of linguistic repertoires simply because their speakers do not think of them as good enough to be listed as languages they speak. The second challenge with capturing language is that it is biographical. That is why many researchers use expressions such as language histories or language trajectories to emphasise that individuals continue to develop new ways of communication as they grow. When I discuss this with my university students, I usually use the expression, ‘your life story with language’. To help students understand the ‘story’ approach to language, I usually start by asking them to write down their responses to two questions: 1. How many languages do you speak? 2. What is your first language? After this task, I ask them to write their biographical story with language from birth until the time of the lecture. 1. 2. 3. 4.

How did you speak as a child? How did schooling affect your ways of speaking and writing? What happened to these ways after you joined university? What new ways of writing and speaking have you developed over the course of your education (e.g. writing academically, delivering formal presentations)? 5. What life events contributed to you acquiring new linguistic abilities? (e.g. studying a foreign language at school, living abroad, having a multilingual partner, etc.)

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6. How would describe your linguistic proficiencies in the different types of language you speak? The students then start comparing between their responses to the two tasks. We collectively learn that being triggered to think of our biographical story with language creates room for more elaborate responses that help us better understand the languaging practices of the class. We also learn that asking individuals to tick one or two boxes to describe their languaging acts is more likely to capture only a small part of their biographical stories with language. The logic that I use when designing the life story task is aligned with the notion of linguistic repertoire advocated by Blommaert and Backus (2013: 15) who refer to linguistic repertoires as, ‘individual, biographically organised complexes of resources… [that] follow the rhythms of actual human lives’. Nonetheless, the challenge of capturing language does not stop here. Are repertoires exclusively linguistic? What do we miss out if we insist on focusing on language as the only primary focus of communication? In his research on the language of Indian English speakers in London, Gumperz (1982) found that although Indian English speakers were fluent speakers of English, miscommunication in crucial gate-keeping interactions such as job interviews continued to happen: The interaction is punctuated by long asides, misunderstandings of fact and misreadings of intent. A, on the other hand, finds he is not being listened to and not given a chance to explain his problem…. in spite of repeated attempts, both speakers utterly fail in their efforts to negotiate a common frame in terms to decide on what is being focused on and where the argument is going at any one time. (Gumperz, 1982: 185)

He refers to these misunderstandings as crosstalk which he mainly attributes to racist attitudes. While his work approaches language from a repertoire perspective, this repertoire approach, with its exclusive focus on language, is not sufficient to interpret the crosstalk, the misunderstandings that occurred. Commenting on this, Rymes (2014: 7) argues, ‘the way someone is dressed, the colour of their skin, the length of their hair, the way they sit during an interview or what kind of bag they carry

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their papers in, all may have an effect on how encounters with diversity unfold’. In order to account for all these factors that affect intercultural aspects of communication, she proposes the use of the term communicative repertoires which she defines as, ‘the collection of ways individuals use language and other means of communication (gestures, dress, posture, accessories) to function effectively in the multiple communities in which they participate’ (Rymes, 2014: 10). Drawing on this orientation to communication, I ask my students to complete a third task: 1. How do you dress when you come to university? Does this affect how you communicate? 2. Think of how you use your voice inside the class. How different is it from using your voice in other social settings? 3. Think of your gestures and posture during class discussion. Do you feel that you, as a group, affect each other’s use of these communicative tools? 4. Think of how I (and other classmates) affect your communication and the language you use during class discussions This task aims at exploring communication beyond language (Rymes, 2014). It usually leads to comments about how we start imitating one another consciously or sub-consciously. I remember one of my students saying, ‘Khawla, I use more gestures when I speak in your class because you use a lot of gestures when you teach’. Through such a task, we collectively uncover two key aspects of communication: how communication goes beyond language, and how we develop new communicative tools as a result of being together and interacting with one another. This takes me to the third challenge; language is not only biographical, but is also interactional and interpersonal. Interactional sociolinguistic research demonstrates that we do not communicate to people but with people. This togetherness is crucial to developing notions of comembership and contingent alignment (Erickson & Shultz, 1982) which not only affect how we speak but how we use other communicative cues such as body language, tone and intonation under the influence

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of one another’s presence. In a similar vein, this emphasis on the interactional aspect of language is prominent in Bakhtin’s work on ideological becoming: I live in a world of others’ words. And my entire life is an orientation in this world, a reaction to others’ words (an infinitely diverse reaction), beginning with my assimilation of them (in the process of the initial mastery of speech) and ending with assimilation of the wealth of human culture (expressed in the word or in other semiotic materials). The other’s word sets for a person the special task of understanding this word. (Bakhtin, 1986: 143)

Bakhtin’s work has been influential to understanding the role of the other in the development and the becoming of the self. It is also relevant to discussions about developing communicative repertoires as a result of encounters and absorbs. This aspect of language development is always in the making. Therefore, it is probably the hardest to capture. The biographical and interactional aspects of language can be perceived through Rymes’ (2014: 10) metaphor of ‘archaeological layers’. Indeed, we only scratch the surface when we ask individuals what language they speak. I cannot claim that my three tasks have enabled me to fully capture the languaging practices of my students. Rather, they help me delve into the dynamic terrains of languaging. They do not include references to digital literacies, digital communicative cues, and practices of online alignment with others. Yet, they help me explore with my students the multifacetedness of language and the challenges of extracting details about individuals’ language. At the same time, it is crucial to be aware of how our questions about language frame normative thinking around language. That is to say, had I asked my students to engage with spatial, material and digital affordances around their languaging, they may have developed an awareness that the language about language does actually permit the inclusion of what is not usually thought of as language. These frames are important as they can limit or broaden the thinking about what language can be. In a way they resemble the role of a photographer who captures then frames a photograph. Commenting on frames of thinking, Butler (2009: 83)

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argues that ‘we have yet to understand this frame, these frames, where they come from and what kind of action they perform’. So the challenge of extracting details about the amorphous languaging acts continues. It constitutes a major ongoing challenge for linguists and applied linguists who for a very long time assumed that ‘the object of linguistic investigation—language or languages—is a known and settled entity’ (Pennycook, 2020: 355) rather than asking the all-important question of ‘what is it we are actually dealing with?’ (ibid.). In the next section and in an attempt to shed more light on what we are dealing with when we talk about language, I re-imagine language through engaging with post-humanist, new materialist, embodied, affective and chronotopic perspectives. Taken together, these insights offer expansive and overlapping conceptual tools that assist with developing language to talk about language.

5.3

Re-imagining Language

In his Short History of Linguistics, Robins (1997) explains that the development of linguistics as a discipline at the beginning of the nineteenth century coincided with the heyday of nationalism. It is, therefore, not surprising that the discipline is influenced by national imaginings of language. National ideologies, as I explained in the previous section, draw on imagined principles of consensus, boundedness and sharedness. These features were reflected in the establishment of linguistics as a discipline which was largely dependent on constructing an ideological imagining of language as a conventional system based on certain characteristics and governed by structural principles. Like nations, languages are seen as constrained within geo-political borders. They are regulated and standardised and they are utilised as national markers of unity, homogeneity and pride. And since nations are constructed based on spatial and categorical distinction (Kearney, 1991), languages too are ideologically perceived as discrete and distinctive entities distributed across national spaces. In addition, the godfathers of modern linguistics such as Saussure and Chomsky established a legacy, or perhaps a fallacy, that locates

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language in the mind of the individual. Under the influence of structuralism, we are told that each language has its discrete structure that exists out there. That structure, or langue in Saussure’s terms, is abstract, static, objectified, and bounded (Canagarajah, 2020: 296). Similarly, Chomsky’s competence/performance distinction, as observed by Canagarajah (2020), locates grammatical structures in the mind. This created what Canagarajah (ibid.) refers to as ‘methodological individualism’ which is based on separating the mind from the body, the human from the non-human, as part of a conceptual operation described by Viveiros de Castro (1998) as the Great Divide. Braidotti (2019) explains that the Great Divide has continued to be a foundational principle of European thinking since the Enlightenment. Crucial to the construction of this divide is the understanding that human powers such as language, thinking, decision making are exclusively situated in the mind, isolated from the heart and the body. Such an epistemological stance continues to methodologically inform most linguistic research until today. Love (2009: 31) argues that ‘much of what has passed for a science of language over the last 150 years has been nothing but an exercise in culture maintenance’. Not only is it an act of cultural maintenance but is also a stubborn process of ideological reproduction in the discipline. Such ideologies are consequential as they wield significant influence on how language is thought of in societies, researched in the discipline, and produced in discussions about what it means to be a competent user of language. While these imaginings have largely remained uncontested in theoretical linguistics, there has been a growing trend in applied and socio-linguistics that calls for a reconsideration of what language is and where it is located while seeking conceptual inspirations from posthumansim (Braidotti, 2013), new materiality (Barad, 2007), affective feminist perspectives (Ahmed, 2004), and chronotopic contextualisations (Bakhtin, 1981). Bringing these transdisciplinary insights ‘home’ enables the establishment of ‘a different subjectivity from that which has for centuries been ours’ (Irigaray, 2008: 133). For example, Pennycook (2018) argues that breaking free from the distinction between interiority and exteriority permitted through these transdisciplinary conceptual

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lenses has resulted in relocating assumptions about where social communication and semiotics occur. As such, there is an increasing recognition for the need to conceptually shift from methodological individualism to distributed practice when researching language as performance (Canagarajah, 2020: 304). Aligned with the view that thinking does not occur just in the brain but at ‘a series of sites in the body’ (Thrift, 2007: 166); that our bodies inter/intra act with the different places and objects around us (Ahmed, 2004); and that we are materially embedded and embodied affectively and relationally (Braidotti, 2019), languaging (and communication overall) becomes a distributed practice. With this in mind, we can start to break away from dualistic thoughts through focusing on entanglement, becoming, bodily and material imminence (Leonard, 2020). As such, we can understand the embodied nature of language and how bodies produce language through tuning the voice, producing bodily semiotics, and expressing embodied emotions; all of which are crucial to the production of embodied indexicality, the production of contextualised meanings through the bodily engagement with the world (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016). At the same time, Bucholtz and Hall (2016) explain that language produces bodies through introducing the body to sociocultural realms of meaning-making. For example, I am always fascinated by the impact of switching on the camera during online communications. As soon as the camera is on, I sit differently and I start observing my moving picture on the screen to see how I use my face, eyes, smile, and eyebrows to communicate. This communication produces bodily arrangements that change as soon as I click the ‘leave’ meeting button. This posthumanist understanding enables us to see how bodies are imbricated in complex arrangements that include human and nonhuman conditions. Sociolinguistic readings of posthumanism (e.g. Bucholtz & Hall, 2016; Canagarajah, 2020; Pennycook, 2018) have benefited from decentring the focus on language, the human, and the mind, arguing for the importance to see communication as distributed across evolving arrays of bodies, spaces and materiality in order to understand language as a ‘fully embodied, fully material phenomenon’ (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016: 189). In addition, intercultural communication readings of posthumanism have also benefited from perceiving encounters with different cultures

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as embodied and embedded intra-actions between humans and nonhumans. In this new materialist understanding, humans are not seen as belonging to pre-existing categories but are thought of as continuously being in the process of becoming (Barad, 2007), as they inter/intra-act with one another and with objects, places and technologies. Such an understanding breaks away from the dualistic thinking sustained by the Great Divide between cultures in order to develop a ‘new conceptualisation of difference’ (Tuin & Dolphijn, 2012: 115) based on dynamic becoming and entanglement, rather than imposing assumptions, and imaginings of singular and unitary representations of cultures, which are always becoming in ways that yield a plethora of equally true representations. This new conceptualisation requires what Barad (2007: 93) calls a ‘diffractive methodology’ which explores the boundary-making processes that produce objects and subjects. Diffraction, Barad (2007: 30) explains, ‘involves reading insights through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge, how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter’. In other words, posthumanist intercultural research can be further expanded by treating difference, not as the starting point of departure but as an inter/intra-actional concept in the making. Researching it through a diffractive process entails exploring relational differences aligned with material immanence (Braidotti, 2019). This understanding does not necessarily produce a new thing but a new relation (Atkinson, 2017) and new ways to talk about language and communication that are merciful, graceful, and hopeful (Leonard, 2020). Committed to exploring the potential of using post-humanism in intercultural studies, my work with Elisha Hall in Badwan and Hall (2020) offers an example of using a walk-along as a research tool that enables critical, reflective, differential, embodied and embedded insights into how individuals inter/intra-act with each other and with spaces, places, objects and artefacts in different or similar ways. Walk-alongs enable the possibility of exploring experiences that occur in ‘less easily storied’ spaces (Holton & Riley, 2014: 63). The study emerged as a response to a comment made by a research participant, Samiya, who was trying during a sit-down interview to find words to explain why

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a particular place in Manchester is significant to her. During a sixhour walk-along, Samiya showed Elisha the significant places that she frequently visits in Manchester so that she could show her the untellable about how these places invoke memories and emotions that produce a sense of belonging for Samiya. The two women, a British research assistant, Elisha, and an Algerian doctoral researcher, Samiya, were able to deconstruct the cultural boundaries by liberating themselves from imposing essentialist descriptions based on national anchoring. As they developed a sense of coming together, they were also able to explore how different differences get made (Barad, 2007). For example, Elisha writes about a harissa tub on a table she shared with Samiya: Samiya draws my attention to – what I termed ‘cultural artefacts’ – a Harissa tub that had been repurposed as a sugar pot; she explained that in her country, Harissa is a key ingredient in a student meal – oven baked Hummus, topped with Harissa and served with baguette. However, to myself it bore no significance and this is perhaps how cultural distinctions go unrecognised by people that are unaware of their purpose (Badwan & Hall, 2020: 233).

This harissa tub moved Samiya, made her feel the connection to her home in Algeria and invoked memories from the past. Yet, for Elisha, it simply appeared to be a ‘sugar pot’. This critical moment left Elisha wondering about the construction of difference and the boundaries between subjects and objects. These reflections were permitted through recognising subjective entanglements in material immanence (Braidotti, 2019). Another example of posthumanist affordances to explore how differences get made comes from Elisha’s diary when she wrote: During this conversation, I am forced to recognise the intersectional challenge Samiya faces. She feels free to go where she pleases in the city. However, this street accommodates a large part of her cultural identity – commodities, communities and religion. This does in some way circumscribe a large aspect of her identity to this geographic location. Unlike myself, I am not dependent on a singular location to accommodate my identity. I have the privilege of preference. On this street her

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gender, religion, clothing style, and ethnicity appear to prevent her from going into a bar. Beyond this street, I wonder how and if all these factors intersect to prevent that experience in more insidious ways. (Badwan & Hall, 2020: 236)

This example demonstrates how posthumanist thinking enables individuals to move from reductionist assumptions about cultural categories and invites intersectional interpretations foregrounded in exploring how subjective, spatial and material affordances are relationally created. These examples, among many others, are central to reimagining language and communication. The feelings, reflections, and realisations developed through posthumanist thinking are not simply located in the mind of the human, isolated from the heart, the body and memories. Nor are they independent or separable from the nonhuman. Rather, they are enmeshed in the embodied and embedded entanglement of the human. That is to say, these post-humanist and new materialist orientations entail a renewed focus on materiality (Barad, 2003) in order to understand how ‘things make people happen’ (Kell, 2015: 442). They challenge the mind/body, human/non-human binaries, treating them as equal resources, not only connected to one another but are also capable of affecting one another. These orientations decentre the hierarchy of language—understood as exclusively consisting of linguistic resources— and treat it as only part of a larger semiotic assemblage (Badwan & Hall, 2020; Deleuze, 2007; Harvey et al., 2019; Pennycook, 2018). The assemblage metaphor (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) has been used in the literature as an umbrella term that refers to the collage of linguistic, spatial, material and digital resources. I take an ambivalent position on the ‘assemblage’ logic. While it helps with decentring the focus on language, an assemblage inherently assumes discreteness, a sense of collecting countable and identifiable entities. There is something paradoxical about the term; it challenges the separation between different types of resources: linguistic, spatial, material and digital, and yet it does not do more than bringing together discrete entities. Can we ever come up with a metaphor that blurs the boundaries of discreteness with reference to language, place and materiality while at the same time reflecting the state of always being made?

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So how can we talk about languaging from these transdisciplinary conceptual perspectives? It is useful to understand that ‘there is no longer a world “out there” separate from humans and represented in language but rather a dynamic interrelationship between different materialities’ (Pennycook, 2018: 449). As such, individuals’ repertoires are no longer individual and biographical (cf. Blommaert & Backus, 2013). Rather, they are emergent properties that derive from the inter/intraaction between people, artefacts and spaces. What is more is that this inter/intra-interaction is both chronotopic and affective. Chronotopic orientations draw on Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of a chronotope, where ‘spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thoughtout, concrete whole’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 84). This is a useful concept not only because it draws attention to the contextualisation of languaging acts, but also because it merges place with time. Therefore, I echo Georgakopoulou’s view (2005: n.p.) that ‘Bakhtin could be made to work “harder” in sociolinguistics, particularly in relation to the chronotope’.While place and spatial conceptualisations of language have been widely recognised in applied linguistics (see Chapter 7), time remains an underexplored factor. Time is an important factor to understanding language as a distributed practice. It is not just a contextual reference; rather it is a consequential element that shapes, and is shaped by, languaging practices. I, elsewhere (Taibi & Badwan, 2021), argue for the need to develop a stretched understanding of time that includes real time, online compressed time, previously held language ideologies carried over time and challenged in recent times, as well as time-influenced linguistic encounters. Time is always there, always relevant. Individuals connect and reconnect with words that they have not used for some time; individuals use words that remind them of other people, events, and memories that take them back in time; individuals make linguistic decisions about what/how to speak depending on who is present during that time. Almost all our languaging acts are constructed in relation time. Think of how we use greetings such as good morning, Merry Christmas, Ramadan Mubarak. Think of new languaging conventions during the COVID 19 pandemic such as ‘I hope this email finds you in good health and spirits’, etc. All of these examples, and many more, feature

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the inevitable merging of time and place during languaging practices and hence the focus on chronotopic perspectives in this discussion. In addition to chronotopic contributions to understanding language, I would like to draw attention to feminist affective perspectives to languaging. The interaction between and within the human and the non-human, Ahmed (2004) argues, produces emotions that shape what bodies do, stick to objects and bodies, and move around, circulating variations in intensities of feelings. A common example is that people tend to find handwritten messages more personal than typed ones. Not only does the process of handwriting entail engaging the hand with material resources (pen, paper, colour, card, etc.) but it also reflects the writer’s personality and feelings. From this perspective, languaging subjects are engaged with the process of finding their way through the repertoire and resources available at their disposal to be able to externalise the views, feelings and knowledge they want to share with others. Some of these feelings and views are developed in relation to spatial and material resources. These ways of languaging are not objective, but are shaped by the feelings, intentions, purposes and attitudes of the languaging subject. In return, they further produce feelings, views and attitudes that move the addressed languaging subject(s). Like emotions, languaging events affect us and are affected by us. To illustrate language from post-humanist, affective and chronotopic perspectives, I would like to use this card designed by my son at the age of 5 years (Fig. 5.1). The card is part of paper wrapping for a new mobile device in our house. This material enabled the making of the card and its associated languaging event. It gave my son an inspiration for doing something with this resource. The thinking behind the languaging event was initiated due to the human/non-human inter/intra-action. The semiotic repertoires are extended beyond phonetically (mis-)spelled words to include: • drawings saturated with affects, with smiles and happy wishes; • drawings related to the time when the card was made. That is when I was ill during the Christmas holiday; and • a sticker of a bee because he knows how much I love honey.

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Fig. 5.1 Languaging as distributed practice

This simple card does not reflect a simple understanding of language. Rather, it demonstrates how language is always in the becoming and how it is distributed across, and orchestrated by, a range of material, spatial, affective and chronotopic resources. Some of these resources make the languaging act happen. Instead of analysing the card from the perspective of which words are correctly spelled and which are not, I have demonstrated through engaging with new materialism how material relations offer expansive understandings of language: they show how materiality makes and shapes discourse and how adding a materialist lens can change the narrative about language. One final note which I would like conclude this chapter with is to illustrate that the way I use the term languaging incorporates what other scholars refer to as assemblages. In their work on linguistic ontological turns, Gurney and Demuro (2019: 1) trace the move from language, to languaging and then to assemblages arguing that, ‘we then begin to think through language/languaging as assemblage’. In this book, I chose not to separate languaging from assemblages but to merge the two, with the understanding of language as performance and distributed practice as captured by the word ‘languaging’. This is aligned with the posthumanist perspectives I presented earlier that emphasise how language as a verb

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is embedded in material immanence. As such, while I do not use the ‘semiotic assemblage’ logic, I embrace the ontological stance of breaking free from the hierarchy of linguistic resources, highlighting the need to include posthumanist, chronotopic, spatial, material, affective resources and perspectives in the melting mix of communication that is always in flux, depending on the dynamics and the ecology of the languaging event and the materialist conditions within which it emerges.

Chapter Summary In this chapter, I discussed normative thinking about language, embedded in ideologies of linguistic essentialism, and produced by dominant national ideologies which are reproduced through formal language education. I then discussed three linguistic manifestations associated with linguistic essentialism, namely: linguistic purity, the one-languageone-community formula, and the labelling of language as L1, L2, etc. After that, I presented an expansive posthumanist understanding of language that takes into account the inter/intra-action between linguistic, spatial, digital and material resources. This chapter traces the discussion from language to languaging, highlighting the understanding of language as performance, always in the making.

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6.1

Multiple Narratives

The unprecedented levels of mobility of people, ideas, capital, and cultures within and across national and international borders has ushered in new configurations that call for new paradigms for conceptualising the world. As we are grappling with new ways of describing the world, Nail (2019) calls for a new grand narrative based on mobility, fluidity or liquidity. This chapter partially responds to this call while asserting that there could not be a singular grand narrative to discuss mobility. As I explained in Chapter 1, individuals’ experiences with mobility are not unitary; they mainly depend on the types of movers, the circumstances under which mobility occurs, as well as the purposes and directions of mobility. Therefore, while this chapter attempts to provide some comments on language on the move, it is crucial to remember that these comments are not meant to offer a singular, grand narrative. This multiplicity of narratives is a state of being inspired by the post-humanist understanding that ‘we are all in this together but we are not one and the same’ (Braidotti, 2019: 52). The binding force is a shared understanding and recognition of how we are embodied and embedded in conditions © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Badwan, Language in a Globalised World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7_6

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of mobility, liquidity, oppression, capitalism and subjection in relational and differential ways that produce multi-layered and multi-directional narratives that defy grand narratives and flat equivalences. Echoing the concerns of Deumert (2020: 231) who asserts that, ‘a certain romanticism has often been attached to the idea of mobility, associating movement with freedom, opportunity and human agency’, I would like to stress that while some experiences of mobility might indeed feature agency, freedom, prosperity and success, others are surrounded by struggles, resistance, and a quest to be heard, seen and recognised. This is why it proves difficult to develop a sociolinguistic conceptualisation of semiotic mobility that would do justice to the varying experiences of mobile subjects. For example, skilled migrants in highly paid jobs experience mobility in very different ways if compared with migrants who are labelled as ‘non-skilled’ or if compared with the experiences of refugees and displaced movers. In my own research on language and mobility (Badwan, 2015; Badwan & Simpson, 2019), I explore the experiences of academic sojourners in UK Higher Education. Academic sojourners are not only ‘wanted movers’; paying full tuition fees and staying for a limited period determined by a visa card, but are also ‘good multilinguals’ (Deumert, 2020) who have proved themselves capable of learning in English according to Anglo-centric admission criteria that value English and only English proficiency. In this research, I develop what I elsewhere (Badwan & Simpson, 2019) refer to as ‘ecological orientations to sociolinguistic scales’. While this orientation draws the attention to how the who, what, when, where and why of interaction affect individuals’ semiotic mobility and language value, I cannot claim that an approach that was developed based on the experiences of ‘elite movers’ (Ladegaard & Phipps, 2020) can also speak for non-elite movers, and hence my emphasis on the complexity of developing an inclusive and expansive sociolinguistic framework for language and mobility, or a ‘grand narrative’ for mobility, to borrow Nail’s (2019) phrase. With this limitation in mind, I now turn to attempts at theorising language and mobility. Mobility scholars over the past two decades have been preoccupied with questions such as: what happens to language and its value when individuals move across time and place? Do individual maintain their semiotic mobility or do they lose it as their language becomes subject

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to de/re-valuations and new linguistic expectations/requirements? (Badwan, 2015; Badwan & Simpson, 2019; Block & Cameron, 2002; Blommaert, 2007, 2010; Canagarajah, 2013; Canagarajah & De Costa, 2015; Fairclough, 2006; Pennycook, 2007). Most of the answers swing on a pendulum between place power and individual agency. That is to say, scholars on the place power side argue that ‘what are adequate linguistic capabilities for one setting can be profoundly inadequate for another’ (Collins & Slembrouck, 2005: 191) and that people do not move across empty spaces. New spaces are historically someone else’s social space, and they are filled with norms, expectations, conceptions of what counts as proper and normal language use and what does not count as such (Blommaert, 2010). On the other hand, scholars on the individual agency side accentuate individuals’ ability to negotiate power and positioning in the new place (Canagarajah, 2013; Canagarajah & De Costa, 2015). My own position, as I illustrate in this chapter, is somewhere between the two sides.

6.2

Scale Theorisations

A useful starting point would be to introduce the notion of ‘scale’ in sociolinguistics. Blommaert (2007) calls for sociolinguistic research that enables better understanding of society, rather than a reduction of society to linguistic structure. To this end, he suggests the use of sociolinguistic scale as a tool to interpret the stratification of society (2007: 3): Introducing a notion such as scale for describing current phenomena in communicative action has the advantage that it introduces a layered, stratified model of society as a frame for the interpretation of such phenomena. Power and inequality thus become incorporated into our ways of imagining such phenomena, and rather than seeing them as exceptional aberrations in social life (as in many analyses focused on power), they can be seen as integral features of every social event.

While acknowledging the usefulness of the scale metaphor in sociolinguistic research as a way to address power inequality and traditional

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social categories, the approach to sociolinguistic scale presented in the quote above emphasises power and inequality as the starting point that underpins and controls human communication. While I do not aim to downplay or deny the possibility that real, situated interactional inequalities are manifest in social communication, it is also important to acknowledge that human interactions are not neat events governed by fixed principles. Rather, they are complex, contingent, relational, relative and socially constructed. Not doing so runs the risk of reducing societies to linguistic structures and frames, and the risk of developing a one-sizefits-all grand narrative of language and mobility. As such, it is crucial to problematise and complexify the hierarchical relations embedded in the scale thinking. Since the development of discourses about globalisation in the 1980s, attempts have been made to conceptualise the relationship between local, translocal and global spaces. At the same time, social sciences witnessed the ‘spatial turn’ which aims to understand space as a qualitative context (Massey, 2005). Sociolinguists joined the ‘spatial turn’ by borrowing the ‘scale’ metaphor from social geography to theorise a sociolinguistics of globalisation (Blommaert, 2007, 2010). Proponents of scalar approaches to language use such as Blommaert (2007, 2010, 2014, 2015), Kell (2011), and Canagarajah and De Costa (2015), despite disagreeing on ontologies of scale, share the view that this metaphor is useful for invoking issues of power, hierarchy, layers, and authority while interpreting the communicability of linguistic resources. A scalar metaphor also underpins a world-system perspective where the relationship between the core and the periphery is static, hierarchical and problematic (Wallerstein, 1991), and hence the view that linguistic norms associated with native-speaker usage (particularly standard, middle class varieties) are located at global, timeless and higher level scales. Moreover, sociolinguistic scale theorisations are imbricated in the dynamics of the sociolinguistic market I discuss in Chapter 3 where I explain how certain linguistic repertoires are seen as more valuable depending on historical processes, as well as factors associated with socio-economic, racial and political dominance. To illustrate the high-low scale ordering in light of earlier scale theorisations (Blommaert, 2010), let’s consider the

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following example. The high scale ordering subsumes that a white American professor with an American standard variety is likely to maintain the semiotic mobility of their language wherever they go in the world because their variety is located at a high scale, which means that it is timeless, global and will be valued and understood everywhere. On the other hand, the same cannot be said about a professor from the Global South who is a proficient user of English because the low-scale ordering of their variety renders it local, bounded and of value in certain places only. The rigidity and fixity inherent in these earlier theorisations of sociolinguistic scale is problematic for a number of reasons. First, unless treated as dynamic, scale implies inequality at the outset, inevitably privileging one scale over others as ‘the starting point for analysis’ (Uitermark, 2002: 751). Aware of this, Canagarajah and De Costa (2015) argue for using scale not as a category of analysis where scalar grids are imposed, but as a category of practice whereby scale is treated as a verb. This view attempts to reflect the dynamic nature of interaction and the process of (re)negotiating power structures, evident for example in processes of rescaling and scale-jumping. Such a view has been advocated as part of ‘scalar politics’ (Bailey et al., 2016) where the focus is placed on negotiating power and hierarchical relationships in a way that challenges pre-defined ontologies of scale and conceptualises scaling as an ongoing process. What ‘scalar politics’ attempts to resist is the rigid locating of individuals’ linguistic resources in pre-determined vertical positions in the global hierarchy. A second challenge posed by the scaling logic is that it treats place as bounded with fixed, homogeneous and predictable linguistic norms, a point that has been debated in critical human geography. For instance, Massey’s (2005: 12) understanding of space as an interactional space indicates that ‘this is a space of loose ends and missing links’; thus space essentially becomes ‘unboundable in any absolute sense’ (Massey, 2004: 5). Space becomes complexified, open, networked, heterogeneous and unpredictable—a point I revisit in the next chapter. A third challenge is that there is no agreement on what scales are, as evident in the following quotation from Marston et al. (2005: 416) who explain that, ‘there is today no consensus on what is meant by the term

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or how it should be operationalised’. Human geographers demonstrate that the past two decades have witnessed various attempts to complicate the hierarchy located in the scaling logic: From the fixed and nested levels of the world systems model – sometimes metaphorically described as a Russian doll construction (Herod and Wright 2002) – to the linkage of both (vertical) hierarchy and (horizontal) networks in more recent work by Amin (2002), Brenner (1998), Leitner (2004) and Taylor (2004), different researchers have nuanced scale in different ways. (Marston et al., 2005: 417)

To resist a logic of scale which hierarchises space and produces preconfigured, rather than self-reflexive accounts of social life, Marston et al. (2005) propose a ‘flat ontology’ of scale ‘where the dynamic properties of matter produce a multiplicity of complex relations and singularities that sometimes lead to the creation of new, unique events and entities, but more often to relatively redundant orders and practices’ (2005: 422). A ‘flat ontology’ enables an initial position that treats all linguistic resources and repertoires as equal and problematises the supremacy of what is traditionally categorised as ‘global, timeless, high scales’. It is then the ‘dynamic properties of matter’ which are linked to ecological variables that give rise to new relations and orderings, some of which can indeed abide with structural inequalities embedded in traditional social categories (Badwan & Simpson, 2019). With this fluid approach to scale, we can maintain some balance between foregrounding power relationships and leaving room for negotiation and manoeuvre. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that resisting the rigidness of scale theorising is also about countering the potential stigmatisation of language practices in certain communities (Flores & Lewis, 2016). As I discuss in Chapter 4, the language about language is both normative and transformative. If we, as applied linguists, take part in assigning high-low scale orderings to certain repertoires, we become complicit in the reproduction and perpetuation of linguistic inequalities, which ultimately affect the life chances of individuals affected by such practices of linguistic degrading and oppression. I return to this discussion in Chapter 9.

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One of the promising observations that I noted during my lectures on sociolinguistic scales is that many students raised important questions such as, on what basis is one’s language located in a high or low scale? Who decides? Are these decisions not embedded in racist and elitist epistemologies of the supremacy of white, middle-class repertoires which are described as timeless and global? If so, are we not to challenge them to uncover the social injustices reproduced by such ideological positions? Such class debates, among many others, are a living testimony of the importance to challenge the language about language. My students were right to question the potential harm caused by the scaling logic. I am here reminded by Mufwene (2006: 4) who asks: To what extent have we emancipated ourselves from the dominant 19th-century ideology in Europe that considered European languages and cultures as superior, more evolved, or more refined than their non-European counterparts?

Mufwene’s (2006) question is a call for decolonising normative thinking about language in order to break free from the linguistic stratification and hierarchy associated with high-scale languages and high-scale varieties. It pushes us to un-think what it means to speak language well and according to whose standards. Achebe (1965: 29) makes a similar point in relation to the African use of English: My answer to the question, Can an African ever learn English well enough to be able to use it effectively in creative writing? Is certainly yes. If on the other hand you ask: Can he ever learn to use it like a native speaker? I should say, I hope not. It is neither necessary nor desirable for him to be able to do so. The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

What is important for Achebe (1965) is to decolonise English through submitting it to other forms as a step towards liberating the self from the burden of being enslaved by certain linguistic norms and standards. This quotation argues against the necessity to acquire a high scale variety of English because resisting this hierarchy entails producing ‘a new living

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language that would nourish a postcolonial body politic’ (Singh, 2018: 85). But is it at all possible for the colonised subject to be seen as mastering a high-scale colonial language? What does it mean to be seen and heard as a speaker of high-scale English? To address the first question, Fanon (1967: 18) explains that mastering a language means that the individual ‘possesses the world expressed and implied by that language’ and argues that it is impossible for the educated colonial subject to obtain language mastery because of racism and European supremacy. For the colonial subject, on the other hand, the desirable pursuit of acquiring highscale language creates both a mobilising and subjugating force (Fanon, 1967). The second question can be approached by emphasising that to be seen and heard means to be recognised as sounding as a legitimate speaker (Bourdieu, 1977). This sounding is subjectively and ideologically framed. I return to this discussion in Chapter 9 when I discuss Rosa’s (2019) work on the notion of ‘languagelessness’. However, what this discussion demonstrates is that the frames through which we see, describe and assess language through high-low scale orderings are indeed colonially conditioned and historically entrenched. This requires us to summon the discourses we use in language research in order not to fall in the trap of reproducing colonial descriptions of language. Having discussed some limitations of the scaling logic and some views on language and mobility, I now summarise key debates on language and semiotic mobility, starting with Blommaert (2010), then Canagarajah (2013) before I discuss my work in Badwan (2015) and Badwan and Simpson (2019).

6.3

Blommaert (2010) on Scale and Semiotic Mobility

In his book, The Sociolinguistics of Globalisation, Blommaert (2010) explores whether individuals maintain or lose voice across contexts. He asserts that ‘this is a problem not just of difference, but of inequality’ (2010: 3), and argues that traditional ‘sociolinguistics of distribution’, which perceives the movement of language resources as moving across

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stable spaces in chronological time, does not capture all that is necessary to decipher language in motion. Consequently, he justifies the need for establishing a ‘sociolinguistics of mobility’ that studies language in motion whereby language patterns are seen as vertically layered ‘scales’. Sociolinguistics of mobility is about actual uses of language resources in real geopolitical, sociocultural, and historical contexts (Hymes, 1996). Such contexts are described by Blommaert as ‘a messy new marketplace’ (2010: 28) in which people ‘attribute different values and degree of usefulness’ to their investment in language resources. An important feature of Blommaert’s sociolinguistics is the use of ‘sociolinguistic scales’, which are stratified by power and inequality. Blommaert sees people move across spaces filled with norms, expectations, and codes and explains that individuals move from local scales to global scales and to other intermediary scales in between. To understand his use of sociolinguistic scales, it is necessary to bear in mind what he calls ‘placed resources’. That is, how some people’s repertoires ‘will allow mobility while others will not’ (p. 23). For instance, when individuals move from one scale to another (e.g. local to trans-local), the relationship between these scales is indexical as it relies on meaningful communication, which can be captured by maintaining the norms and the expectations of the higher scale (the trans-local). As a result, successful jumping from a scale to another entails ‘the capacity to lift momentary instances of interaction to the level of common meanings’ (p. 33). In this way, Blommaert’s scales offer a vertical image of power differentiation and hierarchical ranking. The act of ‘scale jumping’ (Uitermark, 2002: 750), either by virtue of movement from one context to another or during discursive practices, is a power move that indexes social order, thereby determining the positioning of the interlocutors. Such a process requires access to discursive resources that invoke higher scale levels. Another similar act is ‘up-scaling’ whereby an interlocutor lifts the interaction to a higher scale inaccessible to the other. Both acts indicate that scaling is about power and inequality that distribute discursive resources in a way that privileges some and underprivileges others. Another feature of Blommaert’s sociolinguistics of mobility is ‘orders of indexicality’, a ‘sensitising concept’ (p. 38) in the field of semiotics. Following Agha (2003) and Rampton (2003), linguistic and semiotic

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structures are predictable and structured. Blommaert uses ‘register’ as an example to feature the ‘normativity’ of language forms to index certain social roles in discursive practices. Such indexical orders spring from histories of being, e.g. the notion of ‘Standard language’. When speakers come from different orders of indexicality, orders from high social structures become valid at any time. That is to say, some forms of semiosis are seen as valuable, others as less valuable, and overall, this is governed by principles of authority and power leading to ‘an economy of exchange’ (p. 38). Where authority and power come from is constantly evolving. This relates to what Blommaert calls ‘polycentricity’. People speak under the influence of a centre, or what Bakhtin (1986) calls a ‘super-addressee’ and behave with reference to this centre that has an ‘evaluative authority’. Such an authority controls how speakers use language and display different roles in various contexts. Goffman’s (1981) ‘shifts of footing’, the different positioning of a speaker and the shifting linguistic modes thereof, relates to polycentricity as a key feature of interaction. Once again, this feature is at the heart of issues of authority and hierarchical ranking: ‘both concepts, “orders of indexicality” and “polycentricity” thus suggest a less innocent world of linguistic, social and cultural variation and diversity, one in which difference is quickly turned into inequality’ (Blommaert, 2010: 41). Therefore, when people move across space, they also move across sociolinguistic scales, orders of indexicality, and new centres, which render their communication less predictable and hence one’s language use can be subject to unexpected inequalities (among other various possibilities).

6.4

Canagarajah (2013) on Agency and Negotiation

Canagarajah’s (2013) Translingual Practice is another important work that contributes to the discussion on language and mobility. Canagarajah describes translingual communication as unpredictable. Unlike Blommaert (2010) who focuses on the mobility of high scale semiotic resources, Canagarajah asserts that translinguals defy stability, construct

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meanings, and reach agreements through negotiations, not shared norms. They use strategies like the ‘let-it pass’ strategy (Firth, 1996) to allow the flow of the conversation and the possibility to get more clues to resolve unintelligibility. They can deviate from grammatical norms, rely on other ecological resources, and negotiate power to satisfy all parties. Thus, he sees linguistic diversity as the norm and linguistic sharedness as an exception, which is not always present or guaranteed. To elaborate on the discussion about negotiation strategies, Canagarajah offers four macro-level strategies, which contain other specific strategies. The four strategies are envoicing, recontextualisation, interactional strategies, and entextualisation. They correspond to the personal, contextual, social, and textual dimensions. Envoicing is related to identity representation that highlights one’s identity and voice. Canagarajah argues that in many ‘negotiation of meaning’ studies, scholars have overlooked this dimension by foregrounding meaning and information transfer. Recontextualisation is related to how interlocutors frame their talk in a way that brings suitable footing for negotiation. However, he explains that in translingual practices, it is difficult to decide on whose frames and which footings apply, but he seems optimistic that these are negotiated to achieve intelligibility. Interactional strategies signal the social dimension which is based on reciprocity, not sharedness. Although this dimension is studied in the ‘negotiation for meaning’ studies, he adopts a rather holistic approach that looks at rhetorical and social meanings together. Interlocutors might not employ the same strategies, still they bring to the table strategies that complement or resist the existing strategies in order to negotiate meaning or to achieve rhetorical and social objectives. Entextualisation looks at how codes are used in the spatial and temporal dimensions of language production, be it written or spoken. It depicts how writers/speakers monitor their linguistic products to satisfy their purposes and intentions. This is a performative task that helps translinguals accomplish many functions. Canagarajah complicates the notion of ‘geopolitical contexts’ within the framework of moving linguistic resources across translocal spaces. He argues that most scholars perceive context as bounded, static, and homogenous. It is a static context where a particular English variety is spoken. Rejecting this imagining, he demonstrates that ‘translocal spaces’

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are dynamic geopolitical contexts and that the English used in these spaces travels across changing contexts with competing norms. Even though he appreciates Blommaert’s use of sociolinguistic scales to reflect the inextricable relationship between time, space, and society, he states that ‘Blommaert’s notion of scales doesn’t leave room for agency and manoeuvre’ (2013: 156). He, therefore, calls for more appreciation of people’s ability to negotiate and reconstruct language norms. In addition, he refers to Blommaert’s scales as ‘static and rigid’ because they imply that when ‘non-native’ speakers of English move across geopolitical contexts, their roles and statuses are predetermined, unlike those who speak more prestigious varieties which enable them to jump scales. Furthermore, he insists that Blommaert’s scales have two main problems: (a) they are normative and are not subject to renegotiation or resistance, and (b) they are impersonal because scales are predefined: ‘[r]ather than scales shaping people, we have to consider how people invoke scales for their communicative and social objectives’ (2013: 158). Canagarajah is not alone in his dynamic perception of scales. In fact, he quotes both Uitermark (2002) and Swyngedouw (1997) who perceive scales as a process rather than an ontological entity. Aligned with the process understanding of scales, Canagarajah (2013) uses the term rescaling , a term that reflects how norms and codes can be renegotiated. To illustrate this, he uses examples from his mobile participants, arguing that ‘we have to be open to the possibility of policy changes in the context of ongoing rescaling in everyday talk and texts in globalisation and migration’ (p. 159). While it is important to accentuate discussions about individual agency and negotiation enactment in order to avoid pre-determined theorisations of language and semiotic mobility, it is equally crucial to exercise caution in order not to develop celebratory discourses that do not take into account that mobile individuals are ascribed a wide range of social positioning depending on who is moving and under what conditions. For example, Canagarajah’s (2013) emphasis on agency and negotiation was supported by empirical research looking at the experiences of 65 African skilled migrants in the UK, the US and Canada. His research indicates that the participants did not want to shift to a ‘native speaker’ variety, and that they expected native speakers of English

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to adopt a ‘two-way street’ strategy, rather than insisting on their norms. While this can indeed offer valuable insights into the experiences of skilled migrants, it is important to acknowledge that skilled migrants in ‘highly-skilled’ jobs are positioned differently from those in ‘low-skilled’ jobs. Therefore, individual agency can be a privilege that is not afforded by all movers. Another reminder that a grand narrative of language and semiotic mobility may not be conceivable. In the next section and based on some empirical research which I conducted in the period between 2012 and 2015, I present an ecological orientation to language and semiotic mobility which I think of as a middle ground in the discussion about place power and individual agency. However, it is worth noting that my contribution to this discussion is based on research with academic sojourners who can arguably be seen as elite movers.

6.5

Badwan (2015) on Ecological Orientations to Sociolinguistic Scales

In my longitudinal research with six Arab academic sojourners in the UK, I explore how the participants talk about what English meant for them prior to coming in the UK and during the sojourn period. As such, semiotic mobility is a key theme in this research. All participants had studied English for a number of years and had already achieved the required linguistic proficiency in order to be admitted to a Higher Education intuition in the UK. They landed in the UK expecting that their English skills are going to be highly valued. Coming to study in UK HE, however, introduced the sociolinguistic realities of negotiating new exchange values assigned to their linguistic capital in discursive practices. The word ‘value’ here includes both the value perceived by the speaker himself or herself (perceived value) and the way others assign value to the language of the speaker (assigned value). Overall, there was a unanimous agreement that the participants’ English repertoires were subject to changes in the exchange value of their linguistic repertoires. However, what emerged in discussions about this exchange value is how ecological factors such as the when, where, how, what, why of interaction intersect

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in multiple and nuanced ways and contribute to how the participants feel about the semiotic mobility of their English repertoires in the UK. In the following section, I present some data excerpts to discuss some of these ecological factors.

6.6

Ecological Factors and Semiotic Mobility

Moving across time and space comes as the first and most influential ecological factor which contributes to shifts in the participants’ linguistic exchange value. In fact, the participants identified this factor since their early days in the UK. When they talked about how they felt about their English before coming to the UK, their responses were quite positive such as ‘number one’, ‘perfect’, ‘enough, no need for more’, ‘better than many girls’, ‘distinguished’, and ‘competitive’. Yet, movement has changed these feelings and led to the emergence of less positive descriptions of their linguistic exchange value. This is mainly because their new UK context has different interlocutors including ‘native’ speakers of English and other proficient multilingual speakers. In addition, living in an English environment requires using English beyond academic and professional purposes which imposes higher linguistic expectations on academic sojourners. The following quotation from Amjad, a Palestinian academic sojourner, explains this: When I was in Gaza I used to feel that I am strong in comparison to others… But when I came to the UK what became different is that we started to meet other Arab students who have better English even those who are Arabs like me. A person feels weak when he sees others who are better than him. First of all, I am here with the owners of the language. I see them speak English and I feel that no matter what I do I will still have a long journey ahead of me and will never be like them. Second, it is possible to see other Arab students and some of them came from my country and they speak English better than I do. These reasons made me start to feel that my English needs a lot of improvement.

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Amjad’s comment indicates that the semiotic mobility of one’s language can be affected by geographic mobility, not necessarily because of place power and its indexical linguistic norms, but because ecological factors such as interlocutors, functions and topics influence the perceived exchange value of one’s linguistic resources. In one of his interviews, Amjad reported how he felt very disappointed when he went to buy some groceries but did not know the English words for ‘cucumber’ and ‘parsley’. He commented on this saying, ‘I used to deliver academic lectures in English on business studies and here I don’t know the words for cucumber and parsley. I need more English’. This sentiment was echoed by Reem, a Saudi student who used to work in an international bank where she used English as a lingua franca to communicate with non-Arabic speaking staff. In spite of that, she reported that she felt challenged in academic contexts and that made her understand the difference between her previous context and her new context and positioning in the UK: When I speak English here, I do not feel that I am better than others. I used to be more courageous at work in my country. Here I do not participate a lot in classes especially the classes where we have other British students. I feel intimidated. I feel I am not confident about what I say so I stay silent.

When asked about how she felt about communicating with work colleagues in English in Saudi Arabic she explained: I was the one who is helping my colleagues. Yes they were native speakers of English but I was the one who understood the rules and traditions. I now need help because there are things that I don’t understand.

This quotation establishes a link between semiotic mobility and individuals’ positionality in relation to cultural capital. Reem’s English in Saudi Arabia, albeit localised and low scale in Blommaert’s (2010) terms, was sufficient to grant her a powerful social positioning among her work colleagues. This indicates that semiotic mobility is not exclusively linked to individuals’ access to ‘high scale, native speaker varieties’ of English,

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but is also linked to other sorts of capital such as cultural and social capital. Dalal, another Saudi student, made an observation which adds another aspect to the discussion on semiotic mobility. She explains that the semiotic mobility of language is affected by one’s ability to transfer previously developed socio-cultural and linguistic knowledge to new interactional events. This point is addressed in the following quotation: When I talk about something I do not know, for example, when I called the city council to talk about the council tax. The person on the phone was talking about the law and I did not understand it and I did not know how to make him understand that I do not know the system. On the other hand, situations like in restaurants or shops are easier because I am used to the kind of conversations that take place there so I am less nervous.

The interplay between different forms of capital (e.g. cultural and social) and the semiotic mobility of language continued to be invoked in different ways through the experiences of other participants. For example, Asma, a Palestinian sojourner, describes the difficulties she faced during informal social interactions: In social talks, I am a listener most of the time. I mean when we talk about shopping, daily life, films. Once my friend and I went to the cinema and watched the same film. A third friend asked us about the film on the following day. I told her it was really nice and I stopped. I wanted to tell the story of the film, but I felt I needed to stop to collect the words and the ideas. While I was doing that, the friend who went to the film with me told the story easily. I don’t know why I was not able to describe what I saw easily.

It is worth noting that Asma described herself as one of the most active students during classroom discussions in the UK. Trying to make sense of her very different experiences of linguistic exchange value, she suggests that since she has already acquired and mastered the academic jargons of her field, she feels confident using her academic English repertoires during classroom discussions. Informal communicative events, on the

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other hand, are relatively new to her, as she did not use English for informal communication prior to coming to the UK. Other participants reported similar experiences of how they enjoyed academic discussions. For example, Ameen, a Qatari sojourner, spoke about taking part in a group presentation where they had to use English: I was part of a group when we worked on a group presentation and there were no problems. All chats were in English because we had a student from Iceland and that was an advantage because all of us had to speak in English. I really enjoyed that.

It appears that academic contexts tend to offer a safer environment where communicative norms are more predictable. These contexts exhibit elements of familiarity. Students are familiar with the different interlocutors, with classroom expectations and with the support they can access. Under such ecological circumstances, most participants in this study reported a higher exchange value for their English repertoires and spoke with more confidence about their semiotic mobility. Out-of-class communication, on the other hand, offers less predictability and less familiarity with communicative norms. Commenting on this, Amjad expresses concerns about his ability to use English in legal or medical contexts in spite of perceiving himself as a proficient user of English: When I need to go to hospital, God forbid, how can I understand the doctor? I have nothing- not one medical term. I have not been to a GP here and if I go to places like courts, or police stations, I have no words to use there.

This quotation agrees with Collins and Slembrouck’s (2009: 24) view that ‘registers of law, medicine and officialdom more generally… are generally understood to reflect social differentiation and hierarchy’. At the same time, Amjad’s comments about the expected struggles in high jargon social domains are also concerns about the cultural unfamiliarity with these formal, inaccessible and highly structured social interactions. Another reminder of how semiotic mobility requires not only linguistic

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capital, but also social and cultural familiarity with the cultural norms of the communicative event. Amjad continues to reflect on successful and unsuccessful communicative events. This time he highlights the role of the interlocutors in terms of one’s familiarity with them as well as their positionality: Maybe it depends on the person I talk to: if I understand them easily I feel reassured and relaxed but if I struggled to understand them I stay tense throughout the whole interaction. I am really surprised that this happens with me. Why do I feel that my English is excellent? But later I feel that I have problems?…I am very proficient with my classmates. I struggle with people who have managerial positions at university. I also struggle in the supermarket. Sometimes these situations are easy and in other times they are not. Generally my communication with my classmates is very successful. I don’t know why. I hope someone can explain what happens.

This example highlights how one’s position in relation to the interlocutor could affect their second language anxiety and therefore their ability to communicate fluently. The emphasis on psychological factors such as anxiety, familiarity with other interlocutors is aligned with Kramsch’s (2006: 251) view when she argues that communication is ‘not just items of vocabulary or communication strategies, but embodied experiences, emotional resonances, and moral imaginings’. In Amjad’s case, this anxiety has affected his ability to communicate fluently. This, however, was not the same experience reported by Mahmoud, an Emirati sojourner, who explains that his anxiety pushes him to pay more effort to save face during some communicative events: Look, when I see that I have to speak to a British speaker I know beforehand that the communication will not be easy and I am now convinced that they have to pay some effort in order to understand me. But imagine if I have to communicate with an important person, say, a manager responsible for our Foundation course. The situation is different here. I have to pay a lot of effort in order to be understood because he might say that my English is weak and dismiss me from the course. So the amount of effort I pay when I talk to others using English depends on the status of the person I talk to.

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Mahmoud’s example shows that he was aware of what he could do with his English and how he tactically deployed agency in situations where he felt he needed to. I now move to discussing another point on the connection between social capital and semiotic mobility. This was inspired by Dalal’s comments on her social network which mainly included fellow international students in the UK. Commenting on how language played a key factor in her socialisation practices during her sojourn period, she said: Someone with broken English is better because at the end I will understand what they want to say. Most of native speakers do not take into consideration that we are foreigners so they need to speak slowly and choose simpler words. Communication is harder with them and I will keep on saying excuse me and this will embarrass me. I don’t like to be in these situations that’s why I try to avoid them.

Commenting on this, in my work with James Simpson (Badwan & Simpson, 2019: 14), we explain that: [W]hat is traditionally viewed as ‘high scale’ English does not necessarily hold great social capital in a given context and at a given time…. Thus what might be considered high-scale English (i.e. an educated native-speaker variety) cannot be unconditionally assumed to be timeless, widespread and ever-valid… Such a predisposition raises the capital of the non-native English varieties which would be seen (through a lens of linguistic prescriptivism and sociolinguistic stratification) as sub-standard or low-value varieties.

The experiences I presented in this chapter indicate that language exchange value and semiotic mobility are relational, contingent and changing depending on a range of ecological factors such as the topics being discussed, the interlocutors involved, cultural familiarity with communicative norms, as well as individuals’ social positioning in relation to their interlocutors. This opens the door for a range of possibilities. That is to say, the same individual can be placed in different situations: situations when negotiation strategies are sufficient to achieve successful

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interactions; or situations when the other party is not willing to negotiate either meaning or positioning, leading to possible communication breakdowns or to unfavourable positionings. However, there are also many messy and complex situations in between. Such an understanding leaves us with less certainty and fewer generalisations. Acknowledging the complexity of researching language in contexts of mobility, Blommaert (2014) calls for a move from mobility to complexity by dwelling on chaos or complexity theory as a source of metaphors to allow creative ways to talk about language. This is in the spirit of admitting that ‘by the time we have finished our description, the system will have changed’ (Blommaert, 2014: 10). Echoing this, Badwan and Simpson (2019: 17) assert that ‘uncertainty about language value becomes the only certainty’. As such, it becomes almost impossible to claim that a particular linguistic variety is likely to be timeless and global everywhere. By bringing to the fore the impact of ecological aspects and arguing that individuals’ semiotic mobility is not solely determined by place power, mobile languaging subjects are given room for agency, reflectivity and manoeuvre. Still, it is important to remember that they might not always be able to afford agency and negotiation in all communicative events. A point of caution to end this chapter with, the participants in my research on language and mobility were prepared for the sojourn period. They had been learning English for years, they met the English language proficiency thresholds for admission at their UK-based academic institutions, they bought flights tickets and booked accommodations. They are ‘elite movers’ (Ladegaard & Phipps, 2020): wanted and desired for the economic, social, cultural and academic value they bring the Higher Education sector in the UK. In spite of all this planning and preparation, their academic sojourn experience was a critical period of uncertainty, confusion, and discovery and their language was subject to devaluing and revaluing all the time as I demonstrated in this chapter. The question that begs an answer is: how do displaced individuals, refugees and asylum seekers experience mobility as they move with no planning and no prior linguistic investment? Confused, tongue-tied, and aware of their social under-privilege, non-elite movers are likely to find it hard(er) to negotiate positions and exercise agency. While the ecological orientation I present above continues to be relevant, it does not take into account the

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pain, loss, vulnerability, and struggle experienced during these trajectories of mobility. I return to this theme in the next chapter where I turn the attention to ethics of linguistic foster-ship.

Chapter Summary In this chapter I summarised some key positions on the language and semiotic mobility debate while highlighting the challenges associated with developing a grand narrative in sociolinguistics of mobility. I have demonstrated how sociolinguistic scale has been useful to uncover power relationships in linguistic exchanges, yet it can potentially reproduce stigmatising ideologies regarding repertoires associated with ‘low scale’. To this end, I argued that it is important to draw attention to the language about language in this debate. Another key argument is the role of individual agency. While it is crucial not to develop pre-determined expectations of what happens to language in contexts of mobility, we need to be cautious not to indulge in celebratory discourses about individual agency. This is because individuals have different affordances during different communicative acts; these are tightly linked to a range of ecological factors as I discussed in this chapter. The final point reiterates that experiences of semiotic mobility vary significantly depending on the social positioning of the movers. While most sociolinguistic research on mobility has mainly focused on elite, wanted movers such as academic sojourners and skilled migrants, it is vital not to generalise theorisations about language and mobility without delving into the lived experiences of the non-elite. These individuals continue to have telling testimonies about how language fears and language shaming bring about a great deal of vulnerability, pain, loss and struggle.

References Achebe, C. (1965). English and the African writer. Transition, 18, 27–30. Agha, A. (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication, 23(3), 231–273.

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Badwan, K. (2015). Negotiating rates of exchange: Arab academic sojourners’ sociolinguistic trajectories in the UK (PhD thesis). University of Leeds. Badwan, K., & Simpson, J. (2019). Ecological orientations to sociolinguistic scale. Applied Linguistic Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/ 10.1515/applirev-2018-0113. Bailey, A., Canagarajah, S., Lan, S., & Gong Powers, D. (2016). Scalar politics, language ideologies, and the sociolinguistics of globalization among transnational Korean professionals in Hong Kong. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 20 (3), 312–334. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. University of Texas Press. Block, D., & Cameron, D. (2002). Globalisation and language teaching. Routledge. Blommaert, J. (2007). Sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics, 4 (1), 1– 19. Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2014). From mobility to complexity in sociolinguistic theory and method. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies (Paper 103). Blommaert, J. (2015). Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. Annual Review of Anthropology, 44, 105–116. Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information, 16 (6), 645–668. Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Polity. Canagarajah, S. (2013). Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. Routledge. Canagarajah, S., & De Costa, P. (2015). Introduction: Scales analysis, and its uses and prospects in educational linguistics. Linguistics and Education, 34, 1–10. Collins, J., & Slembrouck, S. (2005). Editorial. Multilingual and diasporic populations: Spatializing practices, institutional processes, and social hierarchies. Language and Communication, 25 (3), 189–195. Collins, J., & Slembrouck, S. (2009). Goffman and globalization: Frame, footing and scale in migration-connected multilingualism. In J. Collins, S. Slembrouck, & M. Baynham (Eds.). Globalization and language in contact: Scale, migration, and communicative practices (pp. 19–41). Continuum International Publishing Group. Deumert, A. (2020). Mobilities and struggle: A commentary. In K. Horner & J. O’Cain (Eds.), Multilingualism, (im)mobilities and spaces of belonging (pp. 231–241). Multilingual Matters.

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Fairclough, N. (2006). Language and globalisation. Routledge. Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). Grove Press. Firth, A. (1996). The discursive accomplishment of normality. On ‘lingua franca’ English and conversation analysis. Journal of Pragmatics, 26 (2), 237–259. Flores, N., & Lewis, M. (2016). From truncated to sociopolitical emergence: A critique of superdiversity in sociolinguistics. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 241, 97–124. Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. University of Pennsylvania Press. Hymes, D. (1996). Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: Toward an understanding of voice. Taylor and Francis. Kell, C. (2011). Inequalities and crossings: Literacy and the spaces-in-between. International Journal of Educational Development, 31, 606–613. Kramsch, C. (2006). From communicative competence to symbolic competence. The Modern Language Journal, 90, 249–252. Ladegaard, H., & Phipps, A. (2020). Intercultural research and social activism. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20 (2), 67–80. Marston, S., Jones, J., & Woodward, K. (2005). Human geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (4), 416–432. Massey, D. (2004). Geographies of responsability. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86 (1), 5–18. Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage. Mufwene, S. (2006). Race, racialism and the study of language evolution in America. In M. Davis (Ed.), Language variety in the South: Historical and contemporary perspectives. University of Alabama Press. Nail, T. (2019). On being and motion. Oxford University Press. Pennycook, A. (2007). The myth of English as an international language. In S. Makoni & A. Pennycook (Eds.), Disinventing and reconstituting languages (pp. 90–115). Multilingual Matters. Rampton, B. (2003). Hegemony, social class, and stylisation. Pragmatics, 13(1), 49–83. Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of latinidad . Oxford University Press. Singh, J. (2018). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Duke University Press. Swyngedouw, E. (1997). Neither global nor local: Glocalisation and the politics of scale. In K. Cox (Ed.), Spaces of globalisation: Reasserting the power of the local (pp. 137–177). Guilford Press.

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7 The Spatial Turn in Applied Linguistics: Language, Place and Ethics of Foster-Ship

I would like to start this chapter with a vignette describing my son’s reaction upon hearing a name of a country for the first time: Audiologist: We’re done now. I need to go. I am meeting my friend who has just come from Italy. My son: What language do they speak in Litaly? Audiologist: They speak many languages in Litaly. Italian is one of them. My son: Can I have a sticker?

It may have been my son’s first time to hear the word ‘Italy’. He was five years old at the time and he was sitting on a table playing with toys, colours and stamps while the audiologist was gently telling him that she needs to leave. The first thing he wanted to know about this new place is the language spoken there. Language for him appears to be an important feature that helps him explore what the new place is like. The audiologist’s response ‘they speak many languages in Litaly. Italian is one of them’ must have been too complex for a five-year old that he decides to change the subject by asking for stickers. I left the hospital © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Badwan, Language in a Globalised World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7_7

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wondering what would our world be like if all places were described in this way? What would happen to our understanding of language if we are to accept that in any given place there are many languages and X is one of them? What are the implications of this understanding on how we talk about place, linguistic citizenship and language rights?

7.1

Language in Relation to Place and Spatiality

Responding to Blommaert’s (2010: 2) call for researching ‘changing language in a changing society’, sociolinguists over the past two decades have attempted to develop new approaches to understanding place by engaging with, and learning from, invaluable contributions from other disciplines, namely geography and sociology. Doing so has revolutionised the sociolinguistic ‘home’ which has been enriched by useful, albeit complex, ways of place theorisations. Why am I discussing ‘place’ in this book? Place has indeed been an important concept in sociolinguistic research. While it has been traditionally used to refer to a bounded and somehow homogeneous geographical location where the occurrence and distribution of linguistic features is analysed, it is becoming increasingly used in discussions about sociolinguistics of mobility as I discussed in the previous two chapters. Central to these old and recent orientations is uncovering epistemologies of place in sociolinguistic research. For example, sociolinguistic variations, while aiming to bring to the fore the various linguistic features observed in a place, treat place with some sort of assumed flatness and homogeneity that enables the neat mapping of features that are usually presented in relation to the dominant standardised national language which, in itself, is treated as static, clearly identifiable and well-structured. When migrant and minority speech communities are researched, they are treated as ‘isolated entities inside a nation-state’ and are once again analysed in opposition to the standardised national language’ (Jacquemet, 2005: 260). This dominant ‘worldview’ in the discipline not only reduces the dynamic and complex nature of language to limited structural systems but also continues to

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adhere to nationalistic concerns over linguistic sovereignty, while perpetuating the relegation of language to ‘bounded areas, clear confines, and homogeneous communities’ (Jacquemet, 2005: 260). This ideological position locks language to a place (Badwan, 2018), reducing the notions of ‘language’ and ‘place’ to narrow, bounded and geographically-tied concepts. At the same time, methodological nationalism (Schneider, 2019) in sociolinguistic research continues to be a contemporary concern. To explain why this is a growing concern in changing societies, I would like to ask the following questions: whose interests are served by the perpetuation and normalisation of traditional understandings of language in place? Who is omitted, side-lined and marginalised by these ideological views? What are the social implications of continuing to produce neat sociolinguistic maps of language variation in place? What is the basis for inclusion and exclusion in sociolinguistic mapping? What happens to voices that do not fit the ‘traditional’ sociolinguistic profile in/of a particular place? The answers to these questions are ideological and political. While celebrating the diversity of sociolinguistic features, sociolinguistic research that uses methodological nationalism builds great walls based on language. What if your language is in the wrong place? What if you speak in a way that is not historically linked to a place? How can sociolinguistics be methodologically inclusive and socially just? Claims that we cannot research every language and variety in a place are claims about the need to make choices about legitimate and illegitimate speakers in the researched place. This is a social justice concern as I discuss in Chapter 9. In my research on language and place in Manchester, UK, I decided to include participants with different linguistic profiles and I asked them to talk about their experiences of/with language in place. I was frequently asked if my research approach was sustainable because I focused on a range of languages and varieties in place. My answer has repeatedly been framed along the lines that we, as sociolinguists, make subjective and (ultimately) ideological judgements about what is sustainable and what is not. Committed to a socially just approach to researching language in place, we can collectively set a precedent to sustain this approach or devise new ones with social justice as the driving force for our work.

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Every time I look at a language or a dialect map of a place, I cannot help but think of how many people are positioned as outsiders by these maps. The mobile, the displaced, the replaced, the migrant and the refugee are among those who are not historically linked to a particular place. This form of societal exclusion affects these people in different ways (see Chapter 6 on elite and non-elite movers). This is why, I here ague, place needs to be reconceptualised in a way that challenges national and local biases which evoke dichotomies such as ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘from here’ and ‘from there’, ‘minority’ versus ‘majority’ (Rampton, 2011) which feed into processes of societal inclusion and exclusion (Svendsen & Marzo, 2015). It is time to challenge these epistemologies in order to dismantle traditional understandings of place in sociolinguistic research. This unravelling (Svendsen & Marzo, 2015) and unmooring (Badwan, 2020) responds to the observation that ‘territorial fixedness, physical proximity and sociocultural sharedness’ (Blommaert, 2010: 3) fail to address the fluid complexity of social life in urban places. Consequently, we are required to have a closer look at how places and spaces are ontologically perceived in the field; what Canagarajah (2018) refers to as the ‘spatial turn in sociolinguistics’. A spatial perspective stems from a relational, fluid, and dynamic understanding of place, which emphasises the multiplicity, complexity and the constant coming and going associated with social, symbolic, and individual dimensions that contribute to the construction of place while observing the relations among these dimensions (Vigouroux, 2009). In what follows, I present some place conceptualisations while discussing how they can contribute to researching language in place. After that, I explain the link between these concepts and the ongoing emphasis on unbounded spatiality. Human and social geographers have explored the relationship between space, place, and time in the face of globalising processes (Herod & Wright, 2002; Latham, 2002; Massey, 1994, 2004; Massey & Jess, 1995). They have emphasised the intricate connectedness between the local and the global, and how this problematises the construction of place identity while reinforcing the role of power in discourses about place ownership. They highlighted the inseparability of space and society and developed different approaches to understanding the relationship

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between the two. Central to these discussions is the perception that space creates, and is created by, social practices while emphasising that some practices are legitimised while others are rejected (Vigouroux, 2009). This line of research stems from the recognition that social researchers need to move away from conceptualising places as passive backdrops or locations on maps. Rather, they are to recognise places as active constituents with the capacity to shape memories and experiences (Marcu, 2012); hence, understanding place as meaning rather than location (Entrikin, 1991). Massey (1998, 2005) points out that social relations control experiences of place. Such experiences, in return, shape ‘how political subjectivities are formed’ (Cele, 2013: 74). Places are neither static nor objective (Casey, 1993) but are relative, dynamic and changing. This suggests that different individuals are likely to experience the same place differently. A welcoming place for one can be a hostile place for another. Not only is place subjective and relational, but is also temporally shaped, a view maintained by Cele (2013: 85) who suggests that different places are produced depending on the time of the day and the season. My research on university students’ experiences of place in two Northern cities in the UK indicate that the soundscapes and cityscapes of their urban places differ significantly based on time of the day and periods during university term time. For example, the participants reported that places around university campuses and city centres witness diversified soundscapes during the day and during term times. This is because university students from different parts of the UK and different countries around the world socialise more during these times and therefore they reported different feelings and experiences of the places they inhabit in the city depending on these temporal aspects. This draws attention to how time and place are enmeshed in discussions about experiences of place which puts forward a chronotopic perspective of place where ‘spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 84). Other useful constructs of place come from economic geography where there is emphasis on ‘slippery’ and ‘sticky’ places. Markusen (1996: 294) explains that slipperiness relates to ease of mobility whereas stickiness ‘connotes both ability to attract as well as to keep’. Similarly,

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critical race theorist, Ahmed (2004), utilises the concept of stickiness to explain how individuals attach or stick emotions to objects around them. Such emotional attachments then become crucial to how places are internalised, as Cloke et al. (2008: 245) argue, ‘places are made meaningful only by the embodied and emotional interactions’. Notions of slipperiness and stickiness are useful to researching language in place. For example, when cities attract people for work or study purposes or under conditions of asylum and displacement, they are turned into sticky places saturated with a range of embodied experiences, emotions and metrolingual soundscapes. In return, these places also have the potential to leave ‘sticky traces’ in the linguistic repertoires of their inhabitants. Moving to another important concept in urban studies, the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1991) is useful for researching language in the city. Lefebvre (1991) bases the concept of ‘the right to the city’ not on formal citizenship status, but on inhabitance. As summarised by Purcell (2013), the concept of the right to the city evolves within two fundamental rights: the right to appropriate urban space and the right to participate, which refers to a right of inhabitants to produce the city’s space and make it their own. The concept is advanced by the United Nations, as it encourages urban policies to promote justice and inclusion in cities (Purcell, 2013). In addition, Lefebvre (1996) draws a distinction between the ‘city’ and the ‘urban’. Cities are important spaces with the best soil to cultivate the urban, yet the urban is only achieved by ‘meaningful engagement among inhabitants embedded in a web of social connection’ (Purcell, 2013: 151). Numerous initiatives have come under the umbrella of the ‘right to the city’ to address issues such as women’s rights and environmental causes (Purcell, 2013). Yet, the linguistic diversity of the city’s inhabitants awaits further recognition. To achieve the full potential of the city as an urban place, its linguistic galaxy brought about/along by its inhabitants needs to be part of the production of the city spaces. This will ultimately require dismantling bounded understandings of place by embracing the continuous (re)shaping of place depending on the ‘interactive dynamics of their members’ (Mufwene, 2010: xii). Thus far, I have engaged with discussions about place as relational, subjective, temporal, slippery, and sticky. It is also a space where relations

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are (re)built and possibilities are borne. At the same time, it embodies a political site for struggle where collective activism is required to ensure that language has a right to the city. Collectively, these constructs point towards the direction of unboundedness and the constant (re)shaping of place; these are key characteristics of understanding spatiality, as I explain next. Geographer, Doreen Massey, pioneered a new materialist orientation to space. This orientation marks the departure from understanding space as a bounded concept to perceiving it as a concept with dynamic and open-ended possibilities. Summarising this view, Massey (2005: 39) explains that: The stasis of closed systems robs ‘the spatial’ of one of its potentially disruptive characteristics: precisely its juxtaposition, its happenstance arrangement-in-relation-to-each-other, of previously unconnected narratives/temporalities; its openness and its condition of always being made.

Massey’s emphasis on the nature of ‘always being made’ highlights the fluidity and complexity of spatiality. It resonates with the concepts I discussed above. It shakes the confidence in fixed place theorisations because by the time a place is described, it will have changed by the coming and going of different individual and symbolic dimensions. Commenting on the social value of Massey’s spatial theorisation, Canagarajah (2020: 298) argues, ‘Massey theorises spatiality as opening up more inclusive, responsive, and dynamic analyses on the “becoming” of meaning and activities’. These features are needed in our times as we are witnessing increasing levels of mobility across intra-national and transnational spaces and across social classes. Inspired by such attempts to challenge stasis and closed systems, different views in applied/socio-linguistics emerged as to how to conceptualise the relationship between language and place. These conceptualisations engage with questions such as: does place shape language or does language shape place? In other words, does place influence which language becomes visible/audible or does language contribute to place making? Is it a one-way or two-way process? Different views are observed

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in the literature. I start with the dominant view that perceives the relationship between language and place as a one-way process. As discussed in Chapter 5, normative understandings of language in the world are tightly linked to national epistemologies which regulate acceptable and unacceptable linguistic norms in a particular place. Statements such as ‘this is England. You have to speak English’ embody a rather rigid understanding of the world of language framed around geopolitical borders. From this perspective, place is seen as dictating social practices, a one-way process. Commenting on this, Valentine et al. (2009) present a historical view of how linguistic and territorial unity defined the notion of ‘peoplehood’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centauries. Therefore, ‘a people’ is seen as a bounded entity defined by shared cultural norms, mediated by a shared language spoken in a contagious territory (Jacquemet, 2005). While Valentine et al. (2009) admit that accelerated patterns of mobility and contact made language detached from historical locations, they maintain the view that place is ‘not infinitely fluid’ (Valentine et al., 2009: 191), and that the repetition of certain social and cultural forms in a place assigns power to these forms that shape and saturate the social place, producing models of normativity in society (Agha, 2007: 157) including norms and rules about common communicative behaviour. This ultimately leads to legitimising some forms of behaviour and identities based on histories of inheritance and the repetition of social practices which lead to making them become the legitimate, accepted, normal and expected ways of living in a place. Commenting on language in place, Valentine et al. (2009: 191) maintain: [M]igrants are often defined as ‘out of place’ in their new environment despite being multilingual because their particular individual linguistic competencies do not always fit the norms or expectations of the particular spaces which they inhabit and as such their identities are ascribed by others as not belonging.

This view can be used to comment on growing sentiments of linguistic hostility and ethnolinguistic nationalism in Europe. From this perspective, space, place and spatiality are not always in the making. Rather, they are bounded, pre-determined, and easily-described. This has implications

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for individuals’ communicative practices, as well as their sense of identity and belonging. That is to say, in order to fit in or to be seen as ‘of place’, individuals have to speak the language/variety associated with, and regulated by, the spatial contexts they inhabit. As such, norms and regimes are regulated by place and individuals cannot always exercise agency to challenge expected communicative practices. This view foregrounds the role of structural and symbolic acts of power in place and leaves no room for creating or negotiating new norms responsive to the coming and going of mobile individuals. At the same time, it assumes equal and equitable access to the expected language/variety in a given place. While this view can indeed be used to interpret dominant features of linguistic hegemony and nationalistic discourses on integration, assimilation and inclusion, its stasis and rigidity continue to disadvantage mobile individuals, causing them immense suffering (Nail, 2019). Mobile individuals are deterritorialised due to a range of factors such as forced migration, family/study considerations and/or employment; such factors significantly affect the social positionings of the individual mover, as I discussed in Chapter 6. With the dynamics of deterritorialisation (Jacquemet, 2005: 263) come processes of reterritorialisation such as the anchoring and recontextualising of global cultural forms (Tomlinson, 1999). Language is indeed part of the anchoring and recontextualisation that accompany the process of place-making within the wider reterritorialisation context. When the linguistic practices of mobile individuals are rejected in place, they are stigmatised as not belonging. The stigmatisation occurs in complex and multiple ways: • Social stigmatisation: it occurs when ‘locally dominant ethnic groups strengthen in-group identities by raising the membership bar through practices of intolerance and exclusion’ (Jacquemet, 2005: 263). This behaviour is often nurtured as part of a nostalgic yearning discourse and a worry that ‘our’ place is changing by those with no ties to the place they live in now. • Emotional stigmatisation: through social stigmatisation, two types of groups emerge: the ‘normal’ and the ‘person with a stigma’ (to borrow Goffman’s, 1968 phrase). Not only are stigmatised people alienated,

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banished and treated as inferior (cf. Bauman, 2016), but also their communicative behaviours are judged as ‘unacceptable’, ‘illegitimate’, ‘loud’, ‘uncivilised’ and ‘ugly’. This produces language shaming and language fears as I explain later in this chapter. • Institutional stigmatisation: the mobile are always expected to meet the expectations placed on them by institutions that enforce national structural powers. Linguistic expectations act as major gate-keepers and markers for (un)belonging to the institution. An example of institutional stigmatisation is when employers hire individuals on the basis of speaking an accent that sounds posh, intelligent, and prestigious. This sounding is ideological. Who decides what language/variety is to be seen as more valuable than the rest? (See Chapter 3 on the sociolinguistic market.) • Academic stigmatisation: unfortunately, a vast majority of sociolinguistic research that researches language with reference to a particular place is complicit in the stigmatisation of individuals who are seen as transient, not from here and therefore their language variations do not count. The logic of mapping language in a place reduces language to a noun, rather than a performative complex verb. Furthermore, the mapping logic is not compatible with the linguistic complexity of liquid, unbounded and mobile speech communities. These forms of stigmatisation exacerbate the potential for language to act as a great wall in contemporary societies, making language a serious concern for social justice as I explain in Chapter 9. Another view on the relationship between language and place comes from Vigouroux (2009: 69) who approaches it as a two-way process: [W]hile we seek to understand how language practice is produced at a given time and in a given setting by a complex intertwining of related and sometimes competing dimensions of space, we also need to analyse language practices as an ongoing process of space production. Space is therefore no longer approached as a mere projection of language practice that might exist outside of the practice itself but as something intrinsically constructed by it.

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This approach conceptualises space and place as constantly in the making: recreated, reorganised, and renegotiated by the coming and going of social actors. However, it is worth noting that Vigouroux’s empirical research on language in place was conducted in a particular site: a multifunctional internet café in Cape Town. The café is owned by long-term migrants and it attracts African migrants from different linguistic backgrounds. Through its clients’ multilingual soundscapes, the café is turned into a communication hub that connects these individuals with family and friends in other countries. As such, the café as a place is constructed by the linguistic practices it hosts. At the same time, these practices were enabled by the symbolic meanings the participants attributed to this setting. That is to say, the café was perceived as a space for communicating with others across different time and place frames through multiple linguistic practices. While discussing this two-way relationship between language and place in the café, Vigouroux (2009) notes that English was used as the language of the café signs which display house rules such as warnings and costs. She suggests that using English can be interpreted as a strategic framing of the place as a legal business company at a time when most telephone businesses were illegally run in private houses. She adds all written notes in the café were reserved to former colonial languages such as French and English. African languages were excluded from written representation which enacts macro-social asymmetrical power structures sustained by the education system and employment requirements in South Africa. This study provides an important argument regarding the conceptualisation of language and place bearing in mind micro and macro social fields. At a micro-level, the place is shaped by the multilingual practices brought along and brought about by its clients. In return, such practices are shaped by the symbolic meanings ascribed to the place by its clients who perceived it as a multilingual space for connecting across time and place. Yet, at a macro-level, the written signs that significantly contribute to the construction of the place seek to conform to dominant language ideologies in Cape Town while visually hiding the multilingual realities of the cafes’ day-to-day functions. This study, among many others, highlights the complexity of discussing place power vis-à-vis individual agency. Does place dictate

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how language is used and which language is accepted since it is not an empty space and it is filled with normative views of acceptable linguistic behaviours? Or can individuals’ linguistic practices through ‘new’ linguistic displays and soundscapes defy normative expectations of linguistic behaviour and thus reconstruct place? The answer to this question is very important because the side we, as sociolinguists, take has significant repercussions for how we describe social life and how we talk about linguistic rights and citizenship in societies. I agree with Svendsen and Marzo (2015: 54) when they maintain, ‘[t]oo much emphasis on agency overlooks “the very real constraints acting on us in time and space”, and too much emphasis on structure disempowers people and fails to “account for human beings making a difference” (Carter & Sealey, 2000: 11)’. In a similar vein, Johnstone (2016: 632) calls on sociolinguists to approach linguistic analysis from the perspectives of identity and agency rather than only geography and demography. This middle-ground view is the approach I choose to follow in this book. Several studies have been done by urban multilingualism researchers who have attempted to denaturalise normative discourses of language in urban centres (Quist, 2000; Rampton, 2015; Svendsen & Marzo, 2015). Overall, this sociolinguistic work aims to unravel the links between certain ways of speaking and the values ascribed to them. Here, the key mission is to develop new ontological and epistemological stances of language in place bearing in mind the primacy of mobility and fluidity. While this work has been underway for almost two decades, sociolinguists still have a long way to go in their mission to legitimise ‘new’, ‘untraditional’ and ‘non-standard’ ways of speaking in order to highlight the heterogeneity of language in urban centres. It is not an easy path as sociolinguists are often confronted with nationalistic discourses about language that emphasise the importance of ‘standard’, ‘correct’ and ‘proper’ language use. Such views stem from monolingualising ideologies of unity, stasis and homogeneity while displaying ignorance of language as symbolic power and as a serious concern for social justice (see Chapter 9). An example of such nationalistic discourses about language in place was discussed in Svendsen and Marzo (2015: 47) who analyse the

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role of media in ‘the invention and diffusion of labels and the assignment of stereotypical indexical values’. For example, they explore how the media talks about a ‘new’ way of speaking associated with young individuals from migrant backgrounds. This way is referred to as ‘kebabnorsk’ (Kebab-Norwegian), a term commonly used in the media to refer to ‘street’, ‘slang’ language. They include a translated extract from Dagsavisen, a Norwegian regional newspaper, which highlights tensions between media and scholarly discourses about language: Even though young immigrants believe speaking Kebab-Norwegian closes doors in the employment market, language researchers see no reason why they should stop speaking that way. (Svendsen & Marzo, 2015)

This example resonates with ongoing sociolinguistic debates in many urban centres in Europe. In particular, the language of young people, working class, displaced and mobile individuals has come under scrutiny due to its non-compliance with dominant ontologies of language based on national and static ideologies. While sociolinguists continue to highlight that language is a dynamic and changing means of communication as well as a crucial aspect of how individuals project themselves to the outside world, hegemonic discourses of language such as those reproduced by the media and state education insist on perpetuating a static, unchanging and bounded understanding of language while representing sociolinguists as ‘language anarchists’, ‘liberal elitists’ (LippiGreen, 2012: 9) or as ‘metropolitan elites’ (Glaser, 2016). Another factor to consider in this tension between sociolinguists and the general public comes from right-wing, anti-elitism discourses that draw on, and utilise, nostalgic yearning for a fictional past without migration and without diversity in order to fuel linguistic hostility and debates about whose language and whose voice should be recognised and legitimised in place. These discourses refuse to engage with scholarly research and academic expertise and insist that their own views of societies should prevail. This section has highlighted the different views on the relationship between language and place. While spatiality offers the potential

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for developing a flexible and inclusive understanding of place responsive to the coming and going of individuals and the language they bring along/about, place is still populated with ontologies that seek to preserve societal norms that stem from a static understanding of the world, whereby places have static borders with certain norms of linguistic behaviour. This view responds to the increasingly migratory lifestyle of the twenty first century with increasing social anxieties about mobility and motion. At the same time, sociolinguists, like other social scientists, are exploring new theoretical and conceptual tools to develop language about postmodernity and the melted solids (Bauman, 2000). Engaging with the public to change and challenge narratives about societies by raising awareness about how contemporary societies defy traditional notions of stasis and homogeneity in multiple ways, including linguistic behaviour, often results in uneasy conversations dominated by either nationalistic, elitist discourses or right-wing, anti-elitist discourses; both of them turn their back on the heterogeneity of contemporary societies. These discourses matter because they produce symbolic violence that dominates societal views about linguistic legitimacy, causing immense suffering to those whose language is deemed ‘illegitimate’ or ‘not fitting’ as I explain in the next section.

7.2

Language and Symbolic Violence in Place

Symbolic violence, unlike other forms of violence, is subtle, gentle, and elusive (Bourdieu, 1990). It is sometimes hard to prove or talk about because it is usually recognised as legitimate. Bourdieu (1991: 140) explains how it works: symbolic violence can only be exercised by the person who exercises it, and endured by the person who endures it, in a form which results in its misrecognition as such, in other words, which results in its recognition as legitimate.

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Symbolic violence requires dominance, causes pain and forces endurance. Individuals affected by it struggle to recognise it as violence because the source/cause of pain superficially sounds legitimate. In other words, for symbolic violence to succeed it requires those subjected to it to recognise it as appropriate and reasonable. Language in place can be a source of symbolic violence. When individuals endure pain, vulnerability, shame, fear and anxiety as a result of hiding and shielding linguistic repertoires which are not traditionally perceived as belonging to a place, they do so while admitting that these repertoires do not have legitimacy in the place. While the pain, fear and shame are endured, their triggers are perceived as legitimate due to normative thinking about language in place. In my research on how young people talk about language and place (Badwan, 2020), young people not only talk about how they avoid using a language, other than English, in public spaces in England, but also legitimise the practice of hiding a major part of who they are and rationalise behaviours that sanction multilingualism in place. For example, in an interview with an English—Gujarati speaker living in Manchester (UK), a 23 year old, female participant reported that she avoids speaking Gujarati in public spaces and narrated a story when she had no option but to speak Gujarati on a train when she phoned her non-English speaking grandmother: I had to talk to her in Gujarati. So I did get a funny look from the lady who I sat next to and obviously she probably thought that oh it’s a bit rude because she can’t understand what I’m saying but for me it’s just like I had no choice.

This incident shows how the participant had to endure the ‘funny look’, which signals disapproval from a fellow commuter on the basis of linguistic behaviour. It also shows how the participant not only tries to endure, but also legitimise, this form of disapproval. This funny look is an act of symbolic violence. I cite another example in Badwan (2020) from a Polish young person in Manchester who reported that she tries to speak in English in public spaces even when she speaks to another Polish speaker:

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If I’m speaking to a Polish person I’ll speak to them in English because obviously if someone’s around you, they don’t feel attacked.

Once again, the policing of linguistic practices in public spaces is endured, justified and rationalised. It is seen as a normal and legitimate practice in place. In this example, the participant talks about a form of language fears. She acknowledges this fear when she said, ‘they don’t feel attacked’. At the same time, her linguistic behaviour is an attempt to ensure that she will not be attacked for speaking Polish in public spaces. Commenting on this, Rymes (2014: 20) wonders: Is it really hard to tell the difference between some using Spanish to solve a math problem, and using it to talk maliciously about someone else? Most competent speakers of any language can read cues in other languages that hint at what the point of the conversation is. Why not build relationships on the basis of these shared non-linguistic cues? Instead, we often seem to be conditioned by the linguistic monolith perspective to ignore all other aspects of communication.

In other words, these language fears are not justified. Individuals communicate beyond language and this communication entails cues such as eye movements/contact, body language, gestures and facial expressions that can be used to indicate the topic of discussion. This language fear is a myth about communication that is often linked to hearing other languages. This myth has social consequences; it continues to delegitimise the presence of linguistic repertoires that are seen as not historically belonging to the place, and it pressurises individuals to shield their linguistic diversity in order to adhere to national epistemologies of language in place. In addition, this language fear creates a mechanism of othering that divides between those deemed integrable and those deemed non-integrable. This is because of stubborn national discourses that continue to link speaking the national language with integration while placing the integration responsibility on socially deprived migrants, displaced and mobile individuals (Simpson, 2020). Language speakers in these situations endure pain and vulnerability while trying to justify these feelings and possibly recognise their causes as normal or legitimate. Under these circumstances, place becomes a field,

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in Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1992) terms. The notion of ‘field’ is relevant in a world of increasing mobility and tensions which bring about different types of borders. These borders are invisible, somehow uncrossable until those inside the field grant outsiders permission to come inside under the conditions of the insiders. These field members decide on who to recognise as ‘like’ or ‘unlike’ them. Consequently, the borders of the field are ‘no longer sites to be crossed but lines that separate’ (Mbembe, 2019: 3). Still, it is worth noting that these borders and boundaries are not fixed or static. Rather, they are contingent and responsive to wider socio-political contexts. That is to say, they are determined by those inside the field who continue to adapt the inclusion criteria to their field depending on changes to wider political and ideological spheres. As such, field members (re)assess the affiliation requirements to determine what it means to be in or out. Language plays a crucial role in this process. A case in a point is found in Derrida’s (1998) Monolingualism of the Other which documents an autobiographic account of how violent and contradictory social forces were central to his own ‘disordered’ identity (Derrida, 1998: 14). He narrates how he was affected by the withdrawal of the French citizenship from the Jews of Algeria. In spite of being a French speaker himself, the citizenship withdrawal meant that he was perceived as not belonging to French as a language. This non-belonging to a language was central to his own social exclusion and sense of identity disorder. The endured pain was the result of field members’ reassessment of his membership. Derrida insists that the discussion about language, belonging and recognition is not exclusive to his own individual situation. Rather, he (2005: 101) seeks to generalise how language belonging works in societies: I knew that what I was saying in The Monolingualism of the Other was valid to a certain extent for my individual case, to wit, a generation of Algerian Jews before the Independence. But it also had the value of a universal exemplarity, even for those who are not in such historically strange and dramatic situations as … mine. I would venture to claim that the analysis is valid even for someone whose experience of his own mother tongue is sedentary, peaceful, and without any historical drama.

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Derrida’s discussion is about the violence constituted through language in societies. After all, ‘every language is the language of the other’ (Derrida, 1998: 63). The language we speak as children is the language of the other, be that a mother, a father or whoever cares for the child. At the same time, being assigned affiliation to a language is also accomplished through the validation of the other. Being denied linguistic affiliation to a language by the other is an act of violence and an attack on one’s identity. To sum up, our linguistic identities are developed, recognised or denied through the other. During this process, symbolic violence is enacted when individuals are recognised as ‘unlike’ the other members based on language (McNamara, 2010: 31). In these situations, individuals and their language endure the pain and brutality of being othered, signalled out, separated, perceived as outsiders, and alienated. While Derrida’s work discusses wider implications of citizenship withdrawal on how individuals endure symbolic violence on the basis of language affiliation, everyday experiences of/with language in society indicate that other social factors such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender intersect in complex ways with comments about, and judgements on, linguistic behaviour and language use in place. In June 2016, the BBC1 reported on an incident whereby a Welsh speaking woman was asked to speak English on a bus in Wales. The woman was speaking to her son in what sounded like a ‘foreign’ language to a fellow commuter who then said to her, ‘when you’re in the UK you should really be speaking English’. Another commuter interrupted, saying ‘she’s in Wales. And she’s speaking Welsh’. Reading the story without knowing that the Welshspeaking woman was a visible Muslim (recognised by wearing a niqab) does not fully explain this linguistic hostility. The example shows the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity and religion on how the woman was positioned by the objecting commuter who did not think that the woman was speaking in Welsh because she did not look like the Welsh language, to borrow Rosa’s (2019) expression. While these forms of violence exceed the subtlety of symbolic violence, I discuss them here to illustrate how normative thinking about language in place constitutes 1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36580448/welsh-woman-on-bus-shuts-down-racist-who-

told-muslim-passenger-to-speak-english.

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different types of violence. I return to this point when I discuss language as a social justice concern in Chapter 9. As I explained in the Preface of this book, I have always felt uncomfortable talking about my own English repertoire. I lost count of how many times I was asked, ‘how come your English is impeccable?’. While these questions affirm my belonging to some field by its members who seem to value my language and recognise it as ‘like’ that of others in the field, I feel perplexed whenever I attempt to answer the question. Some start making guesses about the origins of my English repertoire that do not seem to comply with the features of a particular variety. These guesses continue to remind me of my inbetweenness in relation to place. While I embrace this in-betweenness, I am reminded that the validation of the other in the field requires some sort of adherence to social categories that do not always leave room for in-betweenness. Unfortunately, linguistics as a discipline is complicit in essentialising language through relying on idealised and generalised linguistic grids that are imposed on the language of individuals under the umbrella of linguistic analysis. A concern raised by Blommaert et al. (2005) who argue that language is often studied with the presumption that individuals’ language use is a stable entity and a secure starting point for analysis. For many linguists and lay people, these essentialising processes are normalised. In his discussion of linguistic theory and diversity, Riemer (2016) asserts that students majoring in linguistics are ‘instructed in an essentially reductive and classificatory approach’ before they soon realise that there is no disciplinary consensus in the field and that claims for ‘scientific authority’ are heavily reliant on their ‘own favourite candidate theory’. This state of the discipline has serious social repercussions and symbolic violence lies at the heart of such consequences. For example, the field uses a range of terms such as ‘native speaker’, ‘non-native speaker’, ‘balanced bilingual’, ‘truncated repertoires’, ‘good English proficiency’, ‘speaker of Standard X’, ‘authentic accent’, ‘regional variety’, etc. With all these terms, among many more, it is important to ask who decides on assigning linguistic affiliations along the lines of these terms? And most importantly, what are the implications of being denied certain linguistic affiliations? I think the discipline will certainly benefit from critical discussions of how symbolic violence continues to be inherent in

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what sounds like scientific approaches to analysing language. I here echo Riemer’s (2016) concerns when he says: We should resist the attempt to impose a single vision of language, meaning or human nature, when this vision is empirically contested, and, crucially, unoperationalized. We should also hesitate to accustom students to the instrumentalisation of truth claims.

In other words, it is crucial to raise awareness about the amorphous nature of language by emphasising its complex and fluid nature. While it might be inevitable to use essentialising categories for the sake of linguistic description and analysis, it is important to note the social consequences of such theories and practices: whose interests are served by such approaches? who is disadvantaged by them? and how can we conceptualise language bearing in mind the subtlety of symbolic violence in practice? Taking the discussion back to the spatial turn in applied linguistics, space is a pivotal reference point for understanding how languaging happens and how it is perceived by others. As such, the spatial turn foregrounds the inseparability of language and society and places language use within wider contextual, historical, political, moral, ideological and chronotopic considerations. Languaging is not only a reflection of an individual internalised system but is also a situated, interactional and relational practice, as well as being a joint, negotiated performance (Valentine et al., 2009).

7.3

Ethics of Care and Fostership in Place

I became interested in discussions about language in place with reference to ethics of care and fostership three years ago. In a teaching session about language and mobility, I asked the students to sit in groups of four whereby each group was asked to produce a list that describes the ways of speaking they hear around them in Manchester (UK). Surprisingly for me, the lists from the five groups were quite short. They included references to local linguistic varieties such as South Manchester

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English, North Manchester English, Oldham English, and Mancunian English. I displayed the lists and asked the students to spend some time reflecting on how their own lists made them feel. These are tasks to engage university students with questions such as: ‘How do we document the subjective effects of language on the embodied perceptions, memories and emotions of speakers?’ (Kramsch, 2009: 15). We had moments of silence, frustration, vulnerability, discomfort and hesitation. It seems that the students were grappling with decisions such as who to include in their lists, who to exclude, and on what basis. They were thinking of the bordering and the legitimacy of language in place. One student from Kuwait broke the uncomfortable silence and reported that the lists made him feel unrecognised and unheard in the city. Another student from the US reported similar sentiments. A Vietnamese student wondered whether ‘non-native’ Vietnamese English could be counted as one of the voices in Manchester. Two brothers started joking because one of them lived most of his childhood in the US whereas the other lived in Yorkshire in the North of England. They started debating whose voice should be added on the list. Other students from different parts of the UK felt that they needed to add their voices but were not sure if they count because they were not ‘from Manchester’. At that time, a student who described himself as ‘from Manchester’ argued that the list of ways of speaking heard in Manchester should only include ‘original’ Mancunian voices. The students looked at me as they were searching for a resolution to the debate of who is in and who is out when discussing language in the city. They were looking for a ‘scientific grid’ to help them deal with the task in an objective way. I did not offer a resolution nor an objective grid. Instead, I asked them to modify their lists to add all linguistic repertoires they hear around them in the city regardless of the ‘legitimacy’ or ‘originality’ of these ways of speaking. The lists were getting longer, the silence turned into noise, with students asking one another ‘what else can we add?’. The task ended when a student said loudly, ‘this list is endless. How can we list everything we hear around us in a city like Manchester?’. Other students nodded in agreement. I smiled and said, ‘your next task is to think of how your new lists make you feel as dwellers in Manchester’. The students started using adjectives such as ‘inclusive’, ‘hospitable’, ‘welcoming’. That put an end

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to the unease we collectively experienced as we were thinking of who is in and who is out of the place. I have grappled with notions such as ‘hospitality’ and ‘inclusion’ for some time. While we often like to describe places and people as ‘hospitable’, it is important to remember that ‘hospitality is never fully open’ (Westmoreland, 2008: 3). It entails having a host who has power and sovereignty and who can impose certain conditions, restrictions and rules upon the guest. This form of conditional hospitality is built on rights, duties and obligations. When asked about the principle of unlimited hospitality, Derrida (2005: 6) admits that there are limitations because the host needs to establish what is ‘proper’ in order to protect ‘home’. Interestingly, he refers to linguistic communities in this discussion: This principle demands, it even creates the desire for, a welcome without reserve and without calculation, an exposure without limit to whoever arrives [l’arrivant]. Yet a cultural or linguistic community, a family, a nation, can not not suspend, at the least, even betray this principle of absolute hospitality: to protect a ‘home’, without doubt, by guaranteeing property and what is ‘proper’ to itself against the unlimited arrival of the other; but also to attempt to render the welcome effective, determined, concrete, to put it into practice.

Is contact with foreign languages and different linguistic varieties ‘proper’ for cultural and linguistic communities? What if the hosts decide that in order to protect ‘home’, other ways of speaking are not proper? Does this violate the principles of hospitality or does it constitute some form of conditional hospitality? Because of these problematic features of hospitality, I started to avoid using terms such as ‘hospitality’ and ‘hospitable’ when I discuss ethics of caring for language and when I advocate for language-based social justice. The term ‘inclusion’ poses similar challenges. Race theorists problematise this notion when they talk about the ‘inclusion tax’ in white structures. For instance, Melaku and Beeman (2020) argue that inclusion entails the pressure to conform and manage emotions to suit the comfort of dominant people. It demands the pressures to stay silent

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about injustices, hostilities and inequalities. When you are included in a particular setting, you enter a field whose norms are determined prior to your inclusion. Negotiation norms continue to be afforded depending on the individual’s positionality in relation to power structures. What does an inclusive linguistic space look like? How do we ensure that languaging subjects are not pressurised into conforming and adhering to linguistic norms that exclude their own? In my research with young people in the city of Manchester, some participants reported that Manchester is an inclusive place, yet they provided examples of how they deliberately hide their non-English repertoires in order not to offend or be offended by others in public spaces. Like the term ‘hospitality’, ‘inclusion’ also does not necessarily advocate an agenda for caring for language and the numerous ways of speaking that inhabit the place. In search for a better term (while being aware that labels and terms can never be fully neutral), I landed on ‘foster-ship’. I googled the term ‘foster-ship’ and found no literature on how to conceptualise it or talk about it. The verb ‘fostering’ is frequently used in academic publications to refer to nurturing certain practices, philosophies or approaches. Yet, I was inspired by Phipps’ (2020) lecture for World Refugee Day organised by the UNESCO Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. The title of the talk was, ‘Fostering Integration: making refuge real through the arts of justice and contemplative seeing’. One of the lecture’s key questions was: What happens after the welcome and how do we really do the hard, piece by piece work of justice, and what Simone Weil calls ‘decreation’ to create in the bodies, homes, communities and institutions that make up our lives?2

Phipps (2020) explains that foster-ship is to go beyond the welcome and its hospitality discourses. It is a step beyond entertaining the guest and offering good will and aid. To foster means to embrace, nurture, protect, and wrap arms around those who need love and protection (Phipps, 2020). It is a long-term commitment that requires lifetime 2 https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/unesco/news/headline_725541_en.html.

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dedication. Fostering—like parenting—is a decision one takes without knowing exactly how to do it or what it fully entails, yet what matters is to decide that what is being fostered is worth the care and protection. As I discussed earlier, the spatial turn in applied linguistics foregrounds the importance of liquid spatiality which entails developing new conceptual and linguistic tools that allow us to be responsive to the coming and going of people and to the ongoing inter/intra-actions with spaces, objects and emotions in order to produce innovative expansive discussions of languaging in place. Applied linguists continue to capture and frame language during empirical research; this capturing and framing is not neutral and can indeed have implications for symbolic violence and societal divisions in place. How can ethics of care and foster-ship help address these inherited empirical linguistic caveats? I do not claim that I have an exhaustive road map with detailed steps to fix linguistic inequalities in place. However, I argue that applied linguists—like photographers—choose the focus of what is captured during fieldwork and what is framed in research outlets. This choice is not simply scientific. It is ideological and subjective and it feeds into how language is talked about in academic and non-academic domains. What if the research focus stems from ethics of care and foster-ship? What if applied linguists work collectively to understand the vulnerability of language and the pain endured by different types of language users in place? A foster-ship approach to researching language has the potential to respond to what Bourdieu (1991: 43) refers to as the ‘illusion of linguistic communism’, an illusion that overlooks how linguistic competence and performance are distributed and perceived unequally in societies. It can also contribute to ongoing debates about linguistic rights, linguistic representation, and linguistic citizenship. Ontologically, linguistic foster-ship draws on premises of diversity, contact and mobility and acknowledges how these factors significantly influence the social values associated with their linguistic manifestations. Linguistic fostership is not going to be easy or straightforward and it might leave us with the laborious task of developing new liquid conceptual tools and messy analysis approaches. It might force us to break free from some established linguistic models or theories. In other words, it entails some acts of ‘decreation’, whereby ‘we participate in the creation of the world by

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decreating ourselves’ (Weil, 2002: 33). The decreation of the self requires a problematisation of the discipline and asking whose interests are served by established scholarly work. I am aware that in a discipline dominated by idealised and generalised language abstractions and approaches, this might sound like an unachievable vision. Yet, I would like to add my voice to Riemer (2016) when he said: The world is not in a good way, either socially or environmentally. As people responsible for educationally preparing the next generation, we cannot think too deeply about what kind of societies we are helping, in our small way, to form.

Research impact and societal outreach have become crucial aspects of assessing research quality in some countries like the UK. While the impact agenda is not without its problems, we can utilise impact and outreach platforms to develop a societal agenda for caring, fostering and nurturing language in place. Fostering, in particular, is about protecting the vulnerable and providing circumstances to allow them to grow and flourish. In the next section, I discuss an example of foster-ship through breaking free from local and national epistemologies of language in place, what I call, ‘unmooring language’.

7.4

Unmooring Language

In Chapter 5, I discuss some pervasive local and national framings of language, which are ingrained in the fabric of modern thought, subjectivity and language politics. I refer to these epistemologies as ‘mooring’ language. Mooring, Phipps (2013) argues, offers certainty, order, stability and control. It offers confidence in the languages of people and places and emphasises social cohesion, consensus and coherence. It locks language to a place and enables the mapping of sociolinguistic features across horizontal spaces. The challenge with such epistemologies of language in place is that while they fail to reflect the increasingly migratory social life of the twenty-first century (Nail, 2019), they continue to be vital and influential to how many ‘ordinary language users’

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(McGregor, 2001) talk about their world of language and language in the world. These epistemologies cause social justice concerns and produce different configurations of symbolic violence in place such as fear, shame, shaming, othering, abuse, harassment, bullying, (un)belonging, as well as feelings of pain caused by being unrecognized, unpresented, unaccepted and unwelcome. They inform major crises of our times; practices of dehumanisation that continue to render some individuals and their languages more grievable than others (Butler, 2009), see Chapter 9. To respond to Valentine’s et al. (2009: 190) concern that ‘there has been a failure to look at the way that language is becoming detached from specific locations and at the linguistic transformations that are taking place as a result of accelerated patterns of mobility and contact between different practices’, I introduce the notion of ‘unmooring language’ (Badwan, 2020) which also serves as a language-based social justice concept. It is precisely because language mooring is almost everywhere that I understand the challenge of unmooring which has also made it inescapable for me. Unmooring is about shaking the confidence in what language to expect in place. It draws on the ontology of turbulence that generates new entanglements where ‘novelty, unpredictability and uncertainty are produced’ (Stroud, 2015: 209). It is about engaging with conflict, chaos and fluidity in liquid speech communities. It calls for expecting the unexpected and being committed to ‘caring for the language that is actually produced by persons, legitimately or illegitimately’ (Komska et al., 2019: 127). It also challenges linguistic essentialism (Gurney and Demuro (2019), engaging with acts of (de)occupying language (Alim, 2019) and denaturalising discourses about language, ethnicity and identity (Svendsen & Marzo, 2015) in order to permit new ways of talking, and thinking about, language in place. Like other creative sociolinguistic conceptual endeavours such as dis-inventing language (Makoni & Pennycook, 2005), challenging the discreteness of language (Jørgensen, 2008; Li, 2011; Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010), (de)occupying language (Alim, 2019), decolonising multilingualism (Phipps, 2019) and linguistic disobedience (Komska et al., 2019), among many others, unmooring language is going to be messy and unsettling. It is going to require ‘awkward practice [and] uneasy

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rehearsals’ (Phipps, 2019: 7), as well as the effort to unlearn the habit of perceiving the world as unchanging and static. It will also require a lifetime of disquieting activism that argues for the legitimacy of the ‘unexpected’ language of the mobile, the oppressed, the displaced, and the socially marginalised. And yes, it is not always possible to be neutral in the way we conceptualise and describe language in place because whenever we discuss a language, ‘we indulge in political linguistics’ (Blommaert, 1996: 217). In addition, unmooring language as an epistemology derives from the unboundedness of spatiality in that it creates new possibilities for responding to the ongoing coming and going of people in a way that shakes the confidence in what to expect of language in place. By unmooring language, place becomes complexified and always in the making. With all the making and re-making of place, individuals might feel out of place as they encounter different peoples, cultures, languages, customs and ways of being. Said’s (1999) Out of Place presents a somehow paradoxical account of what it means to be always out of place. Reflecting on his childhood memories as a Palestinian located outside Palestine who through travels developed unsettled identities in conflict with each other, he said, ‘I wish we could have been all-Arab, or all-European and American, or all-Orthodox Christian, or all-Muslim, or all-Egyptian’ (Said, 1999: 5). Later, he discusses the value of being out of place, and how it obliges him to become different in unexpected ways: ‘Now it does not seem important or even desirable to be “right and in place” (right at home, for instance). Better to wander out of place, not to own a house, and not ever to feel too much at home anywhere’ (Said, 1999: 294). Similarly, in his discussion of being in or out of place, Pennycook (2012) discusses how he takes pleasure in being out of place because it makes him engage with difference through unknowing, becoming undone and thinking in new ways. All these processes of unlearning, re-learning and exploring the self through difference are nowadays possible without the need for extensive travel because the places we share with others have become ‘linked lattices of connected entities brought together by mobility’ (Leitner et al., 2002: 287). As such, many of us can indeed experience being out of place without necessarily moving between

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geographical places. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that this learning is not neat, comfortable or linear. That is why it is common to observe discourses of nostalgic yearning to a simpler past with less complexity, mobility and diversity. A past where places have expected languages, cultures and customs. Maybe it is easier for many to moan about the present than to engage with decreating the self. This moaning has serious social consequences. Ahmad (2014) explains how social norms become affective over time so when people talk about something from the past, they present some emotional attachments to it. Therefore, language as a crucial social norm can become affective. When people are ordered or policed to speak in a certain way, these acts are not just ideological but are also affective. That is to say, through language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2001) people develop certain values, judgments, attributes and emotions which are then attached to certain linguistic behaviours. Not conforming to social norms including linguistic behaviour could produce sentiments of fear, social anxiety and loss of control which are then manifested in discourses of nostalgia, consensus and unity. Such discourses, argues Ahmad (2014) in her discussion about the affective politics of fear, create ‘a distinction between those who are “under threat” and those who threaten’ (Ahmad, 2014: 72). A lot can be said about who is under threat and who is threatened but in a discussion about language, I maintain the focus on language fears and how local and national framings of language become under threat by the ‘new’ languages and ways of speaking that are not historically thought of as belonging to the place. An alternative approach to engaging with mobility and difference is to shake the confidence in places and their languages through continuous unlearning and decreation. Confidence in one’s knowledge is tied to the notion of mastery which has been invoked as an essential good (Singh, 2018). To be confident in what to expect entails the compulsive desire to be knowledgeable and masterful which has dominated the field of sociolinguistics for decades. Unmooring language is about challenging the mastery, the confidence and the self. As an anti-mastery concept, it encourages us to disentangle ourselves from the legacies of hegemony and fantasies of invulnerability that lead us to hurt other humans (Singh, 2018). I shall return to Singh’s work in Chapter 10 when I discuss the

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pedagogical implications of decolonising linguistics through unlearning and unthinking mastery. Unmooring is about the decreation which occurs as we decreate ourselves (Weil, 2002). Instead of treating the ‘I’ as anchored in place and the other as encroaching on one’s place, decreation dictates that, ‘we must be rooted in the absence of a place’ (Weil, 2002: 39) in order to change previous arrangements of control and ownership. Only then can we unlearn the old habits of viewing the world and assessing the value of the other and their language in it. And yes, it may never become a level playing field as categories of race, gender, class might continue to do their work (Phipps, 2019), yet these struggles to decreate are indeed well worth a try. Decreation is about breaking loose and breaking free from the politics of representation in order to liberate the self from colonial, essentialising and dehumanising entanglements. Commenting on this, Phipps (2019: 91) explains that: The languaged realities of the world when languages no longer remain rooted to specific territory but have broken loose and are establishing themselves in the life of new contexts and communities are an opportunity for decolonising work.

We can learn a lot from the presence of language in new contexts. Language comments, anxieties, judgments, requirements can teach us a great deal about structural hierarchies, inequalities and injustices in the world. Unmooring language, on the other hand, teaches us to deconstruct our knowledge about the world and to unthink our notions of mastery in order to create new arrangements for living with language moving in unbounded spatiality. Is this social justice concept an optimistic good life fantasy that ‘makes life bearable as it presents itself ambivalently, unevenly, incoherently’ (Berlant, 2011: 14)? I am still grappling with this question while appreciating that this might be a profoundly hopeful concept, gazing towards a future it still cannot see.

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Chapter Summary This chapter has engaged with different place theorisations to comment on the relationship between language and place. It shows the potential for spatiality (Massey, 2005) to permit new ways for reimaging place and its social norms. Central to these ways is the understanding that place is always in the making which, on the one hand, provides an expansive lens through which language can be approached. On the other hand, spatiality challenges us to decolonise our thinking, to shake our confidence in what to expect in place, to unlearn and decreate. With this decreation, I hope, comes the awareness about the vulnerability of language and the different types of speakers whose language endures pain and symbolic violence. In societies seeking to become socially just, I discuss the value of care and foster-ship, as opposed to the fashionable terms ‘hospitality’ and ‘inclusion’.

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Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender. Polity. Massey, D. (1998). The spatial constructions of youth cultures. In T. Skelton & G. Valentine (Eds.), Cool places (pp. 121–129). Routledge. Massey, D. (2004). Geographies of responsibility. Geografiska Annaler, 86 (1), 5–18. Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage. Massey, D., & Jess, P. (1995). A place in the world? Oxford University Press. Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press. McGregor, G. (2001). Folk linguistics, review of folk linguistics. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 20 (4), 480–483. McNamara, T. (2010). Reading Derrida: Language, identity and violence. Applied Linguistics Review, 1, 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1515/978311022 2654.23. Melaku, T. a. and Beeman, A. (2020). Academia isn’t a safe haven for conversations about race and racism. Harvard Business Review. [Online]. https:// hbr.org/2020/06/academia-isnt-a-safe-haven-for-conversations-about-race. Mufwene, S. (2010). Foreword. In J. Blommaert (Ed.), The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge University Press. Nail, T. (2019). Being and motion. Oxford University Press. Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7 (3), 240–254. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790710903414331. Pennycook, A. (2012). Language and mobility. Multilingual Matters. Phipps, A. (2013). Unmoored: Language pain, porosity and poisonwood. Critical Multilingualism Studies, 1(2), 97–118. https://cms.arizona.edu/index. php/multilingual/article/view/20/58. Phipps, A. (2019). Decolonizing multilingualism. Multilingual Matters. Phipps, A. (2020, June 18). Fostering integration: Making refuge real through the arts of justice and contemplative seeing. A talk for the 4th Annual UNESCO Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. Purcell, M. (2013). Possible worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the right to the city. Journal of Urban Affairs, 36 (1), 141–154. Quist, P. (2000). Ny københavnsk ‘multietnolekt’. Om sprogbrug blandt unge i sprogligt og kulturelt heterogene miljøer [New Copenhagen ‘multiethnolect’. On language use among youth in linguistically and culturally heterogeneous settings]. Danske Talesprog, 1, 143–209. Rampton, B. (2011). From ‘multiethnic adolescent heteroglossia’ to ‘contemporary urban vernaculars.’ Language & Communication, 31(4), 276–294.

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Rampton, B. (2015). Contemporary urban vernaculars. In J. M. Nortier & B. A. Svendsen (Eds.), Language, youth and identity in the 21st century: Linguistic practices across urban spaces (pp. 24–44). Cambridge University Press. Rymes, B. (2014). Communicating beyond language: Everyday encounters with diversity. Routledge. Riemer, N. (2016). Diversity, linguistics and domination: How linguistic theory can feed a kind of politics most linguists would oppose. [Online]. https://hip hilangsci.net/2016/05/11/diversity-linguistics-and-domination-how-lingui stic-theory-can-feed-a-kind-of-politics-most-linguists-would-oppose/. Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad . Oxford University Press. Said, E. (1999). Out of place. Granta Publications. Schneider, B. (2019). Methodological nationalism in linguistics. Language Sciences, 76 , 1–13. Simpson, J. (2020, July 9). Adult migrant language education: A social justice perspective. A Plenary talk for the BAAL 2020 Language Learning and Teaching SIG. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/english/our-events/baal-2020language-learning-and-teaching-sig/plenary-speakers/. Singh, J. (2018). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Duke University Press. Stroud, C. (2015). Turbulent deflections. In C. Stroud & M. Prinsloo (Eds.), Language, literacy and diversity (pp. 206–216). Routledge. Svendsen, B. A., & Marzo, S. (2015). A ‘new’ speech style is born. EuJAL, 3(1), 47–85. Tomlinson, J. (1999). Globalisation and culture. University of Chicago Press. Valentine, G., Sporton, D., & Nielsen, K. (2009). The spaces of language. In J. Collins, S. Slembrouck, & M. Baynham (Eds.), Globalisation and language contact: Scale, migration and communicative practices (pp. 189–208). Continuum International Publishing. Vigouroux, C. (2009). A relational understanding of language practice: Interacting timespaces in a single ethnographic site. In J. Collins, S. Slembrouck, & M. Baynham (Eds.), Globalization and language in contact (pp. 62–84). Continuum International Publishing. Weil, S. (2002). Gravity and grace. Routledge. Westmoreland, M. (2008). Interruptions: Derrida and hospitality. KRITIKE, 2(3), 1–10.

8 Language and Identity in a Globalised World

8.1

Not Fitting the Mould

Edward Said was known for, among many other contributions, his writings on what it means to have conflicted identities and to be out of place all the time. Language was repeatedly featured as a factor that made it particularly difficult for him to describe himself. He asks questions such as what is my first language? What is my second language? Am I completely bilingual? In the following quotation, he grapples with the notion of ‘living in’ languages from different world, a situation many mobile individuals find themselves in as part of the migratory life of the twenty-first century: There is a massive technical literature about bilingualism, but what I’ve seen of it simply cannot deal with the aspect of actually living in, as opposed to knowing, two languages from two different worlds and two different linguistic families. This isn’t to say that one can’t be somehow brilliant, as the Polish native Conrad was, in English, but the strangeness stays there forever. Besides, what does it mean to be perfectly, in a completely equal way, bilingual? Has anyone studied the ways in which © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Badwan, Language in a Globalised World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7_8

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each language creates barriers against other languages, just in case one might slip over into new territory? (Said, 2004)

What I find particularly intriguing in Said’s work is his emphasis on feelings of ‘strangeness’ and ‘out of place-ness’ that stay ‘there forever’ which made him refer to his identity as ‘conflicting’. Derrida (1998), too, talks about similar sentiments when he discusses the ‘disorder’ of identity. But what makes identity strange, conflicting or disorderly? One possible interpretation is that identity is dependent on the recognition and identification of the Other, what Gee (2001) refers to as discourse identity. When individuals experience in-betweenness in relation to different subjectivities and social positionalities through discourse in social interaction, they might feel that they do not fit the mould set out by the other; and therefore, they might experience persisting strangeness. Foucault (1980, 1984) argues that Western knowledge is constructed around binary opposites such as mind/body, masculine/feminine, public/private. These binaries are not natural but realised through discourse. The polarisation caused by binaries and hierarchical orderings result in ‘the formation of meta-narratives that are excluding in principle and normalising in character’ (Baxter, 2020: 35). Following that, the power of normalising discourses hides and undermines the idiosyncrasy of everyday encounters and the diversity of subjectivities. These discourses create social moulds with subjectivities mostly afforded to the dominant who are then seen as normal, unmarked and belonging to place. Language is one of the key manifestations of this social mould which can be described as limiting and socio-politically charged. People’s perceptions of speaking language with a ‘foreign’ accent, a ‘different’ dialect, or in conjunction with a language associated with a ‘distant place’ are contributing factors to not fitting the mould. Language, argues Baxter (2020: 37), is a regulatory force that pressurises individuals to adhere to socially approved ways of being, including speech and linguistic behaviour. How important is it to fit the mould? While it is widely recognised in post-structuralist approaches to identity that identity is complex, multifaceted, and governed by a range of subjectivities, there is also a recognition that we are socially pressurised to conform in order to avoid being stigmatised as ‘weird’, ‘odd’ or ‘strange’.

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Such acts of social coercion become established from a very young age. For example, primary school children after less than a year at school become accustomed to ‘normal’ ways of being which are reproduced through doctrines of social desirability and social pressure. I remember the reaction of my son (6 years old) when I once picked him up from school and greeted him in Arabic. He frowned at me and said, ‘shhh, we do not speak Arabic at school’. I said to him, ‘that is not true. Look at that poster behind you. It says “welcome” in many languages including Arabic’. He shrugged his shoulders and walked ahead of me in a sign of protest. What is happening here? He has established through discourse what is normal at school and has associated speaking a ‘foreign’ language with strange behaviour. Obviously, he does not want to receive comments on his ‘weird mum’ who speaks a ‘strange’ language at home time. By adhering to social expectations, he wants to enact an identity that fits a socially desired mould. While I have the privilege of being able to fluently switch languages and meet his expectations of how I, as a mother, should behave, I have to admit that I struggle in these situations particularly when I try to draw on my professional identity as an applied linguist who teaches about, and advocates for, unmooring language in place. No matter how many times I talked about the value of language and how important it is to be proud of being able to speak different languages and varieties, my son continues to insist on the English only requirement around school premises. I recognise the identity struggle for him and for me in these everyday encounters with language. Breaking the mould which has been established through pervasive discourses about what it means to be normal takes more than one individual talking about unmooring language in place. It requires years of disquieting activism and unlearning. For now, these identity struggles make it even all the more harder to answer a question such as who am I as a translingual, mobile individual? Bauman (2000: 207) offers an approach to dealing with conflicting identities. He argues that building a home on the crossroads between cultures and languages can be exciting and eye-opening: Rather than homelessness, the trick is to be at home in many homes, but to be in each inside and outside at the same time, to combine intimacy

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with the critical look of an outsider, involvement with detachment- a trick which sedentary people are unlikely to learn.

This approach embraces the value of in-between-ness in the construction of versatile and critical perspectives of the world. It normalises the notion of strangeness and forces individuals to unthink normalcy and invite fluidity, in addition to the unavoidable eventuality of creation through breaking rules (Bauman, 2000). This approach was featured in the work of Derrida (1998), Bauman (2000), Said (1999) and the relatively recent work of Pennycook (2012). When discussing this view, these authors explain how the strangeness of being insiders and outsiders enabled them to see themselves through the other and to see the other through the self. In other words, the juxtaposition, the discomfort, the learning and unlearning that come with not fitting the mould are crucial not only to the becoming of the self but also to being at peace with oneself in spite of feeling out of place. What we learn from the biographical work of many influential social researchers is that there is significant value in developing a pedagogy that nurtures unthinking normalcy and breaking the mould. Yes, it might be easier (and indeed safer) to develop ways of fitting the mould, but an approach that enables individuals to take up different subjectivities and turn them into enablers to critically contribute to their different places is invaluable. Bauman (2000) describes this contribution as ‘gifts’ to the different places that host individuals in ‘exile’. Bauman (2000: 208), following Brooke-Rose (1996), explains that being in exile entails: the refusal to be integrated- the determination to stand out from the physical space, to conjure up a place of one’s own, different from the place in which those around are settled, a place unlike the places left behind and unlike the place of arrival.

Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that living with strangeness and in-between-ness requires patience, perseverance, and bravery. It also necessitates the determination to embrace the opportunities and challenges brought about by choosing not to fit the social mould. For this approach to be sustained, it needs to be socially accepted, acknowledged

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and recognised. Therefore, it is not surprising that most writers who discuss the virtues of strangeness are themselves internationally recognised scholars and highly appreciated figures. In other words, they have experienced the intellectual and social value attributed to their scholarly contributions which were enriched by virtue of being in exile. I have to admit that this is not an easy fix approach to identity struggles and that it is rather challenging to mainstream a philosophy that fosters and normalises in-between-ness, strange-ness and not fitting the mould. I cannot remember how many times I discussed this with my students only to receive doubtful looks. This is mainly because such a position is at odds with the vast majority of public education systems in the world. For example, in his critique of school systems Robinson (2009) explains how the rigid hierarchy of subjects and the growing reliance on particular types of assessments produce a stratified, one-sizefits-all approach that normalises those who can survive the approach and marginalises those who cannot. He argues that for individuals to reach their ‘element’ and follow their passion for creativity, innovation and brilliance, they are required to recover from their education in pursuit of alternative ways of being. That is not to say that there are no successful or inspiring models of education that nurture creativity and passion. One of the revolutionary educational approaches is found in the Reggio Emilia approach in Northern Italy which rejects the principles of educational homogeneity and refuses the one-size-fits-all model for education. ‘The Hundred is There’1 poem by Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of this approach, summarises the underpinning educational philosophy. Part of the poem reads: The child has a hundred languages (and a hundred hundred hundred more) but they steal ninety-nine The school and the culture separate the head from the body. 1 https://www.reggiochildren.it/en/reggio-emilia-approach/100-linguaggi-en/.

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They tell the child: to think without hands to do without head to listen and not to speak to understand without joy to love and to marvel only at Easter and Christmas.

What are the implications of separating the head from the body, reducing ways of expression to one and asking children to think without hands on identity? The short answer is: identity mainstreaming. By this I mean that school and dominant culture produce normalising discourses that encourage particular social norms, practices, behaviours and ways of being. Adding peer pressure to the mix, young individuals are often faced with the pressure to conform in order not to be stigmatised by the system or the peers. Having said that, the system and the peers do not necessarily always pull young individuals in the same direction. For example, whilst the system encourages individuals to study hard and excel in their studies, it might be cool to be in a peer group that does exactly the opposite. Either way, individuals are polarised to conform in a particular way. Identity mainstreaming has forceful, excluding features. That, of course, does not mean that identity is like shoes of which we can only wear one pair at a time, to borrow the metaphor from Hobsbawm (1996: 87). We all possess multiple ‘repertoires of identities’ (Horner & Weber, 2012: 107) which are constantly performed and negotiated through discourse. At the same time, we might find ourselves coerced into performing certain identities and supressing others when pressurised to conform by a particular system or under social desirability doctrines as I explained in the case of education mainstreaming. When faced with this challenge, mobile individuals often find it even harder to settle with their in-between-ness in relation to the cultures, languages, norms and customs of the different places they inhabit during their mobile lives, and this has significant repercussions for their identity. Coupled with the dilemma that public education principles are similar in most countries around the world, it is not surprising for mobile individuals to experience conflicting identities as their mobile lives are expected

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to adhere to the ‘static’ national modes of life observed in the places they dwell in. As one of the researchers in a large European project on migrant children (aged 10–17) in changing Europe, I found that language was repeatedly featured in the identity struggles of these children. This is mainly because many of the interviewed children reported lack of appreciation for the languages they spoke before coming to the UK and they saw little value in them when it comes to learning and education. The following quotation from a 10-year old, male student from Kuwait reflects this view: I’m really good at school. But I need more, I need more to be at the top, I am probably in the middle. I need to do hard work, to read every day, write, speak more English. If you speak your own language you’re not going to learn anything, so you need to speak English more. So I just like speaking too much.

In this example, the dominant school discourse of working hard and speaking more English is internalised by this child and is used to justify his own self-assessment as ‘really good at school’. While it is important to acquire new linguistic repertoires on the go—something mobile individuals tend to do anyways, it is equally crucial not to undervalue previously acquired communicative repertoires. The ‘monolingualising’ (Heller, 1995) ethos that pervades the education system in the UK (Conteh & Brock, 2010) can be used to interpret this child’s view when he says, ‘If you speak your own language you’re not going to learn anything’. Due to the emphasis on an English Only policy in education, migrant children seem to overlook that a lot of learning can happen in other languages. They can learn different values, understand the world in different ways, and explore alternative ways of being and becoming through embracing all their communicative repertoires. Children cannot develop confident identities when they are asked to cut ties with, and shy away from, their histories, heritage and roots. On the contrary, they will be faced with the dilemma of seeing their families and schools as two separate, and sometimes, contradictory worlds and this separation could potentially lead to alienation. In their research on

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language in the lives of Somali children in Sheffield (UK), Valentine et al. (2009) describe the battles over linguistic hegemony that migrant children experience at home, as they are frequently asked by their parents to speak Somali, rather than English. For the children, it is easier to express themselves in English and while they understand most of what their parents say in Somali, they tend to respond in English which then results in statements such as, ‘Don’t speak English language, you know, when you come back from school, you must speak Somali language’ (Valentine et al. 2009: 195). Here, the parents insist on making the home a site for learning and becoming that offers different ways of being in the world and connects diasporic families through linguistic bonds that can reinstate their belonging to Somalia. Yet, this study presents some metalinguistic commentaries produced by the children to show how they do not agree with their parents’ linguistic approach. For example, the following quotation from a Somali young man alludes to some intergenerational tensions because the parents fail to understand the lived experiences and future identity aspirations of young people: Somali child: They [parents] don’t understand. Nobody is going to hire you so you’ve got to make your own way in this world…Some people think it’s easy but put yourself in someone else’s shoe and you see how hard it is. Only because of the colour of your skin. Only because of the lack of education.

Commenting on this, Valentine et al. (2009) explain that Somali children experience educational disadvantage, partly because of their linguistic disadvantage. They also face racist comments and they live in segregated networks. The above quotation shows how this child is trying to find his own way in the world, a way that conforms to social and linguistic norms in his current place of dwelling. He does that with the hope that he would be able to fit in and to become valued by employers. Central to all these tensions and navigations is language. While these children are highly translingual, they inhabit predominantly monolingual spaces: schools which are monolingual, adult controlled spaces and homes which are parent controlled spaces where monolingualism in the ‘heritage language’ is often the linguistic house rule. The polarisation

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experienced by young people significantly affects their sense of identity. While they try to adhere to the social norms of their country of residence (the UK), they are often reminded through experiences of racism and educational disadvantage that they do not fit the mould. At the same time, their parents are trying to make them fit the mould of what it means to be a ‘Somali’ only to be reminded during visits to Somalia that they actually do not fit that mould either. The strange-ness that stays forever (to borrow Said’s quotation with which I opened this section with) is not uncommon for mobile individuals. With this strangeness and in-between-ness comes an ongoing (re)making of identity.

8.2

Languaging and Identity

While the previous section has discussed aspects of (trans)languaging and identity with reference to social moulds established through discourse, this section turns to how translingual individuals talk about how they live with what is commonly referred to as different languages and linguistic varieties. Here, the emphasis is on emotions, connectivity, and performativity through languaging. I also present some insights from my interviews with Tunisian university students for whom linguistic diversity is a normal state of being in order to feature how they talk about themselves in relation to the languages they speak and the identities they perform. I would like to start this section with a short vignette from a diary I kept during my academic visit to Germany in September 2019: During my time in Germany, I was identified as a UK academic and my Palestinian identity did not seem relevant. No, that it is not correct, I was reduced to a ‘passport identity’ at immigration control every time I crossed a border. My Palestinian passport never fails to surprise me as it continues to attract extra checks, bizarre looks and sometimes hostile questions. I kept telling myself that I am a global academic even if border control officers insist on denying me this vision of myself. On the academic panel, I performed an academic identity and Standard English was my only needed linguistic repertoire. After a long day of serving on the panel, I went for a walk by the Rhine with a fellow UK academic.

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After two hours of walking, talking and looking at the river, I was struck by a familiar sound. A sound that took me away from Germany to warm childhood memories from the Levant. It was a song by a famous Lebanese singer, Fairouz, coming from a nearby restaurant. My colleague kept talking and I kept nodding while I was further taken away by the sound. I still do not understand why that happened to me. Was it the unexpectedness of the sound and the language that left me mesmerised? Was it the tiredness of performing the UK academic identity that made me cling to a different me? If you ask me at the moment, ‘Khawla, talk about your identity’. I would have definitely said, ‘I have no language to describe how I feel’. (My travel diary to Germany, September 2019)

This vignette exemplifies how ‘things make people happen’ (Kell, 2015: 442) and how the dynamic interplay between humans, places and soundscapes invokes emotions which are attached to these places to make them ‘sticky’ and saturated with affect (Ahmad, 2014; Badwan & Hall, 2020). That is to say, the interplay between the Rhine as a place of walking and resting after long working hours and the soundscapes featuring German, English and the Lebanese Arabic song turned the Rhine into a sticky place for me. Language (through the soundscapes) was central to the construction of my lived experience of the place. This stickiness invokes and interacts with momentary reflections on my identity as I consciously entered and existed different versions of myself while looking at the river and listening to the song. These versions or different subjectivities are emotionally mediated through the language connection, or what Bauman (2000: 205) refers to as the ‘intimate/distant territory’. We possess emotional connections to some linguistic repertoires as we associate them with memories, histories, relationships, which render these repertoires intimate. Yet, they could become distant if they are less used during mundane, everyday communicative tasks. I was in the intimate/distant territory with Arabic at the moment. Hearing it in one of the least expected places made me feel as if I met a dear old friend who took me to a different state of mind. The associations I have with Arabic awoke in me emotions and inner states from the past which seem to have remained unchanged in spite of changing places, languages and developing new communicative repertoires over the years (Pavlenko, 2005).

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This personal example demonstrates the significant role of emotions in bringing about different ‘reflexive identities’ (Benson et al., 2013). In their ‘facets of identity’ model, Benson et al. (2013: 19) propose different facets of identity as follows: 1. Embodied identity: the self as a mobile point of perception located in a particular body. 2. Reflexive identity: the self ’s view of the self, incorporating selfconcept, attributes and capacities. 3. Projected identity: the self as it is semiotically represented to others in interaction. 4. Recognised identity: the self as it is preconceived and recognised by others in the course of interaction. 5. Imagined identity: the self ’s view of its future possibilities. 6. Identity categories and sources: the self as it is represented (by self or others) using established social categories and semiotic resources. This model emphasises the multifaceted-ness of identity and explains that some facets of identities do indeed exist even if they are not externalised in interaction. The example from my Germany diary exemplifies this. That is to say, during the quick-slow moments of listening to the Arabic song, I did not project nor externalise how the song triggered childhood memories and how it made me enter multiple invisible identity spaces. Nonetheless, the way I perceived myself did not remain the same during the walk with my colleague. My projected identity remained the same as I continued to use the same semiotic resources and I can only predict that my recognised identity did not change. While the moments of listening to the song were quick as we walked past the restaurant, they were also slow in my mind due to the memories they triggered. In this example, a lot of what is happening is invisible but it is deeply and significantly felt and reflected upon. This example calls upon Said’s (2004) question, ‘has anyone studied the ways in which each language creates barriers against other languages, just in case one might slip over into new territory?’. However, I would replace the word ‘barriers’ with ‘identity spaces that trespass each other’. My question now stands as, has anyone studied the ways in which each language creates identity spaces

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that trespass spaces created by other languages, just in case one might be able to find a language to describe these intertwined spaces? In my research with academic sojourners in the UK (Badwan, 2015), the subject of language and identity was predominantly featured in the sociolinguistic trajectories of my mobile participants. The participants spoke about how their English repertoires enabled and inhibited different identities. For example, since they learned formal English, they reported that they sounded ‘too serious’ and ‘very formal’ in informal situations. One of the participants, Dalal from Saudi Arabia, explained how she tried to stay silent most of the time because she felt that her formal English repertoire sounded ‘slightly odd’. This silence limited the projection of aspects of her desired identity in many informal settings. Another participant who reported a similar challenge is Hassan from Qatar. In the following quotation he presents some reflections on living with English and Arabic: Khawla: Who are you as an Arabic-English speaker? Hassan: I like to think that I am the same person. I notice that I come across as humorous and more approachable in Arabic. I know how to joke in Arabic and how to speak in formal and informal situations. In English that does not happen. I do not always understand English jokes and my jokes are not always understood which makes me feel awkward. I think English makes me sound too serious. That is why I now prefer to be a serious person when I use English to avoid being misunderstood.

In this quotation, Hassan engages with what it means for him to live with two different named languages. The first sentence indicates how he wished he could have the same range of identities that he could project through Arabic when he speaks in English. He is aware that his perceived identity when he communicates in English is different from that when he speaks in Arabic. However, this does not stop at the perceived identity facet as he feels that his reflexive identity is also affected by the communicative repertoire he uses. Living with English and Arabic, he tries to stick to the identity option available to him through English by trying to project the identity of a serious person, something he is not always comfortable with.

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While Mahmoud from UAE reports similar sentiments regarding being a more ‘serious’ person when he speaks in English, he talks about the ‘seriousness’ that characterises his identity as a tool that he uses in challenging communicative events that require him to be serious and straight to the point: Khawla: In your first interview you said that you are obliged to use English and you don’t feel comfortable speaking it. Is this still the same now? Mahmoud: After a year in the UK, I can say no I am not obliged. I have the option and it is even more comfortable than Arabic sometimes. When I chat with my friends, I sometimes feel that using English is easier because there are things that I will not say in Arabic but I can say in English because English does not mean anything to me as a language and it does not have feelings so I can use it in embarrassing situations without being embarrassed… When I am serious and I want to say things freely and honestly without being too diplomatic, I say them in English. They seem less harsh.

What is intriguing in Mahmoud’s response is that he seems to distance English from his identity and emotions which, in a way, has permitted new ways of interaction when he does not want to be ‘too diplomatic’. Indeed, living with different languages not only offers a wider range of communicative repertoires but also enables different identities and emotional states of being. At a personal level, I see this all the time in the ways my family and I communicate. For example, I prefer to speak in English when I am angry. Similarly, I know that there is something bothering my husband every time he speaks to me in English at home. Pavlenko (2005: 135) offers a possible interpretation of why this happens when she explains that during difficult conversations, individuals resort to the language that enables them to gain distance and exercise selfcontrol. Doing this, individuals tend to avoid the language they associate with emotionality as it may deter difficult conversations. My children (aged 3 and 6 years old) understand language emotionality. While they predominantly use English at home, they strategically use Arabic when they ask for sweets and treats or when they apologise for bad behaviour.

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When they do this, they strategically invoke emotionality and I cannot help but reward them for doing this! When I discuss the above personal observations on living with different languages, my students often report similar experiences. What is happening here? Yes, we tend to associate certain communicative repertoires with particular social functions but this association is not fixed, rather it is fluid and is intertwined with a range of ecological factors such as who is involved in the communication, and most importantly, how we feel during the communication. The connection between language, identity and emotions is crucial to unpacking how we unfold different subjectivities, mediated through different emotions and externalised through communicative repertoires. In other words, any discussion about languaging and identity should pay attention to emotions and how they are expressed or suppressed during interactions. In the above examples, I talked about how the link between language, identity and emotions is actualised in everyday communication. I now zoom out to discuss how languaging individuals talk about their multiple languages from a meta-commentary perspective. Everyday meta-commentary, explains Rymes (2014), is an approach to researching communicative repertoires. It ‘signals an understanding of what a sign means without arbitrarily systematising communicative elements, but by pointing to that sign’s situated communicative value’ (Rymes, 2014: 11). Meta-commentary refers to languages, as well as to subtle comments on ‘fine-grained’ categories about language. Here I refer to examples of meta-commentary from my research with Tunisian university students where they were asked to meta-comment on the three languages they speak (Arabic, French and English) and the values they ascribe to them. The first quotations are from Medhat and Maram, two second-year undergraduate students: Khawla: What do the languages you speak mean to you? Medhat: French is a classy language. It is a good language. I like it as a language but I prefer English more because it is easier and I can interact with more people. Arabic is my native language. I like Arabic.

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Maram: English is international. Arabic is very interesting. It is part of who we are and because the Arabic history is rich. English means the whole universe because everyone can speak it. It is more dominant these days. French, TV shows. Arabic means identity to me.

The following quotation is from a final year engineering student: Arabic is a language to reflect my emotions and feelings. I is home, love, the hardest language for me. French is my second language and is part of being Tunisian. English is a language I love. It is fun. It is attractive and international.

The final quotation comes from a final year IT student: With French, it is a love-hate relationship. I need it but don’t like it. It is classical but useful. It is a tool that I use for work and study. I don’t hate it. I cannot hate my power. I cannot deny the power it gives me. As for Arabic, it is my past and love. We don’t use it any more at university. Darjah is a reflection of the history of Tunisia.

What is common amongst these quotations is that these young people appreciate their languaging and ascribe various social values to the different languages they speak. In doing so, they reflect, and metacomment, on the roles played by these languages in their everyday lives. At the same time, these reflections allude to the history of Tunisia with references to national sentiments associated with Arabic, the colonial presence of French, as well as neoliberal aspirations associated with English. After that, I asked the students about the relationship between speaking French and being Tunisian. This question is particularly challenging given the association of French with a colonial legacy in the country. Interestingly, the students I spoke to confirmed the importance of French to their identity. Nonetheless, their responses reflect some sort of coercion as a result of the current educational language policies that continue to promote the status of French in the Tunisian education system. The following quotations illustrate this view:

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Khawla: Is French part of being Tunisian? Maram: Yes. Our first 18 years of education we study a French system. Medhat: French is part of our identity. Our day-to-day language is a mixture of Arabic and French. It is also part of our identity.

Similarly, the next final year IT student agrees that French is important to his identity but he elaborates on how this has become the case: We don’t decide if French is part of us or not. We don’t choose how to study. The Ministry decides to impose French on us and it is part of us as a result of this choice. We have to admit that it is imposed on us.

The above examples highlight how individuals’ lived experiences with language continue to shape how language is perceived with reference to identity. The above quotations meta-comment on the role of French in the reflexive identities described by these young people. It is worth noting that these responses are at odds with official discourses about the linguistic identity of the country that insist on Arabic as the only official and national language. As such, these young people talk about their experiences with their linguistic diversity in a way that challenges dominant national discourses of linguistic purity, dominance and stratification. The implications of these meta-commentaries on identity are, of course, significant. Language continues to add complexity to the mix. In this section, I discussed how languaging individuals talk about their world of language and how language relates to their perceptions of their individual identity. In the next section, I turn to discussing place identity and how it facilitates, supresses, promotes or demotes the expression of individual identity. As expected, language continues to be a crucial reference point in discussions about the places and spaces that host it.

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The City and Place Identity: A Site of Diversity or Segregated Networks?

The question of who ‘owns’ history-and how historical narratives are reproduced and represented- emerges continually in a variety of geographical and historical contexts to show questions of power in history. (Pente & Ward, 2018: 52)

Place identity is about the history of a place and the dominant narratives associated with who lives in the place, what it is known for, and what aspects of cultural heritage (language, culture, customs, traditions, norms, social values, etc.) are linked to it. A discussion of place identity invokes a series of difficult questions such as: who has the power to narrate the history of a place? Who decides on what is in and out of such narrative(s)? Does the history change with the coming and going of people or is it reproduced as a static and factual description presented through discourses of power? Whose interests are served by the narratives reproduced about a place? While I do not answer all these questions in this section, my aim is to highlight the importance of place identity in discussions about language and identity in a globalised world. Crucial to place identity discussions in social research is the buzzword, the city. The city with its vibrancy, complexity and diversity has attracted numerous conceptualisations. One of the dominant narratives about the city can be summarised in two concepts: frontier zones (Sassen, 2013), and superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007). Sociologist Saskia Sassen (2013), argues that large, complex cities are new strategic frontier zones where actors from different backgrounds meet with no clear rules of engagement. These are strategic frontier zones for ‘those who lack power, those who are disadvantaged, outsiders, discriminated minorities. The disadvantaged and excluded can gain presence in such cities, presence vis-à-vis power and presence vis-à-vis each other’ (2013: 67). She asserts that the powerless can make history in urban spaces and can produce disruptive narratives. Therefore, urban spaces offer possibilities for making new norms and identities where the focus is not on the ethnic, the linguistic, or the religious but on

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the urbanity of the setting. That is to say, the intensification of globalisation and mobility along with the presence of the powerful and the powerless have produced new types of bottom-up orderings or selfgovernance which utilise urban spaces to make political claims through the assemblage of diverse actors who, in spite of their difference, can unite for the good of their urban space. The city as a frontier zone narrative establishes the view that the city is a level playing field where the voiceless and the marginalised can develop voice and presence through working collaboratively with others for the public good. This social imagining of the urban gives power to the historically marginalised and seeks to develop a rather collective narrative of place identity. Here, the focus is on the group working for the good of their place. Examples can be seen in collective endeavours to raise awareness about climate change and environment protection. What is intriguing about this imagining is that it goes far beyond the cultural composition of place and its identity. While the people of the city might unite to keep it clean (a public good), they may not unite to protect the linguistic rights of those who are not historically associated with the place. Therefore, it is important to exercise caution when using frontier zone discourses with reference to language and culture as we still have a long way ahead of us to see linguistic and cultural differences as crucial to the make-up of the city. So how can language along with its cultural heritage have ‘a right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1996; Purcell, 2013) from participation and governance perspectives? In Badwan (2020), I discuss an example from Manchester City Council, UK which released a policy report in 2019 that acknowledges the value of linguistic diversity in the city. The report calls for nurturing the city’s linguistic diversity to create an inclusive, equitable, internationally connected, and economically global city. Nonetheless, this applaudable example is quite rare and was a result of years of local, grassroots movements that have passionately called for perceiving languages in the city as bridges of connections, rather than causes for tensions and isolation (see Multilingual Manchester, 20192 ). Without giving language a right to the city, it is not possible for language to develop voice and 2 http://mlm.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/call-for-a-multilingual-cities-movement/.

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presence in a frontier zone. That is to say, it is not enough to perceive cities as frontier zones where the marginalised develop voice. Rather, what is required is continual advocacy and activism for promoting the different aspects of cultural heritage that inhabit the city. These aspects are dynamic and reflective of the coming and going of people. These aspects complexify the history of the place and its identity. That is why it is important to critically engage with history narratives to highlight what they include and exclude. What is included in narratives about a place usually validates the identities of those who fit the macro social mould who are then treated as the unmarked, normal, dominant, majority of the population. On the other hand, those with excluded narratives are the marked minority whose identities are seen as not always compatible with the identity of the place they share with others. This raises a range of social justice concerns as I discuss in Chapter 9. One of these is the attempt to hide some aspects of their identity to be perceived as fitting and integrable. The second concept that is usually invoked in discussions about the city is Vertovec’s (2007) ‘superdiversity’. In particular, sociolinguistics has utilised this buzzword in discourses about language and migration. Vertovec (2007) starts his article where he introduces the term with an alarming statement: ‘Diversity in Britain is not what it used to be’ (2007: 1024). He further explains: Britain can now be characterized by ‘superdiversity,’ a notion intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the country has previously experienced. Such a condition is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socioeconomically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade. Outlined here, new patterns of superdiversity pose significant challenges for both policy and research.

I often discuss this quotation with my students in class. Not only do we discuss the factual trends reported in Vertovec’s work, but we also debate the emotional connotations associated with the style of writing. Words such as ‘panic’, ‘anxiety’, ‘fear’ and ‘abnormality’ are often used

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by my students. Students from migrant backgrounds feel uncomfortable discussing this quotation. They feel seen, othered and un-wanted. ‘Local’ students feel perplexed, hesitant and not sure how to talk about superdiversity. It seems that superdiversity as a concept is indeed troublesome. Ultimately, we need to remember that ‘diversity is the given reality of human social action’ (Higgins & Coen, 2000: 15) and we need to exercise caution and care when we add prefixes such as ‘super-’ or ‘hyper-’ to refer to contemporary liquid societies. The discourses we use and perpetuate in our writings about diversity have social, emotional and psychological repercussions. One of the key critiques of the term ‘superdiversity’ comes from Pavlenko (2019) who discusses the term as an example of sloganisation in academia. She uncovers the anxieties and tensions that the term ‘superdiversity’ tries to hide, or rather artificially celebrate. First, she asks, ‘who are the other in superdiversity discourses?’. She cites key superdiversity studies to foreground that otherness is often linked to migrants, including ‘second and third generation immigrants’ who still display ‘immigrant accent’ (Blommaert, 2013: 72, 75) and ‘daughters and sons, grand-daughters and grand-sons, great-grand-daughters and great-grandsons of immigrants’ (Creese & Blackledge, 2010: 550). In other words, once a migrant, you and your offspring will always be migrants. Essentially, this has implications for individual identity and place identity as I discuss later in this chapter. Pavlenko (2019) argues that superdiversity discourses, while claiming to be more inclusive by researching contemporary linguistic behaviour in Western cities such as analysing street signs and soundscapes, could potentially be utilised to maintain an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ binary in societies. The following powerful quotation from Pavlenko (2019: 222–223) highlights this view: [T]he movement to make sociolinguistics great again under the banner of superdiversity is an exercise in rhetorical power that calls for the dismantling of boundaries, while surreptitiously erecting the Great Wall.

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The Great Wall separates those with unmarked linguistic behaviour from those described as ‘super-diverse’ in the city. For many of those individuals, these research practices are not only othering and essentialising but are also alienating. I lost count of how many times I read research about translanguaging practices among X group of people; the X always refers to an ethnic minority in a city Y. My reaction to this, while appreciating the research and its intentions, is what is strange or unexpected about individuals drawing on a range of their communicative repertoires? Is this not what humans do? Flagging such ‘normal’ practices under superdiversity discourses risks sending the message that such linguistic behaviour is strange or is at odds with linguistic norms in a city. Ultimately, this continues to evoke dichotomies such as ‘us’ vs ‘them’, ‘normal’ vs ‘abnormal’, ‘marked’ vs ‘unmarked’. Similarly, most urban linguistic landscaping research has been preoccupied with analysing the concentration of multilingual signs in ‘urban spaces’, producing a celebratory discourse of the power and agency exercised by migrants who assert their identity and presence through multilingual signs. While this can be partially true, it is worth highlighting that a larger number of multilingual mobile individuals do not feel safe displaying multilingual signs near their homes because they fear for their safety. Reflecting on this, multilingual signs are usually displayed outside businesses and they target a particular pool of customers who are usually members of diasporic communities in the city. I share Pavlenko’s (2019) concern that superdiversity discourses in sociolinguistics can indeed be utilised to create new orderings and stratifications that determine the ‘good’ or ‘normal’ migrant from the ‘not good’ or ‘not normal’: Cashing in on our anxieties, superdiversity enables us to repackage our research as cutting edge, to receive funding from governments anxious about immigrant influx, to move up the academic ladder, and to create a new academic hierarchy, with new hegemonic orders of normativity and indexicality, and a new elite. (Pavlenko, 2019: 223)

Now, I return to the word ‘city’, which I have extensively used in this chapter and throughout the book. The city has been a popular research

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context in sociolinguistics as it is commonly perceived as a site for language contact, language mixing and linguistic creativity (Schneider, 2020). Yet, I have argued in this section that dominant discourses about the city such as ‘frontier zones’ and ‘super-diverse’ are misleading. To uncover social life in the city, researchers need to engage with multiple communities to develop an expansive micro-level understanding of actual linguistic behaviour in streets and neighbourhoods. While sociolinguists do indeed engage with multiple communities, there is an ideological divide within sociolinguistics as a discipline which I describe in Badwan (2020: 6): there is either a focus on the sociolinguistic variation that operates within national and local framings of a named language, or a focus on the presence of “other” languages in the urban place with international framings of language. Here, I argue that researching language in place needs to include both foci in order to develop an expansive framing of language; a framing based on caring for the different languages and varieties that inhabit the place.

This divide is not only exclusionary but it continues to invoke the dichotomy of ‘local/national’ vs. ‘international/diverse’, which ultimately feeds into language ideologies about language bordering and stratification in the city. This, coupled with the view that ‘in an age of nationalism, we find an ideology of groupness that is tied to a construction of territorial place, where this place is understood as linked to a particular kind of language practice’ (Schneider, 2020: 6), nurtures the normalisation of ‘local’ ways of speaking and produces ideological mechanisms for alienating the ‘other’ diverse ways. Sociolinguists on both sides of the divide have already chosen their linguistic priority and this is likely to yield only a partial understanding of language in the city. Going beyond this divide is not only about caring for language, but also is a way to develop a participatory approach to local cultural heritage. By researching language use and linguistic behaviour with participants from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, we can invite numerous backgrounds, which are already present in our research contexts, to be integrated into our ‘local’ descriptions of language in

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place. Such co-production can help us understand who ‘we’ are now after decades of increasingly migratory lifestyles. In addition, it helps us challenge colonial views of the world and exclusion practices observed in many subjects including the study of local history and local cultural heritage (cf. Pente & Ward, 2018; Sheeran & Sheeran, 2009). Ultimately, our research practices, which originally and ideologically stem from our own perceptions of the place identity of our contexts, reproduce these perceptions to the public as we engage with them. This is why it is crucial to question and critique our own narratives about our research contexts and how such narratives contribute to discussions about place identity which are substantially linked to individual identities. I now return to the title of this section: is the city a site for diversity or a site for segregated networks? Schneider (2020) presents a compelling discussion of the urban myth and the imagining of cities as spaces of diversity. She argues that a better understanding of language in the city requires paying attention to different degrees of granularity that involve different scales: city level, neighbourhood level, schools, workplaces, etc. She argues that this approach uncovers historical factors for settlement such as economic histories, racial tensions and economic inequality, which have collectively led to the grouping of inhabitants as we know it today. While these factors might go back to decades ago, they still influence people’s current perceptions of place today. For example, in my research with university students in Manchester, I asked them about how they choose the place of their accommodation in the city. The following response from Samiya (21-year-old, Asian British student) is representative of the general view among the 13 interviewed university students: Khawla: How did you choose where to live in the city? Samiya: I look at who lives there. For example when you live in certain areas and there are only like certain people that live there so obviously if you were the only one from let’s say a different culture and background and you went to go live there you’d feel out of place and awkward and you’d just keep yourself to yourself.

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When the students talk about understanding the demographics of the place before choosing it as their own, they refer to degrees of granularity that unpack the history of the place and its current inhabitancy patterns. The decisions people make about where to live on the basis of who currently lives there has implications for linguistic behaviour. This is because the values individuals ascribe to a place affect their language use in this place (see Chapter 7). For instance, if they perceive the place as diverse and welcoming, they are likely to use more of their communicative repertoire without trying to adhere to monolingual norms (e.g. English only). However, if they perceive the place as hostile and monolingual, they are likely to hide many of their non-English repertoires. A similar process occurs at different levels such as schools, community centres, communal parks, workplaces, etc. In addition to researching different scales of granularity in the city, it is crucial to investigate the social ties that people build in the city. Commenting on this, Schneider (2020: 22) explains, ‘[i]t is the social ties that people construct that are relevant to understand patterns of contact or patterns of segregation, where discourses about place often, but not always, play an important role’. This is because language manifests itself in interactional networks, not in places (Schneider, 2020) and therefore, understanding place identity and linguistic behaviour requires a deeper exploration of the networks people develop in the city. Taken together, the city can be diverse at certain scales yet segregated at other micro scales. Researching place identity requires interdisciplinary collaboration between sociolinguists, human geographers and sociologists to unpack the complexity of the city and to capture some of its linguistic behaviour more fully. I believe more research is required at this front. The more we know about life in the city, the more understanding we are likely to develop about language use in relation to individual and place identity.

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Chapter Summary This chapter has engaged with discussions about individual identity in relation to language, emotions and place identity narratives. It highlights the role of discourse in normalising certain subjectivities and alienating others, which results in feelings of strangeness and out-ofplace-ness experienced by individuals who do not fit the social mould. Language is crucial to fitting or not fitting the social mould and while individuals might be pressurised to conform, there are emotional links with languages and cultural heritage that are likely to cling to identity, facilitating processes of entering and exiting different subjectivity spaces which lead to in-between-ness. Therefore, the chapter indicates the importance of emotions in discussions about identity. In addition, the chapter comments on the link between place identity and individual identity with a particular focus on the ‘city’ as a popular research context. While doing so, it problematises discourses of perceiving the city as super-diverse, frontier zones. It concludes with a discussion about the importance of paying attention to different levels of granularity in the city in order to expand our understanding of actual linguistic behaviour in social networks which could ultimately lead us to revisit narratives about place identity and about the identity of who inhabits the place.

References Ahmad, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Routledge. Badwan, K. (2015). Negotiating rates of exchange: Arab academic sojourners’ sociolinguistic trajectories in the UK (PhD thesis). University of Leeds. Badwan, K. (2020). Unmooring language for social justice: Young people talking about language in place in Manchester, UK. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2020.1796485. Badwan, K., & Hall, E. (2020). Walking along in sticky places: Posthumanist and affective insights from a reflective account of two young women in Manchester, UK. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20 (3), 225– 239. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1715995. Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity.

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Baxter, J. (2020). Positioning language and identity: Post-structuralist perspectives. In S. Preece (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and identity (pp. 34–49). Routledge. Benson, P., Barkhuizen, G., Bodycott, P., & Brown, J. (2013). Second language identity in narratives of study abroad . Palgrave Macmillan. Blommaert, J. (2013). Ethnography, superdiversity, and linguistic landscapes: Chronicles of complexity. Multilingual Matters. Brooke-Rose, C. (1996). Exsul. Poetics Today, 17 (3), 289–303. Conteh, J., & Brock, A. (2010). ‘Safe spaces’? Sites of bilingualism for young learners in home, school and community. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 14 (3), 347–360. Creese, A., & Blackledge, A. (2010). Towards a sociolinguistics of superdiversity. Special issue of Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 13, 549–572. Derrida, J. (1998). Monolingualism of the other; or, the prosthesis of origin (P. Mensah, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings. Pantheon. Foucoult, M. (1984). What is enlightenment? In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 32–50). Penguin. Gee, J. (2001). Identity as an analytic lens for research in education. Review of Research in Education, 25, 99–125. Heller, M. (1995). Language choice, social institutions, and symbolic domination. Language in Society, 24 (2), 373–405. Higgins, M., & Coen, T. (2000). Streets, bedrooms, and patios: The ordinariness of diversity in urban Oaxaca. University of Texas Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1996). Are all tongues equal? Language, culture and national identity. In P. Baker, A. Atkinson, R. Dworkin, A. Hirschman, E. Hobsbawm, A. Sen, & D. Wedderburn (Eds.), Living as equals (pp. 85–98). Oxford University Press. Horner, K., & Weber, J. (2012). Introducing multilingualism: A social approach. Routledge. Kell, C. (2015). ‘Making people happen’: Materiality and movement in meaning-making trajectories. Social Semiotics, 25, 423–445. Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings on cities (E. Kofman & E. Lebas, Trans.). Blackwell. Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge University Press. Pavlenko, A. (2019). Superdiversity and why it isn’t: Reflections on terminological innovation and academic branding. In B. Schmenk, S. Breidbach, & L.

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Küster (Eds.), Sloganization in language education discourse (pp. 142–168). Multilingual Matters. Pennycook, A. (2012). Language and mobility. Multilingual Matters. Pente, E., & Ward, P. (2018). Why are we now? Local history, industrial decline and ethnic diversity. In E. Campbell, K. Pahl, E. Pente, & Z. Rasool (Eds.), Re-imagining contested communities: Connecting Rotherham through research (pp. 41–52). Policy Press. Purcell, M. (2013). Possible worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the right to the city. Journal of Urban Affairs, 36 (1), 141–154. Robinson, K. (2009). The element: How finding your passion changes everything. Penguin. Rymes, B. (2014). Communicating beyond language: Everyday encounters with diversity. Routledge. Said, E. (1999). Out of place. Granta Publications. Said, E. (2004, February 12–18). Living in Arabic. Al-Ahram Weekly, 677. [Online]. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/677/cu15.htm. Sassen, S. (2013). When the centre no longer holds: Cities as frontier zones. Cities, 34, 67–70. Schneider, B. (2020). The urban myth: A critical interrogation of the sociolinguistic imagining of cities as spaces of diversity (Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, Paper 267). Sheeran, G., & Sheeran, Y. (2009). No longer the 1948 show: Local history in the 21st century. The Local Historian, 39 (4), 314–323. Valentine, G., Sporton, D., & Nielsen, K. (2009). The spaces of language. In J. Collins, S. Slembrouck, & M. Baynham (Eds.), Globalisation and language contact: Scale, migration and communicative practices (pp. 189–208). Continuum International Publishing. Vertovec, S. (2007). Superdiversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (6), 1024–1054.

9 Language and Social (In)Justice

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Language and Social Justice

Bell (2016: 30) speaks of social justice as both a goal and a process, with the ultimate goal of social justice being ‘full and equitable participation of people from all social identity groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs’. Therefore, it is not possible to talk about social justice without talking about diversity: social, cultural, racial, religious and linguistic, etc. Equitable participation requires recognising, valuing, respecting and representing diversity in societies. It is important to acknowledge that some individuals and identity groups might experience multiple and intersecting sites of disadvantage (Malleson, 2018). For example, they might be at disadvantage not only because of the ways they speak, but also because of their age, race or ethnicity, among many other social factors. In such instances, it is hard to separate the causes of disadvantage. I further discuss intersectionality and linguistic oppression in the following section. Language causes and alleviates social justice concerns that are wideranging and affect a large group of people. In most instances, individuals are made to believe that it is their individual responsibility to change © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Badwan, Language in a Globalised World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7_9

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the way they speak to put an end to their oppression and experiences of linguistic bullying. This is partly aligned with a liberal-democratic form of distributive social justice (Gale, 2000). This model is based on ‘simple equality’ (Walzer, 1983), an assumption that individuals have the same basic needs. This form of social justice normalises disadvantaged identity groups by providing them with basic material, cultural and social goods that are deemed a baseline measure for equality. Taking language in education for example, the policy principles that regulate the prescriptive use of Standard English often frame it as a public good and a moral way of enhancing life chances. This variety of English is seen as a basic linguistic need that all children need to obtain in order to achieve social justice. As such, disadvantaged individuals are deemed lacking what society expects them to have in terms of educational, social and cultural basics and education is deemed the way to address this deficiency. There is, however, a different approach to social justice. Gale (2000) demonstrates that a social-democratic approach to social justice does not assume that people have the same needs and thus it is characterised by ‘complex equality’ (Walzer, 1983). This approach gave rise to the adoption of the term ‘equity’ which signals that different identity groups require different forms of empowerment. Going back to the example of language in education, this approach does not leave the responsibility with the individual who is seen as socially lacking; rather, it calls on us to question the structures that have rendered these individuals disadvantaged and their languages sub-standard. This social justice approach pushes us to ‘rethink social arrangements thought to be just’ (Gale, 2000: 253) and to confront ideological frameworks, historically constituted normativity as well as institutional patterns and practices that have collectively created unequal social relations (Bell, 2016). This unravelling, unlearning and re-learning aims to take back control over language by liberating it from its self-acclaimed masters (Alim, 2019).

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Language and the Protected Characteristics

In her discussion on language and social justice, Piller (2016) argues that language—unlike race, religion, age and sexuality—is not commonly featured as a concern for social justice and unless this becomes widely recognised, it is likely that linguistic social injustices will continue. While language is not included as a protected characteristic in the UK Equality Act 2010, it is important to note that in real life, language is a significant marker for almost all protected characteristics such as race, gender, age, and religious belief. The relationship between language and these protected characteristics is inseparable. For example, in his discussion on the relationship between language and race, Rosa (2019) argues that while language is commonly perceived as a proxy for race, it is more than a proxy; language is racialised and colonially conditioned, perceived and assessed. An attack on the language of a racialised body is ultimately an attack on race that is semiotically performed through certain ways of languaging. This is because, Rosa (2019) argues, language and race are not objectively observed but historically and institutionally constituted through ideologies rooted in colonial distinctions between normative European-ness and the non-European other. These ideological formations are global in scope and are indeed part of the production of modernity as an ideology (Bauman & Briggs, 2003). This leads to the argument that ‘perceptions of bodies and communicative practices are colonially conditioned constructions of reality rather than unmediated reflections of pre-existing differences or similarities’ (Rosa, 2019: 3). Failure to acknowledge how colonialism shapes perceptions of the non-European other leads to acts of denial that refuse to comprehend the racial, ethnic and linguistic sufferings endured by individuals whose present circumstances have been historically constituted and preconditioned. One of the many troubling consequences of colonialism and perceptions of modernity is that they intersect with other social factors such as ethnicity and religious belief. In Chapter 3, I discussed language value in relation to the hierarchy and stratification processes that assign different

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linguistic statuses to different communicative practices. Similar stratification processes apply to ethnic and religious values, with the normative European being at the top of the hierarchy. Since the way individuals use language is a reflection of social histories and ethnic affiliations, language becomes a semiotic, communicative product. Yet, this product is not finished, and is never finished because language use is a process, as well. With language being both a product and a process, it becomes almost impossible to separate language from other identity characteristics such as ethnicity or religious belief. In the following examples, I discuss why it is important not to treat language as objectively separable from the protected characteristics in the UK Equality Act 2010. Example (1) The intersectionality of ethnicity, religion and language. Unfortunately, we do not have to look too far to find news reports of linguistic abuse and linguistic discrimination which are not, in themselves, just an attack on language, but are primarily discriminatory attacks on the bodies that produce language. Bynes (2018) describes how an American citizen of Iraqi origin was “kicked off the flight” for speaking Arabic over the phone with a relative in Bagdad. The Arabicspeaker was removed from the plane, interrogated by the police and was indeed blamed for speaking Arabic. The defendant in the lawsuit was quoted asking, ‘Why are you talking in Arabic? You know the environment is very dangerous’. The language was identified as Arabic because the passenger had used the expression ‘inshaAllah’ which translates into ‘God willing’. This example features how language, religious belief (and public sentiments towards it i.e. Islamophobia in this case), and ethnicity intertwine in an intersectional manner that makes them impossible to separate. That is to say, it is hard to specify what triggered the discriminatory act against the Arabic-speaking passenger: was it ethnicity (his non-European-ness)? Was it religion (sounding Muslim)? Or was it just language? Perhaps it is all of them because an attack on language is also an attack on the body that performs it.

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Example (2) The intersectionality of age, ethnicity and language. One of the most commonly discussed examples of the intersectionality of age, ethnicity and language is the debate on language policing in schools and the prescriptivist ideologies that promote the standard variety of the national language. As I discuss in Chapter 5, the standard language ideology (Lippi-Green, 2012) is a powerful ideological tool to control linguistic behaviour under claims of cohesion, consensus, standardisation and purity. This ideology is (re)produced and perpetuated through formal education. Commenting on the position of Standard English in education policy in the UK, Cushing (2020) explains that Standard English appears sixteen times in the primary school framework provided by the Department for Education. The framework does not provide any justifications for its focus on Standard English, placing schools and classrooms as sites of ‘standard language cultures’ (Milroy, 2001). This policy provides legitimacy for regulating processes of linguistic stigmatisation operationalised through oral and written corrections (Cushing, 2020). Furthermore, Cushing (2020) explains that language in educational contexts is commonly used as a proxy for academic achievement and the maintenance of standards, leading to the framing of language policing in favour of Standard English as an act of duty that equips students with a more valuable linguistic capital that will give them academic and professional success. This is aligned with Lippi-Green’s language subordination process (2012: 66–77), whereby ‘any speaker of a stigmatised vernacular is promised large returns’. While this could partly hold water as it is reflective of wider societal processes of linguistic stratification, see Chapter 3 on the linguistic market, this argument often overlooks the emotional strain and identity struggle placed on young people when their ways of speaking are corrected and labelled ‘incorrect’, ‘wrong’, ‘improper’ or ‘non-standard’. This, coupled with the view that the current educational policy protects the status quo that privileges certain speakers and disadvantages other, necessitates some discussion about current educational language policies and their wider societal implications. For instance, we need to question the structures that have rendered certain ways of speaking ‘improper’ and ‘less valued’. In addition, we need to challenge the educational reproduction

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of the ontological framing of language as an idealised entity with a single system filtered through assumptions about grammaticality and ‘standard’ pronunciation. There is a lot of value in replacing this framing with the understanding of language as a verb performed in plurilithic ways depending on the ecology of social interaction. There are two points to this argument: 1. Children are expected to speak in ways that reflect their age 2. Children are expected to speak in ways that reflect their ethnic belonging By understanding aging as the ‘construction of personal history, and movement through the history of the community and of society’ (Eckert, 1997: 151) and age as a person’s place at a given time, age becomes experienced both socially and individually. While earlier sociolinguistic research considered age as a biological factor (Labov, 1966; Trudgill, 1974), more recent studies view age primarily as a social variable understood as something individuals perform as part of their identities. Commenting on the relationship between age and language, Eckert (1997) introduces the notion of age grading which looks at changes in the speech of the individual as they move through life and because different people experience different life events, they develop their own age-grading trajectories and therefore, they are expected to develop different ways of speaking. This also applies to children who while striving to be older children; they continue to be good at being small children. Nonetheless, the Standard Language Ideology of the educational system seeks to homogenise and standardise the different ways of speaking that children develop as part of their age grading, forcing them to abandon ways reflective of their age, embodied experiences and social histories. The standardisation of language also entails the pain of standardising identities, emotions, and experiences. As such, children are not always allowed to perform their age through language. However, I would like to be clear on this point. I do not argue that children should not be taught mainstream literacy skills. These are important literacy skills; these are skills that I am using to write this book and to do my

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job in my everyday professional life. And because of their social value, these skills need to be redistributed with equal access for all children and education is the means to achieve this redistribution. My point is these skills should not be the only valued literacy skills and they should not replace children’s embodied languaging practices. They need to be taught in addition to the ‘non-mainstream’ under principles of foster-ship that nurture, support and protect, rather than principles of prescriptivism that restrict, stigmatise and threaten. This is not a straightforward task as it involves a range of educational stakeholders with different beliefs about language use. It is important to acknowledge that beliefs about language are tied up with beliefs about moral ways to live (McEnery, 2006). For many school educators and policy makers, the moral way is to ensure that children speak ‘properly’ and ‘accurately’ to enhance their life chances. For many language researchers, the moral way is to let children be children by permitting ways for them to be proud of their linguistic heritage while equipping them with additional communicative repertoires including Standard English. Resolving the tension between these views is not always possible without persistent disquieting activism that calls on different stakeholders to rethink what they mean by this thing called language. Whatever answers are generated in response to this are never neutral because our descriptions of the objects around us will always entail our own ontological entanglement and engagement which ultimately brings in our worldviews and beliefs about good, bad, moral, immoral, just, unjust, etc. This is why it becomes almost impossible to create meaningful discussions about linguistic inequalities and discrimination without resorting to the ontological turn in applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2020). Here, I echo Escott and Pahl’s (2019: 14) view that ‘[s]urfacing the ontologies and epistemologies of individuals and communities provides a means of encouraging dialogue that is already situated in the ways of knowing that these individuals and communities value’. Thus far, I have discussed how age as a protected characteristic in the UK Equality Act 2010 can be relevant in prescriptivist debates about how children should speak and argued that mainstream literacy practices, with their focus on homogenising the language of children, are not always supportive of children’s linguistic identities and heritage. Framing other

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ways of speaking such as regional dialects, foreign accents, or even other languages as inappropriate, irrelevant, invisible or inaudible is an act of denial and oppression that causes children to feel detached from—and detached by—their educational environments. In this debate, age is often foregrounded as a key factor, but I would argue that ethnicity is equally relevant here. It is quite common for ethnicity to be mixed with race, or to be used interchangeably. Race is a dominant characteristic when discussing linguistic injustices and inequalities as I explained earlier in this chapter, but it is important not to confuse ethnicity with race. I understand ethnicity as the identification with a particular group such as nationality, regional culture, religious beliefs and linguistic practices. With this identification comes the willingness to be treated as belonging to a particular group and sharing systems of symbols, meanings, norms and rules of conduct with this group (Giles & Coupland, 1991: 106). Following this understanding, we all have an ethnic belonging even when dominant, majority groups are often unmarked ethnically. In the example of schoolchildren, their language use is reflective of their ethnic identities i.e. of whether or not they perform belonging to their local region, popular culture, dominant social class in their area, etc. Therefore, to answer a question such as why do my school children speak in the ways they do, the answer needs to cover a wide range of factors such as: • age: children speak differently because of their age and because of the events experienced in their social life. • ethnicity: children speak differently because they perform different types of group belonging such local regions, local cultures, popular culture, etc.) Other factors can be added to the mix such as social class, social networks, social contact and parents’ education, but these factors intersect in complex ways with age and ethnicity. This example demonstrates that language is enmeshed with a range of social factors in a way that makes it almost impossible to objectively separate it. Criticising or stigmatising children’s way(s) of speaking is an attack on their age, ethnic

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belonging, social histories, and the identities they would like to be identify with. At the same time, it is an attack on the bodies that produce the ‘disapproved’ communicative practices. In discussions about linguistic inequality, it is imperative to remember that there is no separation between bodies, emotions and communicative practices. Can language, then, be a candidate for a protected characteristic in the UK Equality Act 2010? In response to this, Malleson (2018) discusses the legality of adding new characteristics: In order to be added to a list of protected characteristics in a groundsbased system a marginalised group must acquire sufficient power to generate the political leverage necessary to secure recognition of their claim, either through litigation, legislation or both.

For groups to develop sufficient power and political leverage, three stages are required: awareness, solidarity and activism.

9.3

Awareness

Awareness entails recognising that language can indeed be a concern for social justice. It feeds into a politics of recognition that makes invisible groups and inaudible pain visible and heard. Awareness can contribute to addressing denial and non-recognition and can reallocate respect to previously marginalised and minoritised identities (Power, 2012). Awareness starts with acknowledging that language can be used as a tool to other, profile, stigmatise, disadvantage, divide, demote and shame people. These are acts of oppressing, silencing and marginalising identities, emotions and bodies. Yet, the affected individuals are made invisible and worthless by dominant social configurations of symbolic violence. Derogatory comments on someone’s language, accent, or way(s) of speaking are not innocent banter or moral concerns about making someone sound more educated or more intelligent. Rather, they are acts of discrimination that cause immense pain and suffering and amount to acts of oppression. According to Bell (2016: 7), all forms of oppression, including linguistic oppression, are restrictive (they limit individuals’

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life chances), pervasive (they are grounded in social hierarchies), and cumulative (they accumulate through social patterns and normativity). Linguistic oppression can be normalised, denied and dismissed leading to mechanisms of microaggressions that are daily, constant, often subtle, and seemingly innocuous (Sue, 2010). Therefore, the ultimate goal of social justice awareness is to enable individuals to examine, identity, talk about, and challenge linguistic injustice and oppression in their personal lives, communities, institutions, and the broader society. In addition, awareness necessitates the acknowledgment that social injustices on the basis of language do not just affect a small group of ‘marginalised’ people. In fact, they affect a wide range of people. I often ask my students to raise their hands if their language attracted some sort of wonderment or was the topic of discussion at some point. Almost everyone in the class raises their hands. Why does this happen? As we lead an increasingly migratory life, different ways of speaking circulate around us and we continue to make comments on ways of speaking we do not identity as ‘familiar’. There are different reasons why a certain way of speaking might sound unfamiliar. First, the mobility of speakers of a certain language causes different varieties of this language to move around. Think of the language of an American student in London, an Australian lecturer in Manchester, a Scottish student in Liverpool, an Indian lecturer in New York. These are examples of macro mobilities, but the same can be said about micro mobilities like the movement of individuals from nearby rural areas to the city. Second, the mobility of speakers of lingua franca English adds another layer of linguistic diversity. These speakers often speak English with different accents and linguistics norms, which are almost always influenced by their first language (Jenkins, 2009). Think of the language of a German student in London, a Kuwaiti researcher in Washington, or a South African lecturer in Manchester. These are examples of different Englishes and ways of speaking that move around. Third, the language of forced migrants and displaced people who tend to acquire new repertoires on the go enrich the linguistic diversity of place. These are examples of different levels of linguistic abilities which are often translingual. Fourth, the languages of diasporic communities that are maintained by their communities and

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used to connect people with families in different parts of the world reflect translingual and multilingual orientations of linguistic diversity in place. As long as we move and communicate, we will continue to notice language, talk about it and wonder about its familiarity or lack of. This wonderment does not equally affect people. Some wonderment acts entail praising someone for their ‘beautiful’ ways of speaking. Others imply more negative attitudes leading to language shaming and linguistic oppression. People’s experiences with comments on their language are mediated by other social identities and factors such as race, gender, age, class, nationality, religion. Language oppression can be triggered by a combination of racism, sexism, religious oppression, xenophobia and heterosexism. For example, black and ethnic minority speakers of English are more likely to face comments on their ways of speaking which are often perceived as ‘marked’ and different. The chances of this increase with female speakers. The intersection of linguistic oppression demonstrates how language is utilised when bodies meet. Certain bodies are identified through ideological and political worldviews as ‘the other’ and this identification triggers emotions (Ahmad, 2014) and judgments which are usually directed towards comments about language when in reality, these comments stem from intersecting factors such as race, gender, nationality, religious views, political views, ideological tensions, and class struggles. In my research on young people’s experiences of language-based discrimination in Manchester (Badwan, 2020), I asked young people to comment on these experiences and explain why they think they happen. Table 9.1 provides some explanations. These comments highlight that language-based oppression is complex and it affects a wide-range of people. I use the term ‘linguistic oppression’ here to embody the interlocking forces that create and sustain linguistic injustice and discrimination, following Bell (2016). The comments above indicate that linguistic oppression can be triggered by different factors such as: • anti-immigration political ideologies as in the case of criticising accents that sound ‘foreign’ or languages that do not fit essentialist linguistic expectations in place.

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Table 9.1: Young people talking about linguistic discrimination in Manchester Participants’ explanations of being discriminated against on the basis of language (my emphasis) I have been discriminated against because of my race/how I look but people comment on my language instead I have been mocked for how strong the Northern aspect of my accent can be. I’ve been told to stop dreaming about being a teacher because no student will take me seriously with my accent When I used to have a more Eastern European accent I definitely think people looked at me weirdly sometimes or would assume that I wasn’t smart On the first site [sight] I look English as I’m white but when I speak my polish accent has ways of picking out and I often get comments or am being judged—even been told to get back to mine country I sound “southern” compared to Mancunians and so I am judged immediately based on that. E.G: “Dirty Southerner”. Although, in the South I’m regarded as a Northerner I noticed that one woman was annoyed because I spoke German on the phone in a bus I’ve been made fun of for having a posh sounding accent so I had to make it more like everyone else but when I did it didn’t sound “white enough” to some people Verbally harassed by local people (usually drunk) because of my Liverpool accent

• racial ideologies that are historically constituted and politically nurtured as in the case of criticising the ways of speaking produced by bodies that are racially identified as the ‘other’. • regional biases that fuel ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ binaries as in the case of criticising accents thought to be not historically linked to a place. • Anti-Standard and anti-posh ideologies as in the case of criticising accents that sound too posh in the north. • Ideologies of languagelessness (Rosa, 2019) as in the case of criticising ways of speaking produced by bilinguals who are perceived as not knowing the language. • Prescriptivist ideologies that seek to homogenise ways of speaking as in the case of criticising ways of speaking thought of as ‘local’, ‘regional’, ‘improper’, etc. What underpins all these types of linguistic oppression is a belief about a ‘proper’ way of speaking. This way differs from one individual to another

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and changes from one place to another. Failure to meet the expectations of this proper way produces sentiments of disapproval which make the targeted individuals feel that they do not fit or belong. Here, I would like to extend the use of the term ‘languagelessness’ that Rosa (2019) uses to refer to a belief that someone does not know ‘the’ language. The definite article in ‘the language’ is very important as it implies a monolithic unitary version of language that some people have as the ultimate target. While Rosa (2019) uses the term to highlight the ways in which race and class are used to frame some bilingual students as linguistically deficient or languageless, I argue that a similar principle of imposing languagelessness applies to all the cases I list above. That is to say, individuals can be framed as languageless if their ways of speaking do not fit the social expectations of what it means to speak ‘correctly’, ‘properly’ and in the ‘standard’ way. As such, these ways are rendered improper and their speakers languageless. Social justice awareness calls on us to challenge ideologies of languagelessness that shame all ways of speaking that do not fit whatever that is that some individuals have in their mind as ‘the language’ or the ‘proper way’ of speaking. And because perceptions of ‘the language’ are often inspired by a place as a reference, it is important to unmoor language (see Chapter 7 on unmooring and “Conclusion: Conclusion: Surviving the Language Blocks”) in order to educate individuals about the importance of developing different plurilithic understandings of language in place in an attempt to challenge monolithic understandings that limit the validity of language in a place to a certain language or way of speaking. The second important key point in social justice awareness is to reiterate that linguistic oppression affects a wide range of people. It can affect you and me and everyone around us. As we move and talk, we will always be faced with certain expectations of ‘the proper’ way of communication and we can never guarantee that our ways of communication will always survive the linguistic expectations of others wherever we are.

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9.4

Solidarity

I would like to start this discussion on solidarity where I ended the previous section on awareness. Because linguistic oppressions affect many people, we need to bring individuals together in solidarity to form a grassroots movement that cares for, and fosters, language in its fluid, plurilithic sense. Solidarity, Ahmad (2014) argues, is based on shared insecurity, on the perception of a shared risk that becomes a binding force in communities. Such a force can be utilised to fuel social justice efforts. That said, it is important to acknowledge that while different forms of linguistic oppression, bias, discrimination and injustice can indeed affect a wide range of people, they are not experienced in the same way, nor are they equally intense or demoralising. Yet, they are sufficient to bring people together to talk more widely and more loudly about language as a social justice concern. The following quotation from Ahmad (2014: 189) demonstrates what solidarity means in advocacy and activism contexts: Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.

I believe it is important to emphasise the common ground in discussions about linguistic social justice. The common ground here is language. Yes, different people live different lives and experience different types of linguistic struggles, but solidarity is about the togetherness achieved when we collectively make ethical commitments to create change that can make our societies more socially just. This chapter is a call for solidarity with the different types of people who experience social injustices on the basis of language. While their experiences of language discrimination vary and so do the causes for the injustices they have to endure, they share the common ground of being disadvantaged because of the communicative means they use. They share the pain of discrimination and the continuous struggle of whether they should maintain how they

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speak or change it. As I discussed in Chapter 8, these are difficult decisions that affect not only the acoustic production of sounds, but the quintessential element of who we are and how the who is phonetically and semiotically performed in talk and interaction. Being under pressure to change the way we speak involves the oppression of being forced to remove traces of the different places and histories that collectively make us who we are as social beings. This attack on identity threatens one’s social image, belonging, and sense of worth. It is also an attack on the body that produces the communicative practices because language cannot be separately from the bodies that use it and produce it (Flores, 2020). I discuss elsewhere (Badwan, 2020) how linguistic activism in applied linguistics needs to be unified in order to develop political leverage. The allies in the field are not united in their efforts. There are two groups of allies that do not communicate enough with each other: one group of allies promotes multilingualism and linguistic rights for minoritised communities. The other group promotes regional varieties and accents within a named language. This division is operationalised and maintained under the banner of ‘specialism’. These two groups see their battles as different types of battles when they are ultimately sharing a common ground: language. Through solidarity and going beyond the artificial boundaries that we, as language researchers, re-install, we can develop a powerful collective that not only raises awareness about language as a concern for social justice but also takes active steps to make change within the different domains and contexts where we operate. In Chapter 10, I discuss examples of using teaching as a social justice platform in order to deliver an education that is not based on knowledge transmission but on social transformation (Freire, 1970).

9.5

Activism

After raising awareness about the different and intersecting ways in which language can raise concerns for social justice and after bringing people together in solidarity, the phase of activism starts. Activism is about partnering with different stakeholders to co-create solutions and carry out

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meaningful action towards equity. In their discussion of Activist Applied Linguistics (AAL), Cowal and Leung (2021) explain how language is entrenched in wicked problems, defined as complex and unsolvable. In this chapter, I discussed examples of how displays of linguistic oppression are manifested in different social domains such as: education, language policies, migration, comments about language in public and private domains, poverty, management, to name but a few. It is crucial to remember that language activists do not have to have academic degrees in linguistics. One of the beautiful yet intriguing features of language is that we all think we know what language is because we all have experiences with something amorphous and hard to describe called ‘language’. This offers an opportunity. The more people talk about language and social justice, the louder their collective voice can be and the easier it becomes for us to identity, analyse and address acts of microaggression that entail subtle yet negative comments that some people make to comment on ways of speaking they deem unfamiliar, improper or insufficient. Activists are conspirers—to borrow Phipps’ (2019) word. They shake the boat and challenge the status quo. They ask difficult questions about what the rules, policies and expectations are and whose interests are served by them. They take active stands to announce that they are not part of endeavours to silence, oppress and violate. They work together and try to reach out to more companions. Here is the opportunity I mentioned earlier. Lay people can become companions in activism and they can fasciliate the process of reaching out to a bigger social base. The ultimate goal is to unlearn language mooring, language essentialism, and prescriptivist ideologies about what language should be like. As such, we can collectively understand language as linguistics of participation (Li, 2018: 15) whose validation and recognition requires caring for language (Komska, et al, 2019).

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Grievable Language, Grieveable Lives

If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense. (Butler, 2009: 1)

This section is inspired by Judith Butler’s (2009) Frames of War. Here, I discuss how the frames through which we perceive, apprehend, recognise or not are politically saturated. I explained earlier in this chapter how perceptions of the bodies that produce language are historically constituted. This suggests that we can make judgements on people’s ways of speaking based on our previously constituted perceptions of people that look like them. Yet, it is not just historical processes that come into play when bodies meet. Politics and political views are invoked in order to constitute frames of thinking through which events are approached. Butler (2009) talks about grievable lives as those whose loss preludes grief and this does not apply to all lives because there is a difference between living and having a life. To have a life means to socially and politically exist and be recognised. It means to be valued in your presence and missed in your absence. I would like to extend this characteristic of being ‘grievable’ to language. When language is grievable, it is recognised, missed and its loss preludes grief. The recognition is normative; it is political. It is framed through politically saturated epistemologies. Following Butler (2009), we need to ask about the conditions under which it becomes possible and acceptable to apprehend a language and certain ways of speaking and writing as valued, and those that make it less possible or even impossible. Here are some examples of non-grievable languages: • When people hide some of their languages in public domains for fear of abuse, these language are normatively framed as not belonging. These languages are not grievable and not recognised. • When children are banned from speaking other languages in schools and playgrounds under the claim that they need to improve their

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English, their lives, histories and roots which are linked to these ‘other’ languages are deemed not grievable. • When working class children are pushed to change the ways they speak in the direction of middle-class Standard varieties of English, their legacies and backgrounds are not grievable. • When individuals are asked to complete citizenship tests in the national language, all their lives with/in other languages are not grievable. The list goes on, but the idea is the same. To possess a grievable language means to adjust in the direction of the grievable ‘popular culture’. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 82) speak of popular culture as, ‘policies of cultural upgrading aimed at providing the dominated with access to dominant cultural goods or, at least, to a degraded version of this culture’. In particular, I refer to Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1992) discussion on the dilemma of working-class ‘lads’. If they choose to oppose the popular culture imposed on them by the school and the educational system, they lock themselves into condition of domination and are further alienated from the school. On the contrary, if they accept assimilation, this amounts to being ‘coopted by the institution’ (1992: 82). The choice between each standpoint is equally bad. This is a complex debate that has been present in social research since the 1970s (cf. Willis, 1977), yet it is still present until today and its intensity is increasing. I present it under the useful notion of grievable languages, grievable bodies to bring to the fore the social justice implications of this symbolic violence enacted through language. For a detailed discussion on language and symbolic violence, see Chapters 3 and 7. A grievable language is linked to a grievable life, not only metaphorically but also literally. During the writing of this book, there were numerous reports and news articles explaining that public health guidance during the Covid-19 pandemic in many parts of the UK was mainly monolingual. The same reports mention that mortality rates among ethnic minorities were significantly higher than the white population. Some make a connection between lack of translation and the high mortality rates, yet there is no evidence that the affected individuals were not able to understand the guidance published in English. If

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language was indeed a key factor, language becomes a matter of life or death. Commenting on this Piller (2020) argues, ‘in a situation where the wellbeing of everyone depends on that of everyone else, ensuring equitable access to information irrespective of whether someone speaks the state language or not is in everyone’s best interest’. Most importantly and while not downplaying the public health implications, there are symbolic violence displays in not producing multilingual guidance and not providing sign language interpretations during the earlier government’s daily briefings. They displays signal a strong message: lives deemed grievable are those that can access the guidance in this grievable language. Some would argue this is just hindsight. Yet, this argument takes us back to where I started this section, epistemological frames. This example shows how communication was framed by those in charge. This frame is politically saturated with dictates of linguistic assimilation and linguistic essentialism. In a similar vein, reports from the US indicate that Covid-19 patients who did not speak English were left alone, confused, and without proper care (Kaplan, 2020). The patients were misdiagnosed, placed in wrong wards, and some of them had notes next to them indicating what language they speak. Kaplan (2020) reports the following note next to a dying woman, ‘Good luck. She speaks Hungarian’. Following her death, a medical resident said the patient could have received better care had she spoken English. These incidents, among many more, continue to actualise the link the between grievable language, grievable bodies and grievable lives. How can we engage with discussions about grievable languages? Komska et al. (2019) discuss how we can counter the abuse of language and the depoliticisation of linguistic oppression through critiquing, correcting and caring. I discuss critiquing the language about language in Chapter 4 and present caring and fostership in Chapter 7. Here, I would like to emphasise the need for correction in social justice debate. Correction, Komska et al. (2019: 75) maintain, is interruption. It is an important element of social justice awareness and activism. It warrants hesitation, reconsideration, and sometimes confrontation and urgency. In other times, it requires patience and dedication. Nonetheless, they warn, ‘[r]ejection is a potential outcome that should be anticipated,

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heard and accepted. But it should not prevent continued efforts to make corrections’ (2019: 78). I hope that this discussion about the complexity of language and social justice can open us spaces for hesitations, reconsiderations, and wonderments about how we can change our epistemological frames in order to make more people and more languages grievable.

9.7

Strategic Essentialism, the Community and the Other

I could not imagine a chapter on language and social justice that does not engage with linguistic rights debates. This section discusses a complex example of linguistic mooring under the umbrella of strategic essentialism (Pennycook, 2002). First, I start by explaining what strategic essentialism is and how it is used in linguistic rights discourses before I problematise it and link it to social justice concerns. Throughout this book I have continued to emphasise the notion of linguistic fluidity in order to highlight the problems caused by the fixity of the social mould. Using language as a verb, I maintained an ontological stance that perceives language as complex, amorphous and always in the making. However, this fluidity is often faced with discourses of prescriptivism that grant language a different meaning. Language in these discourses is solid, defined, and reduced to sounds and structures assessed through the lens of prescriptivist expectations. Such anti-fluidity discourses do exist in contexts of linguistic rights. MacSwan (2020) discusses the mooring of language as a strategic ideological and political tool to recognise minoritised and marginalised languages and varieties in certain places and to give them linguistic protection. Consider for example Welsh in Wales, Catalan in Catalonia, Arabic in East Jerusalem, etc. This is a tricky situation because on the one hand, the mooring provides some political leverage and protection to a particular language in a particular place, on the other, this protection produces a mechanism of othering that defines who is in and who is out of place. Pennycook (2002) argues that this act of strategic essentialism is in fact reproducing the colonial legacy of language constructs

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and language barriers. With these acts of mooring, a community and the ‘other’ is constructed. This is the paradox of the term ‘community’, Bauman (2000) reminds us. As a concept, the community unties and segregates at the same time. What if you are in the wrong place?, asks Piller (2016). If you are a Welsh speaker outside Wales, does this mean that you have to hide your Welsh repertoire because they do not fit other places outside Wales? Stroud and Kerfoot (2020: 4) argue that, ‘an epistemic monoculture is a form of (epistemic) oppression’ and this can be applied to language. Epistemic monolingualism is a form of epistemic oppression. This is because ‘epistemic justice requires a form of life that is informed by the social experience of everyone and freed of the narrow interpretive practices of a privileged minority’ (Stroud & Kerfoot, 2020: 4, citing Fricker, 2007). This takes me to the challenge I introduced earlier in the book when I cited Nail (2019) who asserts that as the world is becoming increasingly mobile, our ontological understandings have continued to grapple with ways of describing it. Can we ever be in a position to develop a form of justice that validates the social experiences of everyone? I ask this question while mindful that systems of authority grapple with complexity and cling to national categories. They need a simple solution. The solution usually entails new ways of othering through identifying something exclusive to a group of people who are deemed ‘legitimate’ within the national apparatus. This ‘thing’ is then superficially protected as long as it remains within its historical and geographical boundaries. This is the challenge of linguistic essentialism. Emphasis on linguistic competence through monolingualising ideologies is politically dominant and is likely to remain so. Gramling (2016) argues that citizenship, as a notion, has shifted from an emphasis on blood and territorial rights to a system based on linguistic competence that signals one’s readiness to belong and become a citizen. As such, monolingualism is not only about communication but is also about nationhood. Gramling (2016) explains that language in pre-modern Europe was not entrenched in ideologies of national belonging; however, as European nations continue to be more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and national origins, language becomes heavily scrutinised and regulated as a marker of symbolic allegiance to the state and as a proxy

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for social cohesion. This ideology is enacted globally and is relevant at different scales. What underpins this ideology is what Veronelli (2015) refers to as the ‘coloniality of language’. Coloniality refers to patterns of power and control that rationalise domination in contemporary systems of oppression and dispossession. Linguistic essentialism, while stemming from politics of recognition and representation for the minority and the marginalised, risks reproducing oppressive systems based on the coloniality of language. What is required instead is pursuing epistemic justice that necessitates going beyond the ‘colonialities of language, and critically engaging with contemporary ideas of multilingualism and the very notion of language itself ’ (Stroud & Kerfoot, 2020: 3). That is to say, the legacy of oppressive, colonial histories that continued to marginalise certain languages and their speakers should not be solved by reproducing similar oppressive systems that live off essentialising language constructs and pushing the idea of linguistic supremacy as the core of civic existence. In her study on Welsh belonging, Daly (2020) explores how young people (aged 18–24) talk about their belonging to Wales. Her findings suggest that the protection of Welsh in Wales ‘can cause an air of hostility’ (2020: 2) and that young people cannot always claim an ‘authentic’ Welsh identity. She draws on Selleck’s (2018) hierarchy of belonging to uncover how language ability supports or inhibits the performativity of belonging to Wales. Many of her participants perceive themselves as authentically Welsh because of many reasons: they speak Welsh at home and went to Welsh medium schools, they can speak Welsh in a ‘traditional’ accent, and they can connect to the Welsh culture and heritage. Yet, other young people felt that they are not ‘authentically Welsh’ and linked their inability to speak Welsh, or the mixing between English and Welsh in their daily lives with their lack of connection to a Welsh identity. This study highlights how national belonging is constituted through language ideologies that stem from linguistic purism. And while it comes from a context of minority language protection, it raises the concern that this form of linguistic protection continues to reproduce the coloniality of language (Veronelli, 2015). Consequently, young people who do not fit the social mould framed around linguistic purity

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and certain traditional accents are likely to experience feelings of not being Welsh enough to belong to the place. Linguistic essentialism, while it superficially empowers what has been historically marginalised, is also about reinstating principles of linguistic monism. Holquist (2014) explains that the intrinsic plurality of language is concealed by the negative doctrine of monism and argues that ‘nothing so complex and shared as language can ever responsibly be treated as a sequestered, unitary thing’ (2014: 18). He asks us to think of what monism denies. In the spirit of highlighting what is denied by monism, I have demonstrated how linguistic essentialism continues to deny many people the need to feel recognised and respected. As we continue to move and lead increasingly precarious lives, the number of people affected by linguistic monism is growing significantly. This makes me wonder if we will one day realise that monolingualism is only a fiction; a harmful one. On the merits of learning from the unintelligible, Stroud and Kerfoot (2020: 10) speak of linguistic citizenship as a modality of struggle that captures language and everyday politics. They explain that: LC [Linguistic Citizenship] is about people using language to build alternative, caring, relationships with Others (the ‘new’ socialities of Fanon 1967). In turn, these relationships allow for the possibility of crafting alternative Selves, and ultimately contributing to grounding new ways of thinking and changing the world and its politics. LC attempts to accommodate the unintelligible or incommensurable by according voice and epistemological authority to the poor and to the marginalized, that is, those whose lives and experiences as ‘abyssal subjects’ lie beyond, or are marginalized, by the ‘dialectic of intelligible possibilities’. (Alcoff, 2011: 3)

Contrary to national discourses on the value of sharing one national language, linguistic citizenship entails appreciating the lack of a shared language as an opportunity to re-think relationships with others. When this shared language is lost, communication occurs differently by foregrounding the relevance of embodied, affective and spatial experiences. Harvey and Cooke (2020) talk about re-imagining voice when a shared linguistic voice is absent. In their work with children in South Africa, they learned how re-imagining voice through the arts (songs, dance,

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collages, drawings, photos, etc.) have enabled them to connect with the children with whom they shared no common language. The recognition felt by the children made them understand themselves as valuable individuals, connected to a wider community, responsible for themselves and others. Their study highlights how a community can be built and belonging can be sustained in spite of the absence of a commonly shared language. These new arrangements create new spaces liberated from the tyranny and coloniality of a shared language. Voice here is not only understood in linguistic terms, but in embodied and affective terms, as well. The children in Harvey and Cooke’s (2020) study teach us that if we unlearn the normative frames through which we perceive communication, we can creatively and passionately improvise new ways to connect with one another. All that is needed is re-imagining language to create new socially just arrangements. This re-imagining entails the commitment to un-learn linguistic essentialism.

Chapter Summary This chapter presents a critical discussion about language as a concern for social justice. I have explained how different approaches to social justice produce different, and sometimes conflicting, views on what is moral, ethical or socially just in relation to language education. I presented these different views while highlighting the importance of delving into onto-epistemological questions about language and language hierarchy in education. The chapter also addresses the link between language and the protected characteristics in the UK anti-discrimination law, arguing that language is inseparable from these characteristics and therefore, it requires protection. The chapter provides a flexible roadmap for language-based advocacy that entails awareness, solidarity and activism. Ultimately, language-based advocacy seeks to problematise the hierarchy of what is perceived as a grievable language by highlighting how grievable language cannot be separated from grievable lives and grievable bodies. The chapter ends with a section on strategic essentialism as a reproduction of the coloniality of language and the tyranny of the moored

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language. It concludes with a hopeful note on re-imagining communication by de-centering the focus on this thing normatively perceived as language.

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Cushing, I. (2020). Power, policing, and language policy mechanisms in schools: A response to Hudson. Language in Society, 49 (3), 461–475. Daly, H. (2020). Wales’ hierarchy of belonging: A mixed methods exploration of the attitudes and experiences of young first and second language Welsh speakers (Unpublished MA dissertation). Manchester Metropolitan University. Eckert, P. (1997). Age as a sociolinguistic variable. In F. Coulmas (Ed.), The handbook of sociolinguistics (pp. 151–167). Blackwell. Escott, H., & Pahl, K. (2019). ‘Being in the Bin’: Affective understandings of prescriptivism and spelling in video narratives co-produced with children in a post-industrial area of the UK. Linguistics and Education, 53, 100754. Flores, N. (2020). Fighting anti-Blackness IS real linguistics [Online]. Educational linguist: https://educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2020/05/31/fig hting-anti-blackness-is-real-linguistics/. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed . Continuum International. Gale, T. (2000). Rethinking social justice in schools: How will we recognize it when we see it? International Journal of Inclusive Education, 4 (3), 253–269. Giles, H., & Coupland, N. (1991). Language, contexts and consequences. Open University Press. Gramling, D. (2016). The invention of monolingualism. Bloomsbury. Harvey, L., & Cooke, P. (2020). Reimagining voice for transrational peace education through participatory arts with South African youth. Journal of Peace Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2020.1819217. Holquist, M. (2014). What would Bakhtin do? Critical Multilingualism Studies, 2(1), 6–19. Jenkins, J. (2009). English as a lingua franca. Oxford University Press. Kaplan, J. (2020). Hospitals have left many COVID-19 patients who don’t speak English alone, confused and without proper care. [Online]. https://www. propublica.org/article/hospitals-have-left-many-covid19-patients-who-dontspeak-english-alone-confused-and-without-proper-care. Komska, Y., Moyd, M., & Gramling, D. (2019). Linguistic disobedience: Restoring power to civic language. Palgrave Macmillan. Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge University Press. Li, W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39 (1), 9–30. Lippi-Green, R. (2012). English with an accent. Routledge. MacSwan, J. (2020). Translanguaging, language ontology, and civil rights. World Englishes, 321–333. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10. 1111/weng.12464.

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Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of justice. Blackwell. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. Saxon House.

10 Teaching Language in a Globalised World: Embracing and Navigating Vulnerability

10.1 Grappling with My Professional Home I have always grappled with my role as a TESOL and Applied Linguistics lecturer. What does it meant to be responsible for teaching English to speakers of other languages? What does that teaching entail? Am I teaching English, teaching about English, teaching about culture (which culture?) or offering new ways of thinking through different worldviews? These questions, coupled with my own personal trajectory of being both an insider and outsider in relation to English, made me uncomfortable in the traditional boundaries of my disciplinary ‘home’ which is mainly concerned with the teaching of English as a linguistic system. Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), as a professional domain, is often understood as a practical territory that teaches and researches how to best teach language systems. After several years of teaching about grammar, phonology, vocabulary, communicative teaching and task-based learning, I started to lose interest in the traditional boundaries and became more convinced that there are more exciting and challenging areas to language that I can research, engage with and teach about. After all, language is not just about rules and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Badwan, Language in a Globalised World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7_10

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systems; language is about communication, participation and becoming. I have experienced this first-hand as an expert user of Arabic and English. I have known how language opens and closes door for participation. I have witnessed how language includes and excludes speakers. And like Derrida (McNamara, 2010), I was teaching on the inside of English from outside, yet grappling with ways of bringing the outside of English inside. Not only did I grapple with the boundaries of my professional home, but I also questioned the forms of mastery I claimed. These forms were mainly based on my ability to analyse and teach the structure of language. I was teaching about English grammar and English phonology with confidence and mastery. Language, for me, continued to be an object of inquiry and analysis that I can subject to my masterful knowledge of linguistic structures. Language was lifeless, detached from its contextual habitat. Even when a context is added in the language textbook, this context is artificial, joyful and no way near the complexity and unpredictability of real world communication. In this context all interlocutors are happy, collaborative and willing to help, discussing a narrow range of ‘bland’ topics which are mainly aspirational, apolitical, and carefree (Gray, 2002). This discourse was described by Kramsch (2015: 409) as ‘tourism discourse’, which features ‘playful, fleeting encounters without any desire to negotiate, let alone resolve, differences in meaning’. Commenting on this, Gray (2012: 108) quotes one of his students who argues that language textbooks represent a ‘dishonest portrayal of life in the UK’ since they ‘create false dreams and aspirations in the minds of language learners’. Cheerful textbooks with glossy designs and bright colours used to fascinate me as a novice language teacher. They helped me create a world of fantasy for my students. My early years of teaching English to speakers of other languages were in the Gaza Strip in Palestine, an area torn by war, poverty and political sanctions. It is an area, once described by former British Prime Minister David Cameron as ‘a giant open prison’ (Watt & Sherwood, 2010). My students and I enjoyed talking about films, cinemas, pop stars, holidays, train stations even though none of these topics were relevant to, or available in, our lives. That fantasy did not bother me until one day I walked into the class to teach about

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how to buy a train ticket a day after the end of a two-week aggressive attack on the Gaza Strip. I started talking about trains and about how fast and convenient they are as a means of transport. I explained that we were going to learn how to buy train tickets. For the first time the desperate and depressed looks of my students made me realise how inappropriate the ‘global courebook’ is—to borrow Gray’s (2002) term. Looking at my students and glancing at the glossy textbook, I decided to put it aside. That was a critical moment in my professional life. It opened my eyes to see the deterritorialised content of the language textbook which is designed to sell worldwide, with no considerations for local needs and everyday struggles. These critical moments in my professional career made me rethink the notion of mastery and wonder about this thing called language that I want to teach and teach about. In addition, I struggled with my role in the cultural and ideological constructions of my students. Aware of how ‘learning transforms who we are and what we can do’ (Wenger, 1998: 15), I realised that learning a new language such as English is ‘not just an accumulation of skills and information, but also a process of becoming’ (ibid.: 215). My students, like me, desired a life that has English in it. There are possible interpretations for this desire. Kramsch (2009: 14–16) explains that learners can desire English to escape from the constraints of their current social environment. I can see how this was at play in my classes. We were all fed up with talking about the miseries of our besieged lives. We had no language to talk about our pain and struggles. Or perhaps we had language to express some of that we felt, but as the world of politics rendered us voiceless and our lives ungrievable (Butler, 2009), escaping the constraints of a miserable reality through indulging in a world of fantasy through a language called English was somehow therapeutic and hopeful. It also offered some form of cruel optimism that made life bearable (Berlant, 2011: 14), promising a dream of freedom and economic opportunity. Learning English was a form of rebellion, resistance and resilience. At a time when the world turned its back on two million besieged Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, my students found in learning English a way to say we can still join you, with the belief that, ‘to speak is to exist absolutely for the other’ (Fanon, 1967: 18). Certainly, many students desired English because it sounded cool, modern, powerful,

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different, and prestigious. Aware of all these complexities and possibilities, I could not help but ask myself: who am I in relation to the cultural and ideological construction of my learners? I was troubled by my approach that turned a blind eye to the politics of language. Troubled by my role and the limitations of what I can do about it, I resigned from my job at an American language centre. Being out of work for a while gave me the opportunity to reflect on who I am as an English language educator. I found many answers in the world of applied linguistics. I came across Motha and Lin’s (2014: 345) work on desiring English and I shared their view that responsible education should allow learners to understand the origins of their desires, be they colonial, racist, sexist, etc. in order ‘to choose how and what to desire, to make decisions about whether to resist, to be critical in their own ways’. I entered the TESOL academic life in the UK with these professional insecurities and struggles, only to realise that the learners I was training to become language teachers are in the same ‘trap’ that I was in during my early years of teaching English. Teaching TESOL in the UK was very similar to the way I used to teach TESOL in Palestine. It is a profession underpinned by the confident overdependence on standard language ideologies. Language is neatly pinned down to one monolithic understanding (Hall, 2014), packaged in glossy textbook covers, and measured through exams. Reflecting on my professional insecurities about how to teach English and teach about English, I continued to ask myself, how do I bring the outside of English into the inside of teaching about English? And most importantly, how can I convince the students that the outside of English is relevant to their degrees and their employability? I was aware that teaching about language, not as a linguistic system, but as a means of communication, participation and becoming within complex contextual layers of cultural, social, political, ideological, global and local considerations is not an easy task. However, I continued to maintain my motivation to do things differently through inspirations from critical pedagogy. In particular, the distinction Freire (1970) makes between ‘banking education’ and ‘transformative education’ informed my own pedagogical decisions and determination to change the way I teach about language so it stops being about transmitting knowledge, and becomes more about transforming how we think about language

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in order to empower and humanise. Language educators, I believe, can make classroom changes that affect the wider society. This is because language educators do not just teach grammar rules and vocabulary lists. Rather, they introduce different worldviews and additional ways of becoming and being in the world. Through their comments on how to talk about ways of speaking that deviate from idealised norms, they influence their students’ reactions to language as it manifests itself in their lives outside the classroom. As such, language educators produce and perpetuate ideologies, attitudes and worldviews that could create prejudice and linguistic hostility or introduce understandings that create ethics of care and linguistic foster-ship. As I discussed in Chapter 9, such language ideologies are not innocent comments about how to speak. They form an oppressive apparatus that is pervasive, restrictive, and socially unjust (Bell, 2016). Committed to doing things differently, an opportunity came up during a programme restructure that allowed me to design my own taught course. I developed a postgraduate module and named it, ‘Language in a Globalised World’. This module became my educational space to co-learn and un-learn about language in the world. During the writing of this book, I had taught this module four times over four academic years. The module was enriched by the students’ lived experiences with/of language. They helped me see things from different perspectives and the module continued to evolve. However, the learning in this module is different. It is personalised, historicised, critical and transformative. And with learning differently come feelings of vulnerability as I explain next.

10.2 Living with Vulnerability Language in a Globalised World, as an optional module, appealed to many applied linguistics students mainly because they were curious about language in the world. Many of my students reported that almost all their previous professional training was focused on language for specific purposes, with specific age groups, in specific contexts. Since the title of the module suggests looking at language from a macro-level

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perspective, many students signed up for this module. I guess this is a win from the start. As the module unfolds, different types of vulnerability started to emerge: Personal vulnerability: the module starts with discussing how historical processes and events contribute to how we perceive and talk about language in our lives. Starting from colonialism, moving to imperialism, globalisation and then neoliberalism, the module outlines the underlying narratives that underpin the language about language as we know it today. As the class is attended by students from different nationalities and worldviews, I sense some hesitation among the students especially during group discussions. Perhapse this is because they are not used to discussing political and socio-economic topics in relation to language. As much as I am determined to make my students realise that language teaching and learning is not a neutral activity and that language is intertwined with wider political, social, economic, cultural and ideological aspects, the hesitation of my students, the awkward silence, and the eyes that avoid contact generated feelings of personal vulnerability for me. There are two reasons for this feeling: my positionality and my shaking the confidence approach to teaching about language. As for my positionality, I am an outsider to the world of English, a ‘non-native’ speaker in a predominantly white discipline and a ‘foreigner’ in a wider socio-political context with increasing anxieties about migration and foreigners. As for my approach, I was asking my students to shake their confidence in language in order to permit new ways for talking about it at a time when their previous language education was based on instilling confidence in what language is. I grappled with these feelings of personal vulnerability. I thought they would go away after teaching the module for the first time. I confused them with the frustration a lecturer feels when they teach a module for the first time. Yet, these feelings were different: they linger longer and they are more subtle to talk about. To navigate these feelings, I often start by identifying the cause. In most cases, it is the two reasons together. However, what lessens the intensity of these feelings for me is the realisation that ‘unlearning habits of oppression and inequality is not

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straightforward or neat and tidy’ (Phipps, 2019: 8). And with this unlearning comes a sense of collective vulnerability that makes me and my students share the pain and the frustration as I explain below. Collective vulnerability: the small class size (average 15 students) means that everyone has a chance to discuss, wonder, or even look around in silence and puzzlement. Yet, the silence and the lack of answers or solutions we experience as a group is often accompanied by a sense of collective vulnerability. These are two reasons for this feeling. First, it is invoked as a mode to redress sudden violence (Butler, 2004). Outlining historical processes such as colonialism, imperialism and neoliberalism in relation to language entails a discussion of violent discourses. Discussing language as symbolic power in relation to the legitimate speaker foregrounds the connection between language and violence. Critiquing the language about language and the winners and losers as a result of these normative framings also refer to the violence of how language is used to include, exclude, supress, divide, other and shame. Talking about language as a concern for social justice foregrounds how language is used to privilege and disadvantage. Highlighting the link between language on the one hand and race, identity, place, and socio-economic status on the other hand struck a chord for many of the students who had experienced linguistic oppression but have had no language to talk about it. In addition, these discussions take language beyond its communicative value and invoke thoughts about the roles English language educators play in raising awareness about language and power and how they are entangled in this dilemma. This is particularly relevant since most of the students on the course take it as part of a postgraduate degree in TESOL. All of this creates a sense of collective vulnerability in the face of the symbolic violence of language. And as every week covers a new theme, the collective vulnerability lingers, yet it pushes us to identify and analyse more displays of linguistic oppression from our lived experiences with language. The more displays the students identify, the more they feel that their experiences matter and are indeed validated. The second cause of collective vulnerability is the desire to gain mastery, a principle repeatedly embedded and heavily invested in discourses about teacher training and teacher development. That is, to

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be a successful teacher, you have to be masterful in different ways: disciplinary mastery, management mastery, delivery mastery, etc. However, teaching about language in a globalised world proves that this level of desired mastery cannot be achieved because to master means to control, to organise, to fix and to solve. Yet, the social challenges caused by normative thinking about language and its associate elusive forms of linguistic oppressions are wicked issues—to borrow Cowal and Leung’s (2021) term. Wicked issues are complex, relentless, multifaceted and unsolvable. In the face of all of this, we collectively fail to master and hence, ‘we become vulnerable to other possibilities for living, for being together in common, for feeling injustice and refusing it without the need to engage it through forms of conquest’ (Singh, 2018: 21). To exist vulnerably means to recognise the dependency on one another and to enable alternative forms of collectivity and subjective being (Butler, 2004). As we feel the injustices together, many students start asking, ‘what do we do with our privilege?’. Phipps (2019: 4) eloquently responds, ‘Own it; use it; pass it on; pass on it; make space; and many other arts which need a lifetime of struggle, apology, reparation and some mutual celebration’. Other students ask, ‘is it okay for me not to know what to do?’. I respond with reassurance that it is okay not to be masterful, to feel puzzled, confused and not to have an instant answer or a clear plan. This is all part of our struggles to un-learn, co-learn and decreate. Yet, some students insist on the need for mastery. My response is: if we have to be masterful, let’s re-imagine it through discomfort. I discuss this in the next section.

10.3 Reimaging Mastery Through Discomfort I remember when I ended a couple of teaching sessions saying, ‘I am sorry that our discussion today was rather dark’. The students laughed and one said, ‘it is dark but true’. Another student said, ‘it’s disappointing’. I left the class wondering. Perhaps it is the darkness and disappointment that keep me and my students more determined to puzzle about language and raise awareness about how it is framed and utilised. Perhaps it is the dominance of linguistic oppression in different

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walks of life that makes it an inescapable challenge for language educators. Perhaps it is the painful hope and the cruel optimism that make me find comfort in cultivating educational discomfort. Discomfort, argues Ahmad (2013: 430) ‘is hence not about assimilation or resistance, but about inhabiting norms differently. The inhabitancy is generative or productive insofar as it does not end with the failure of norms to be secured, but the possibilities of living that do not “follow” these norms though’. As such, educational discomfort is transformative, showing us how to abide differently by the norms (Singh, 2018). What is the place of discomfort in language education? Education as ethics, argues Singh (2018), is a radically unmasterful act that produces unpredictable, unanticipatable and unmasterful knowledge. It entails unlearning what we already ‘know’ and interrogating the words and worlds through which we come to ‘know’. It establishes an education of ‘I wonder’, instead of ‘I do’ (Freire, 1970), deviating from banking education that perceives knowledge as ‘the property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the critical reflection of both teacher and students’ (Freire, 1970: 80). Un-knowing, un-learning, interrogating and reflecting produce sentiments of discomfort. In response to what we can do with this discomfort, Megan Boler (1999) proposes a pedagogy of discomfort that directs our emotional responses of discomfort to alert us to critically inquire about our existing beliefs, assumptions, and ways of seeing. As such, ‘learning to live with…discomfort’ becomes a ‘worthy educational ideal’ (1999: 197), allowing us to live with our ambiguities and complex entanglements. An education of discomfort, as an unmasterful process, radically challenges the notion of education as a ‘practice of subjecting others to the exclusive force of a firmly established hierarchy’ (Singh, 2018: 67). The language about language, as I have argued in this book, is deeply rooted in firmly established hierarchies. Think of notions such as ‘standard’ vs. non-standard’, ‘native’ vs. ‘non-native’, sounding ‘from here’ vs. ‘from there’, the ‘proficient monolingual’ vs. ‘the imperfect bilingual’, the ‘national’ language vs. ‘the other’ language(s), ‘mainstream literacy’ vs. ‘other forms of literacies’, the supremacy of language’ vs. ‘the semiotic assemblage’, and the list goes on. Challenging these hierarchies through language education offers powerful transformations to how language education trainees think about their roles, not

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just as people who teach about language as a linguistic system, but also as educators raising awareness about the power of language in the world. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s (1993) Nobel Prize Speech, I often end my teaching in Language in a Globalised World with the following quotation: I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done – together.

‘I trust you with the bird that is not in your hand because you have truly caught it ’: This is with reference to trusting my students with the linguistic awareness and understanding of language as symbolic violence. The bird is language. It is not in our hands as we cannot control how it is used and abused in society but through understanding the language about language, I trust that my students have truly caught the bird that is not in their hands. ‘Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done – together ’: The ‘thing’ refers to the module as a whole through which our collective vulnerability, wonderments and complex entanglements were woven together to produce this beautiful thing that continues to unravel. The weaving and unravelling are likely to continue even after the module has ended because it has given us a lot of discomforting transformation to analyse, identify and talk about as we go on about our lives in different domains and geographical locations. This thing that we have done together was borne out of language wonderments, language foster-ship, as well as attempts to de-occupy, de-centre, de-colonise and un-moor language. To care for it, we recognise the need for a lifelong of ‘disquieting and enduring dis-ease of all activism that is at the heart of all the critical and decolonising work’ (Phipps, 2019: 11).

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10.4 Shaking Classroom Ghettos and Hierarchies Not only did teaching Language in a Globalised World transform the way my students and I talk about language education, but it also produced new social arrangements which ultimately affected our relationships with one another. First and foremost, institutional hierarchies were shaken in our classroom space and for the duration of our class. I am no longer the masterful transmitter of knowledge but a fellow inquirer thinking and puzzling about how we can change arrangements thought to be just in language education. We started to think together, hold our breaths and then breathe together. This module has also been a fascinating learning experience with a lot of co/un-learning happening in multiple directions. Amongst ourselves, we present critical discussions about language from different parts of the world, challenging Euro-centric knowledge production processes. As a result, all students felt that their views, identities and experiences are valid and validated in the curriculum we were co-creating and de-creating together. The pedagogical opportunities are endless. However, I want to re-direct the focus from pedagogy to social connections. I have always been intrigued by the decisions students make when they decide where to sit in the class and next to whom. We are usually allocated a teaching space with round tables and moving chairs. At the beginning of the module, students usually sit in some sort of nationality/ethnicity-based groupings. There is a table for British students, a table for international students (from countries such as Kuwait, Syria, Pakistan, Algeria, and Vietnam), and a table for European students. British students from minority ethnic backgrounds tend to sit next to international students. All this happens silently and quickly. I refer to this as classroom ghettos because they are framed around some stubborn social factors such as ethnicity or nationality. The question that asks itself is: are these factors stubborn or are humans stubborn by insisting on their relevance? Or is it both? As the module unfolds, we learn, as a group, how to face, and talk about, our instabilities, vulnerabilities, anxieties, biases, prejudices and

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experiences of language-based injustice and oppression. Through a pedagogy of discomfort, we challenge normative frames and wonder about their consequences. The feeling in the room becomes different as we slowly build shy bridges of solidarity, recognising that while our experiences and struggles may indeed be different we still share some common grounds in our battle for socially just arrangements. As this happens, the ghettos start to shake. They do not dissolve completely. Perhaps they never do because their stubbornness coupled with our stubbornness on their importance is what keeps them around. Nonetheless, this module has given me a glimpse of hope that education can shake the social ghettos. This is because ‘while changing our metaphor does not change the way the world is materially, it does change the ways in which we engage with our world and how we think about the possibilities for changing it’ (Herod & Wright, 2002: 9).

10.5 Towards Sustainable Pedagogies and Hope Beyond the life of the module, the ‘thing’ we did together is embedded in sustainable pedagogies for resistance and resilience. The sustainability is maintained because I insist on challenging what Canagarajah (2020: 10) calls the ‘the false binaries which separate the classroom from society, individuals from institution, and language from material conditions’. In addition, this type of unconventional activism uncovers the nonlinear and networked work of power and symbolic violence associated with language and sheds light on how some invisible, subtle forms of linguistic oppression are sustained in arrangements thought to be just whereby ‘people might be lulled into complacency’ (Canagarajah, 2020: 9). This pedagogy offers what Raley (2004) refers to as an ‘integrative notion of revolutionary praxis’ which argues that instead of perceiving forms of power such as symbolic violence or linguistic oppression as organic unities that exist in certain contexts, they need to be reconceptualised as heterogeneous, fragmented, permeable, and nocuous. As such, it equips students with the critical skills to observe, analyse, identify, and challenge them whenever they occur.

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Central to my own educational philosophy is the understanding that while a pedagogy of discomfort coupled with critical and reality-based pedagogies enable critiques of the current order of things, which is a prerequisite for any social change calls, education remains a hopeful project. We teach with hope, about hope and towards hope. It is the hope to offer better and fairer social conditions, the hope to challenge and end oppression and injustices. This hope stems from the belief that: Our being in the world is much more than just ‘being.’ [It is] a ‘presence’ that can reflect upon itself, that knows itself as presence, that can intervene, can transform, can speak of what it does, but that can also take stock of, compare, evaluate, give value to, decide, break with, and dream. (Freire, 1998: 25–26)

Hope makes us feel our presence in the world and through hope we dare to dream of changing the world. We have learned from Pierre Bourdieu that language can be an act of symbolic violence. We learned from Toni Morrison that language is an act of consequences. We also learned from Judith Butler that language can be framed around, and constrained to, normative frames that have powers to shape subjective realities. The fundamental aspect to seeing anew is cultivating the ability to join the dots to understand the workings of language in societies and the ability to reimagine new possibilities for being differently in the world. After all, I always remind my students that they will graduate and work as language educators in different parts of the world. Collectively, we can make small changes in the lives of all the learners we teach. Together, we can spread ethics of caring and fostering language, practices of valuing and validating all ways in which language manifests itself around us, principles of unmooring and de-occupying language and philosophies of wondering about language and communication in everyday life. These can be small changes that we aspire to make through language education, yet they have significant and influential consequences in the lives of future learners and their social circles. Some days I worry about the ontological denials and erasures born of colonial thinking, national prejudices and local biases that are embodied in education and public discourses

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about language. I worry that they might do irreparable harm. However, when I feel lonely in this lifelong quest to un-learn and co-learn, I always remind myself of this ‘thing’ that my students and I made together.

Chapter Summary This chapter has been both therapeutic and hopeful. It challenges the artificial divide in higher education between teaching and research and provides an example of how to research the teaching to understand its impact on teachers and students alike. It is a personal account of my reflections, puzzlements and observations over the past four years during which I continued to teach a postgraduate module called, Language in a Globalised World . This ‘thing’ my students and I have created together in our discussions and frustrations about language in our lives has changed us at individual and collective levels. It has left us with pain, vulnerability, and discomfort, and yet it has reminded us of the things we can do in our different ways as language educators to create change. As such, it makes us cling to painful hope. The chapter explains how critical readings about language in relation to mobility and globalisation have enabled my students and me to live with our collective vulnerabilities, realise our inter-dependence, think of being differently in the world and reimagine what it means to be masterful through discomfort. As we revisit our biases and prejudices, we start to build bridges of solidarity and understand that while we have different types of battles to fight, our struggles do indeed have some common grounds.

References Ahmad, S. (2013). Queer feelings. In D. Hall, A. Jagose, A. Bebell, & S. Porter (Eds.), The Routledge queer studies reader (pp. 422–441). Routledge. Bell, L. (2016). Theoretical foundations for social justice education. In M. Adams & L. Bell (Eds.), Teaching for diversity and social justice (pp. 3–26). Routledge. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.

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Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war. Verso. Canagarajah, S. (2020). Reconsidering material conditions in language politics: A revised agenda for resistance. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 19 (3), 101– 114. Cowal, J., & Leung, G. (2021). Activist applied linguistics. In S. Conrad, A. Hartig, & L. Santlemann (Eds.), The Cambridge introduction to applied linguistics (pp. 308–324). Cambridge University Press. Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. Grove Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed . Continuum International. Freire, P. (1998). Politics and education. UCLA Latin American Center Publications. Gray, J. (2002). The global coursebook in English language teaching. In D. Block & D. Cameron (Eds.), Globalization and language teaching (pp. 151– 167). Routledge. Gray, J. (2012). English the industry. In A. Hewings & C. Tagg (Eds.), The politics of English (pp. 137–163). Routledge. Hall, C. (2014). Moving beyond accuracy: From tests of English to tests of ‘Englishing.’ ELT Journal, 68(4), 376–385. Herod, A., & Wright, M. (2002). Theorizing scale. In A. Herod & M. Wright (Eds.), Geographies of power (pp. 17–25). Blackwell. Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject. Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (2015). Language and culture in second language learning. In F. Sharifian (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture (pp. 403– 416). Routledge. McNamara, T. (2010). Reading Derrida: Language, identity and violence. Applied Linguistics Review, 1, 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1515/978311022 2654.23. Morrison, T. (1993). Nobel Lecture. [Online]. https://www.nobelprize.org/pri zes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/. Motha, S., & Lin, A. (2014). ‘Non-coercive rearrangements’: Theorizing desire in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 48(2), 331–359. Phipps, A. (2019). Decolonizing multilingualism. Multilingual Matters. Raley, R. (2004). eEmpires. Cultural Critique, 57 , 111–150. Singh, J. (2018). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Duke University Press.

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Watt, N., & Sherwood, H. (2010, July 27). David Cameron: Israeli blockade has turned Gaza Strip into a ‘prison camp’. The Guardian. https://www.the guardian.com/politics/2010/jul/27/david-cameron-gaza-prison-camp. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.

Conclusion: Surviving the Language Blocks

I opened this book with the statement, Language in a Globalised World is a protest and a discussion about how language manifests itself in different spheres of public life at individual, national and transnational levels from historical, political, ideological, and socio-linguistic perspectives. I hope that my readers have lived with me the protests and followed the different discussion threads presented throughout the chapters. The book merges the ontological and the spatial turns in applied linguistics. These turns have been crucial to developing and permitting new ways of talking about language as well as new grounds for protesting. Through the ontological turn, the book problematises what language is, how we know what we know about language, where it is located and whose interests are served by the current arrangements. The spatial turn, on the other hand, summons discourses of place and understandings of how pervasively and intimately ingrained language is in the fabric of thought about place, belonging, identity, subjectivity and politics. The task of the book is threefold. First, it seeks to highlight the tyranny of local and national biases in narratives about place and linguistic expectations in order to reorient our conceptualisation pursuits towards an expansive, dynamic and socially just imagining of place inspired by spatial perspectives which © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Badwan, Language in a Globalised World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7

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pay a close attention to the possibilities entangled in the constant coming and going associated with social, symbolic, and individual dimensions that contribute to the construction of place (Vigouroux, 2009). As such, the book is based on the premise that ‘place is always in the making through our movements and relations, [and] through our ways of coming to know and be together’ (Bang, 2020: 441). The second task of the book is to present a plea to the field of applied linguistics to continue to push against rigid and static imaginings of language. As I have explained in this book, language has always been on the move-always migrating, expanding and changing even if and when we insist on national biases and territorial boundaries and treat them as normative. I agree with Bang (2020: 441) that ‘[n]on-movement is an historically accumulating bias that serves the long trajectory of powered struggles in western knowledge systems and societies ontological assertions of human exceptionalism and supremacy’. I demonstrated how insisting on non-movement creates mechanisms for mooring language that produce ‘us’ vs ‘them’ boundaries which feed into creating categories such as legitimate and illegitimate languages, varieties and speakers. I discussed at length how insisting on this imagining causes a lot of suffering as millions of mobile individuals become subjected to the symbolic violence of language enacted in social fields that are ideologically constructed around the imagining of non-movement. The book has highlighted that places, speakers, and grand narratives of historical belonging—how we see them, how we construct them, how we talk about them and how we theorise them—are consequential. The biases we create and cling to are often unleashed in comments and judgments about someone’s language. In return, these have significant consequences for how individuals feel about their existence, identities, sense of belonging, and the extent to which they are seen and heard as individuals with grievable lives. A third task of the book is to challenge discourses of mastery that subjugates language to disciplinary domination that yearns to govern, control, and objectify under claims of scientific authority and academic mastery. Singh (2018) explains how mastery seeks to make what is mastered predicated, organised and categorised. She refers to the currency of Hegel’s conception of the master/slave dialectic that entails

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a life and death battle for recognition. Whereas the master is willing to die for an ideal, the slave wants to preserve their life by submitting to the master whose position as a master is in fact dependent on the slave’s one-sided and unequal recognition. The ‘thingification’ (Césaire, 2001) of language in the discipline is an act of enslaving language, rendering it a thing to be analysed and coded by a masterful ideology that seeks to extract regularity as it constructs what it thinks of as ideal. Commenting on this, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 100–101) argue that the scientification of language is ultimately a battle for power and recognition: Since everybody knows that language is a heterogeneous, variable reality, what is the meaning of the linguists’ insistence on carving out a homogeneous system in order to make a scientific study possible? […] But the scientific model taking language as an object of study is one with the political model by which language is homogenized, centralized, standardized, becoming a language of power, a major or dominant language. Linguistics can claim all it wants to be science, nothing but pure science – it wouldn’t be the first time that the order of pure science was used to secure the requirements of another order […] Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws.

And yet, this thing we call language is not static, stable, or regular, and therefore, it cannot be mastered despite the narratives, frames, and ideologies that persuade us to imagine it as such. Language evolves, changes and surprises. It moves around and mutates. It challenges the most creative narratives of mastery. Nonetheless, it is used as a tool by the powerful to dictate, control, exclude, profile and shame. One of the direct consequences of masterful discourses about language in the world is the emergence of ‘language blocks’ as a social inheritance that individuals need to survive in their daily live. While these blocks are not real, they are stubborn and consequential. Echoing Edward Said’s (1993: 336) remark that ‘the worst and most paradoxical gift’ of colonialism was ‘to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or black, or Western, or Oriental’, I understand language blocks as exclusively reductionist perceptions and ideologies of

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what language is expected to be in certain contexts and what ways of speaking and writing are deemed acceptable and proper by the communicating individuals. To survive a language block means to produce language that matches whatever norms and expectations are placed on individuals in different places and at different times. Throughout the pages of this book, I discussed different types of blocks that individuals need to survive if their language were to be perceived as ‘acceptable’: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The national language block The standard variety block The high scale language block (expected of the mobile) The dominant language/variety in a place block ‘Sounding’ articulate and appropriate block The perfect bi-/tri-lingualism block.

This list is incomplete and imperfect, yet it demonstrates the range of language blocks that individuals face in their lives. I have attempted throughout the different chapters and protests to foreground these blocks as sociolinguistic arrests (Rymes, 2020) that are morally problematic and socially unjust. I explained, through extending Rosa’s (2019) concept of ‘languagelessness’, how insisting on these language blocks render many individuals languageless. These blocks are sustained through formal education, employment requirements, media portrayals, official language policies, and even academia. Perhaps this is why I chose to the word surviving the language blocks rather than overcoming them. Can these language blocks ever melt given the very cold and stubborn macro sociopolitical contexts that create and sustain them? This is a question I cannot answer with certainty but what can certainly be done is language advocacy and activism to raise awareness about how these blocks operate in relation to power, symbolic violence and historicity, and about the winners and losers they create. And as I write this concluding chapter, I cannot help but wonder: did I survive my very own language block constructed through my own ideal imagining of how a book should be written? Or did the perfect imperfection of my bilingualism insist on finding ways of peeking out? What this book has taught me is to learn to live with imperfections.

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My hope is that as language researchers we are expanding our understandings of the scope of relevance involved in researching a complex and amorphous social phenomenon called language, as well as sharpening our perceptions of our own ontological entanglements in producing and sustaining language about language and the frames through which we describe it so that we might see anew and build new worlds with different frames, or perhaps without frames. Frames are static, restrictive and oppressive in how they force us to see only what is framed, taking our attention away from questioning how things/concepts/constructs/ideas are framed, why, by whom and under what conditions. Language in a Globalised World has pointed towards insights and tools that language educators, researchers and students can utilise to re-imagine language, education and pedagogical practices in ways reflective of mobility, fluidity and commitments to social justice. It also aims to engage the wider public in discussions about alternative ways of perceiving language in order to create new social arrangements that care for, and foster, language. The un-learning and co-learning this book calls for can indeed transform the cultural geo-politics of knowledge about language in a globalised world.

References Bang, M. (2020). Learning on the move toward just, sustainable, and culturally thriving futures. Cognition and Instruction, 38(3), 434–444. Césaire, A. (2001). Discourse on colonialism. Monthly Review Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Continuum. Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad . Oxford University Press. Rymes, B. (2020). Students as Sociolinguists. Phi Delta Kappan, 101(5), 8–15. Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. Vintage. Singh, J. (2018). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Duke University Press.

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Vigouroux, C. (2009). A relational understanding of language practice: Interacting timespaces in a single ethnographic site. In J. Collins, S. Slembrouck, & M. Baynham (Eds.), Globalization and language in contact (pp. 62–84). Continuum International Publishing.

Index

A

B

academic stigmatisation 122 activism xvii, 10, 50, 119, 139, 149, 165, 181, 183, 188–190, 198, 212, 214, 222 advocacy 165, 188, 198. See also activism age ix, xiii, xiv, 7–9, 49, 82, 149, 168, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 207. See also age grading age grading 180 an economy of exchange 98 anti-discrimination law. See protected characteristics assigned value 101 awareness ix, xiii, xv, 10, 20, 32, 36, 62, 74, 126, 132, 142, 164, 183, 184, 187–189, 193, 198, 209, 210, 212, 222

Bauman, Zygmunt 2, 3, 21–24, 32, 55, 68, 122, 126, 149, 150, 156, 195 becoming in the world 44 belonging xiv, 1, 4, 8, 9, 23, 55, 78, 79, 120–122, 127–129, 131, 138, 140, 148, 154, 180, 182, 183, 189, 191, 195, 196, 198, 219, 220 Blommaert, Jan 2, 5, 8, 21, 32, 55, 72, 81, 91, 92, 96–98, 100, 103, 108, 114, 116, 131, 139, 166 border-crossing 3 bordering 3, 22, 133, 168 the borderless world narrative transversal bordering 22 Bourdieu, Pierre 29–32, 39, 96, 126, 129, 136, 192, 215

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Badwan, Language in a Globalised World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7

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226

Index

C

Cameron, Deborah 19, 23, 42, 56, 91, 204 Canagarajah, Suresh 8, 18, 19, 32, 76, 77, 91–93, 96, 98–100, 116, 119, 214 capitalism 18, 19, 24, 90 chronotopic orientations 81 civic participation 33. See also social justice classroom ghettos 213 colonialism 7, 16, 17, 20, 24, 30, 59, 177, 208, 209, 221 coloniality 196 colonisation x, 16, 34 commodity 8, 20, 31, 32, 44, 45, 49 communicative imperialism. See sociolinguistic market communicative relativity 37. See also socio-pragmatic competence communicative repertoires 65, 73, 74, 153, 156, 159, 160, 167, 181 complex equality 176 conscious learning 62 contingent alignment 73 the core 20, 30, 92, 196 correction 193 cosmopolitanism. See globalisation cruel optimism 205, 211

derogatory labels non-standard, slang, non-native. See linguistic stratification desire xi, 19, 134, 140, 204–206, 209 discourse identity 37, 148 discrimination. See linguistic oppression distributed practice. See methodological individualism double monolingualism 71

E

ecological factors 101–103, 107, 109, 160 ecological orientation 8, 101, 108 elite movers 90, 108 embodied indexicality 77 emotional stigmatisation 121 entextualisation 99 envoicing 99 equitable participation 175 ethnolinguistic nationalism. See linguistic hostility exchange value 8, 101, 102, 105, 107 perceived value, assigned value 101 exclusion xi, 24, 67, 115, 116, 121, 129, 169

D

decolonisation 22, 48 decolonising xi, 48, 65, 95, 138, 141, 212 decreation xvi, 135, 136, 140–142 de-occupying 48, 215 (de)occupying language 4, 138

F

flat ontology 94 foster-ship 9, 10, 109, 181, 207, 212. See also linguistic foster-ship frontier zones 163, 165, 168, 171

Index

G

globalisation x, xvii, 2, 4, 7–9, 17, 21–24, 92, 100, 164, 208, 216 the Great Divide. See posthumanism grievable language 10, 191–193, 198 H

Heller, Monica 2, 33, 35, 71, 153 heritage language 46, 154 hospitality 9, 42, 134, 135, 142 hostility xi, 125, 130, 196, 207 I

identity xiv, xv, 9, 20, 21, 23, 36, 37, 54, 57, 79, 99, 116, 124, 129, 130, 138, 148, 151, 152, 154–167, 169–171, 175, 176, 178, 179, 184, 189, 190, 196, 209, 219 identity mainstreaming 152 ideology xv, 18, 55–57, 59, 95, 168, 177, 179, 196, 221 imperialism 7, 17, 24, 30, 208 in-between-ness xiii, 150–152, 155, 171 injustice x, 184, 185, 188, 210, 214 institutional stigmatisation 122 interactional strategies 99 intersectionality xiii, 130, 175, 178, 179 K

knowledge economy. See commodity L

language advocacy

227

awareness, solidaity, activism 10, 222 language blocks 221 language contact 9, 168 language education xiii, 9, 10, 20, 34, 84, 198, 208, 211, 213, 215 language fears 109, 128, 140. See also language shaming language ideologies 2, 7, 32, 35, 81, 123, 140, 168, 196, 206 languagelessness 96 language policing shaming 33, 35, 179 language shaming 122 languaging ix, xi, xiv, xviii, 4, 5, 8, 9, 36, 44, 48, 63, 64, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 81–84, 108, 132, 135, 136, 155, 160–162, 177, 181 late capitalism 7 legitimate speaker 96, 209 linguistic bullying. See linguistic oppression linguistic citizenship 56, 114, 136, 197 linguistic diversity 9, 62, 99, 118, 128, 155, 162, 164, 184 linguistic essentialism 8, 84, 138, 195, 197, 198 linguistic fluidity 62, 64, 66, 69, 194 linguistic foster-ship 136 linguistic hegemony 121, 154 linguistic hierarchy 30 linguistic hostility 120 linguistic justice xi linguistic monism. See linguistic essentialism; linguistic purity

228

Index

linguistic oppression 175, 183, 185–188, 190, 193, 209, 210, 214 linguistic privilege 3, 60 linguistic purity 58–60, 62–64, 66–68, 84, 162, 196. See also linguistic essentialism linguistic repertoires 5, 20, 35–37, 65, 69, 71, 72, 92, 101, 118, 127, 128, 133, 153, 156 linguistic rights 9, 56, 124, 136, 164, 189, 194 linguistic stratification 36, 95, 179 liquidity xv, 62, 89 modernity 2, 177 liquid societies modernity 32, 166

M

mainstream literacy skills 180 Massey, Doreen 9, 92, 93, 116, 117, 119, 142 mastery vulnerability 10, 19, 74, 96, 140, 141, 204, 205, 209, 210, 220, 221 meta-commentary 160 methodological individualism 76 methodological nationalism 67, 115 microaggressions xi, 184 migration 2, 21, 23, 30, 100, 121, 125, 165, 190, 208 mobility xv, 2, 3, 8, 9, 21, 23, 24, 35, 57, 61, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96–98, 100, 101, 103–105, 107–110, 114, 117, 119, 120, 124, 126, 129, 132, 136, 138–140, 164, 184, 216, 223

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) 34 moral panic 49 Mother tongues ix

N

nationalism. See methodological nationalism neoliberalism 7, 18, 24, 208, 209 neoliberal order commodity 31 new materiality 8, 76 N-Language 54 non-elite movers 90, 108, 116 non-essentialism xv non-standard 21, 33, 36, 124, 179, 211 normative frames 11, 46, 198, 214, 215 normative thinking 7, 8, 15, 41, 47, 57, 66, 70, 74, 84, 95, 127, 130, 210

O

ontological turn 3, 181, 219 orders of indexicality 97

P

pedagogy of discomfort 211, 214, 215 Pennycook, Alastair xi, 2, 4, 5, 20, 61, 64, 75–77, 80, 81, 91, 138, 139, 150, 181, 194 perceived value 29, 35, 101 the periphery 30 Phillipson, Robert 17, 19, 20, 32

Index

Phipps, Alison xi, xvii, 2, 42, 48, 90, 108, 135, 137–139, 141, 209, 210, 212 place identity 9, 162, 163, 166, 169–171 political linguistics 32, 139 polycentricity 98 posthumanism 8, 76, 77 Power Language Index linguistic hierarchy, linguistic stratification 31 prescriptivism 107, 181, 194 privilege 7, 24, 30, 42, 43, 79, 101, 108, 149, 209, 210 protected characteristics 9, 177, 178, 183, 198

R

recontextualisation 99 redistribution 181 repertoires of identities 152 rescaling 93, 100 right to the city 118, 164 Rosa, Jonathan 21, 48, 96, 130, 177, 186, 187, 222

S

scale jumping 97 semiotic assemblage 80, 84, 211 semiotic mobility 8, 90, 96, 101–104, 108, 109 shaming 33, 63, 138, 185 shifts of footing 98 simple equality 176 slang 33, 125 sloganisation 166

229

social justice xix, 3, 9, 10, 21, 34, 61, 115, 122, 124, 131, 134, 138, 141, 165, 175–177, 183, 187–190, 192–194, 198, 209, 223 social moulds 148, 155 social stigmatisation 121 sociolinguistic arrests 2, 58, 222 sociolinguistic market 8, 16, 32, 33, 35, 37, 92, 122 exchange value. See legitimate speaker sociolinguistics xv, xvii, 2–5, 9, 16, 67, 81, 91, 92, 96, 97, 109, 114–116, 140, 165–168 new sociolinguistics. See The Sociolinguistics of Globalisation The Sociolinguistics of Globalisation 96 sociolinguistic scales 8, 90, 95, 97, 98, 100 sociolinguistics of distribution. See The Sociolinguistics of Globalisation socio-pragmatic competence 36, 37 solidarity 10, 183, 188, 189, 198, 214, 216 sounding 1, 24, 35, 122, 178, 186, 211 spatiality xi, 9, 116, 119, 120, 125, 136, 139, 141, 142 space, place 9 spatial turn. See also spatiality; unmooring language 92 speech communities 8, 33, 35, 62, 66, 114, 122, 138 Standard English. See linguistic stratification sticky spaces 45

230

Index

strategic essentialism 10, 194, 198 super-addressee. See polycentricity superdiversity 24, 163, 165–167 symbolic violence 9, 67, 126, 127, 130–132, 136, 138, 142, 183, 192, 193, 209, 212, 214, 215, 220, 222

T

UK Equality Act 2010 181, 183 (un)mooring 9 unmooring language 137, 138 up-scaling. See scale jumping

V

vulnerability xvi, xvii, 43, 109, 127, 128, 133, 136, 142, 207–209, 212, 216

tourism discourse 204 transversal bordering 22 W U

the UK anti-discrimination law 9, 177, 178, 198

Wallerstein, Immanuel World System Theory 30 World System Theory the core, the periphery 30