1 00:00:00,420 --> 00:00:07,650 Hello and welcome to In Our Spare Time, quite a language is not just words, it's a culture, a tradition, 2 00:00:07,650 --> 00:00:13,770 a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is, unquote, worth of. 3 00:00:13,770 --> 00:00:23,880 Noam Chomsky, our four panellists today are organising a conference here in Oxford in March entitled Language, Mobility and Belonging as a Quartette. 4 00:00:23,880 --> 00:00:28,440 The research ranges right across the discipline of social linguistics from studies 5 00:00:28,440 --> 00:00:33,270 of the Polish diaspora to the use of Hebrew in Palestinian refugee communities, 6 00:00:33,270 --> 00:00:39,780 to the accent and dialect usage of the inhabitants of Bermuda and to the language learning in migrant integration programmes. 7 00:00:39,780 --> 00:00:41,460 In Germany, 8 00:00:41,460 --> 00:00:48,870 the present age is one of ever increasing international migration and displacement from war zones and other ones and issues of cultural integration. 9 00:00:48,870 --> 00:00:51,810 And never be more pertinent, no more complicated. 10 00:00:51,810 --> 00:01:00,090 And having an understanding of the interplay between use of language and the dynamics of social identity has never been more important. 11 00:01:00,090 --> 00:01:07,950 With me to discuss the conference on that research are Rosemary Hall, a second grade student at Morton College. 12 00:01:07,950 --> 00:01:17,460 Dr. Nancy Walker, a postdoc in Paris who really shows a first year student at Green Temperton College and Dr. King at Kosminski, 13 00:01:17,460 --> 00:01:22,260 a recent graduate, beautiful student from Somerville College. Thank you very much for joining me. 14 00:01:22,260 --> 00:01:29,340 I think we just start this podcast by talking to you individually about the fascinating research that you're doing and don't care. 15 00:01:29,340 --> 00:01:36,630 You have studied the Polish diaspora and how language affects their sense of social identity, is that correct? 16 00:01:36,630 --> 00:01:47,010 Yes. So in my difficult study, I looked at a group of Polish speaking migrants in the UK and I was interested in their identity construction process. 17 00:01:47,010 --> 00:01:57,240 So how they make sense of the world around them and how they what role language plays in it and how they construct their identities and interactions, 18 00:01:57,240 --> 00:02:04,680 how they try and different languages that they know in order to index their social cultural positioning in the world. 19 00:02:04,680 --> 00:02:15,240 I interviewed a group of 30 speakers who came to the UK to study, but prior to that they receive part of their education in Poland. 20 00:02:15,240 --> 00:02:20,850 They came to the UK to study and then they were proficient in both English and Polish at a similar level. 21 00:02:20,850 --> 00:02:25,680 And I was interested in these stories and how those stories build into structured 22 00:02:25,680 --> 00:02:30,450 experiences of life in the UK and how that was represented in the languages. 23 00:02:30,450 --> 00:02:40,290 So I looked at both the social discourses in which my participants participated and and the language used. 24 00:02:40,290 --> 00:02:46,980 So how the social discourses were represented in the tiny little detail of the speech. 25 00:02:46,980 --> 00:02:55,620 So this social discourse, meaning the richness of social interaction, they talk to you by those social discourses. 26 00:02:55,620 --> 00:03:01,530 I kind of mean discourses on language, nationality, culture, what they are. 27 00:03:01,530 --> 00:03:09,780 So how they understood Polish ness and how they understood Britishness and how that interacted in daily lives and how that 28 00:03:09,780 --> 00:03:15,870 influenced their understanding of the own position in the British context in relation to the Polish context as well. 29 00:03:15,870 --> 00:03:21,360 So if that makes it a bit easier because it's a technical term, it may not come across before. 30 00:03:21,360 --> 00:03:29,160 So you said you interviewed this person. So I conducted in one to one interviews with them, 31 00:03:29,160 --> 00:03:38,220 which centred around these stories in the UK and what so they told me all about their reasons for coming here, why, how they lived here, how they are. 32 00:03:38,220 --> 00:03:45,180 They told me a lot about their social networks as well and about their views and culture and language as well. 33 00:03:45,180 --> 00:03:52,290 And then those individual stories build into different identities that they expressed. 34 00:03:52,290 --> 00:03:55,050 So there were people who were more nationally oriented. 35 00:03:55,050 --> 00:04:02,040 So there were people who found their place in the social structure in the UK by being part of the Polish diaspora community. 36 00:04:02,040 --> 00:04:06,360 So they would be more oriented towards the diaspora community in Poland itself. 37 00:04:06,360 --> 00:04:10,260 So Poland would be still a point of reference for them in their daily lives. 38 00:04:10,260 --> 00:04:13,830 And the Polish language played an important part in their daily lives because that 39 00:04:13,830 --> 00:04:18,390 was in the language that allowed them to express themselves as really Polish. 40 00:04:18,390 --> 00:04:23,940 And they said that they understood this Polish ness is the national identity. 41 00:04:23,940 --> 00:04:26,340 So that was an essential part of who they were. 42 00:04:26,340 --> 00:04:32,010 And these were people who were very active in the Polish Diaspora community in those Polish organisations here, 43 00:04:32,010 --> 00:04:38,760 and who many times said that they wanted to go back to Poland and here they were, gender differences. 44 00:04:38,760 --> 00:04:44,220 So most of the men said that they would like to go back to Poland, whereas women, not so much, 45 00:04:44,220 --> 00:04:49,590 even if they were initially oriented, but apart from those nationally oriented individuals, 46 00:04:49,590 --> 00:04:53,490 in the other end of this extreme, there were people who are very cosmopolitan, 47 00:04:53,490 --> 00:04:59,830 who kind of rejected nationality as a basis for identity and who oriented themselves more towards. 48 00:04:59,830 --> 00:05:05,200 The global economy and the English speaking world, and that was represented in the language used in that, 49 00:05:05,200 --> 00:05:11,610 that they were developing new speaking styles in Polish because they would their Polish websites. 50 00:05:11,610 --> 00:05:15,680 When you say representing their language use, we're talking quite a technical level of the. 51 00:05:15,680 --> 00:05:22,750 Yes. So how so? They were using certain linguistic features. 52 00:05:22,750 --> 00:05:25,030 So certain phonetic features, 53 00:05:25,030 --> 00:05:32,500 they pronounce the consonants and they used new intonation patterns in Polish that I wasn't familiar with as a speaker of Polish. 54 00:05:32,500 --> 00:05:40,450 And that had to do with their new position in the sociocultural metrics if you want to kind of look at it that way. 55 00:05:40,450 --> 00:05:46,180 Right. Because they were trying to express their new positioning in the world by being Polish, 56 00:05:46,180 --> 00:05:53,500 but in the UK and being a member of this of this transnational community, that is a new sort of cultural formation. 57 00:05:53,500 --> 00:05:57,820 Right. Because they want to say, yeah, we're Polish, but we're also here. 58 00:05:57,820 --> 00:06:06,130 And that it doesn't necessarily result in us being mean nationally Polish because we have different strategies for life so that, 59 00:06:06,130 --> 00:06:14,770 for instance, the social networks were more international, they would be less willing to go back to Poland many times. 60 00:06:14,770 --> 00:06:24,610 And that also influenced the way they spoke. As I kind of show them, I, I you know, maybe to someone who is used to doing a lot of scientific studies, 61 00:06:24,610 --> 00:06:31,300 30 participants might sound like a rather small sample size, but there are quite good reasons why it's not feasible to retain people. 62 00:06:31,300 --> 00:06:38,860 So it might seem as a small sample because usually people doing sociology or they 63 00:06:38,860 --> 00:06:43,360 coming from a different social science would say that they want big samples. 64 00:06:43,360 --> 00:06:53,860 But in linguistics, it is quite impossible many times for practical reasons as well, because as a researcher, you you have to transcribe the data. 65 00:06:53,860 --> 00:07:03,790 It usually has to be thoroughly done. So in a way, you have to transcribe all the little tiny detail of someone's speech and that takes a lot of time. 66 00:07:03,790 --> 00:07:10,990 So like one hour of an interview, you can take up to 15 hours of transcription. 67 00:07:10,990 --> 00:07:15,610 So that basically means that for the purpose of mind field project, 68 00:07:15,610 --> 00:07:22,060 I wasn't able to interview one participants because they wouldn't have had time for that. 69 00:07:22,060 --> 00:07:27,490 Clearly, you're looking at some other immigrant populations, but in a slightly different context. 70 00:07:27,490 --> 00:07:32,470 You correctly you focus on language learning in Germany and particularly these 71 00:07:32,470 --> 00:07:36,350 migrant integration programmes that have been set up in the last 10 years. 72 00:07:36,350 --> 00:07:41,650 Yeah, yeah. So I'm basically doing the opposite of working as doing as I mentioned before, a while, 73 00:07:41,650 --> 00:07:45,790 Kinga and my other colleagues are trying to understand how speakers might be challenging, 74 00:07:45,790 --> 00:07:49,180 take it for granted relationships between nationality and languages. 75 00:07:49,180 --> 00:07:53,890 I'm looking at how Germany on a political level and an educational level and a policy level 76 00:07:53,890 --> 00:07:58,390 is trying to enforce this idea through language requirements for migrants and refugees. 77 00:07:58,390 --> 00:08:04,270 In 2005, Germany introduced this idea of integration or something to get more serious about it, 78 00:08:04,270 --> 00:08:08,830 and they introduced so-called integration programmes that required migrants and refugees 79 00:08:08,830 --> 00:08:14,560 to learn German and to learn about German history and politics and to pass an exam. 80 00:08:14,560 --> 00:08:20,500 And this is facilitated through government funded courses that run for six to nine months. 81 00:08:20,500 --> 00:08:23,980 And they're all over Germany and they run under a nationwide curriculum. 82 00:08:23,980 --> 00:08:28,780 And what I found really striking was this idea of integration where the concept actually mean, 83 00:08:28,780 --> 00:08:32,530 because what we're finding is that it's not very clearly defined in German official discourse. 84 00:08:32,530 --> 00:08:35,830 There's no very clear definition of what that entails. 85 00:08:35,830 --> 00:08:41,770 So my general question is, if we take a look at these classrooms, there hasn't been any research on this. 86 00:08:41,770 --> 00:08:45,610 What can we find about the interaction that takes place in these spaces? 87 00:08:45,610 --> 00:08:50,720 How are migrants going on this journey of integration and how do they come out at the end? 88 00:08:50,720 --> 00:08:55,900 And more specifically, how does this concept of integration become embedded within this interaction? 89 00:08:55,900 --> 00:09:01,390 So I'm looking at this firstly on a an ethnographic level, spending time in these classrooms, 90 00:09:01,390 --> 00:09:06,250 assisting in the teaching, interviewing teachers and migrants and refugees. 91 00:09:06,250 --> 00:09:15,700 But I'm also looking at a linguistic level to see how far this idea becomes embedded within people's ideologies of belonging to Germany. 92 00:09:15,700 --> 00:09:23,080 So because as I understand it, these programmes have to developments outside of the purely language learning acquisition, 93 00:09:23,080 --> 00:09:32,620 but also these elements of learning cultural history of Germany. And there certainly is a broader mission to simply learn the language. 94 00:09:32,620 --> 00:09:35,660 Absolutely. I mean, Germany is not unique in this context. 95 00:09:35,660 --> 00:09:43,450 Most countries in the world have language requirements for migrants and refugees, and surely it serves a functional purpose. 96 00:09:43,450 --> 00:09:48,380 And learning the language of your host country is definitely a resource. 97 00:09:48,380 --> 00:09:55,000 I do challenge the idea that this should be a requirement and I challenge it because 98 00:09:55,000 --> 00:09:59,790 it's unclear how this affects migrants and their trajectories in the host country. 99 00:09:59,790 --> 00:10:06,450 And what it might be instilling in them about their position in this new country, because as a linguistic anthropologist, 100 00:10:06,450 --> 00:10:12,900 I can't remove language from culture and from identity and from ideology and politics and so on. 101 00:10:12,900 --> 00:10:21,300 So I find it very difficult to say we're purely going to look at language or something functional, saying it has to be learnt as a tool. 102 00:10:21,300 --> 00:10:23,110 Rather, I say no, it's a social practise. 103 00:10:23,110 --> 00:10:31,170 So we have to understand the cultural and political implications that go along with learning a language, especially in this context. 104 00:10:31,170 --> 00:10:34,670 It is something that you discovered can please give me cut this out. 105 00:10:34,670 --> 00:10:41,940 This is not a question that you have maybe a large American population that might be really quite proficient in a few words in English, 106 00:10:41,940 --> 00:10:47,220 but doesn't yet have any German. And how that plays out, I just it's a purely anecdotal evidence for myself. 107 00:10:47,220 --> 00:10:54,360 But I have a friend who is doing the Austrian version of Teach First before that is quite difficult situations school, where you have some very, 108 00:10:54,360 --> 00:11:00,840 very bright immigrant and refugee children who are extremely fluent in English but are put in very low sets just 109 00:11:00,840 --> 00:11:07,320 because at that point when they arrive in Germany and I don't know where you're from is a widespread phenomenon. 110 00:11:07,320 --> 00:11:11,670 That's an interesting question, but I think it's very complicated and I think it depends on how you approach it. 111 00:11:11,670 --> 00:11:18,720 On the one hand, if you look at urban spaces in Germany, English is becoming the language, 112 00:11:18,720 --> 00:11:23,080 the lingua franca of young urban start-ups and things like that. 113 00:11:23,080 --> 00:11:28,590 So speaking English is a really important tool in Berlin, especially where I'm looking at. 114 00:11:28,590 --> 00:11:35,250 But this also depends on where you're coming from. If you're an American, a white American and you speak English, that's different. 115 00:11:35,250 --> 00:11:42,660 But if you're a Syrian or if you're Iranian or if you're a person of colour, there might be different issues that are facing you. 116 00:11:42,660 --> 00:11:49,830 So I don't really know what to say. But I what I can say is that whether you speak English or not, you have to learn German. 117 00:11:49,830 --> 00:11:53,100 So it's a requirement for everyone unless you're from the EU. 118 00:11:53,100 --> 00:12:00,870 Does that answer your question or are they found in other contexts that actually these immigrants and refugees come with their own multilingualism, 119 00:12:00,870 --> 00:12:06,240 which will include a European language? If it's from Africa? They might know French and other parts of the world. 120 00:12:06,240 --> 00:12:10,140 They know English, but that is not valued when they come to the host country. 121 00:12:10,140 --> 00:12:13,260 They still have to be categorised in a separate group, 122 00:12:13,260 --> 00:12:21,580 which means that they have to integrate on on a different playing field than if you come as, let's say, a privileged. 123 00:12:21,580 --> 00:12:26,910 I know somebody with a degree, let's say from from Europe and North America, 124 00:12:26,910 --> 00:12:35,340 that multilingual isn't just English language skills are valued differently in a kind of economic market point of view. 125 00:12:35,340 --> 00:12:39,300 Yeah, I guess what I was trying to say is that when you ask a question like that, 126 00:12:39,300 --> 00:12:42,480 you have to think about what what kind of belonging we're talking about. 127 00:12:42,480 --> 00:12:49,240 So on a local level and that's why I mentioned sort of multilingualism in Berlin and speaking English that actually has a lot of capital, 128 00:12:49,240 --> 00:12:55,440 that cultural capital, speaking English or speaking French and other European language will mean something if you're living in urban space. 129 00:12:55,440 --> 00:13:02,580 But if you want to become a citizen or you want to be a permanent resident on a national level, speaking those languages isn't necessarily useful. 130 00:13:02,580 --> 00:13:07,860 So there's different forms of movement that we have to consider and different forms of belonging that we have to consider within that question, 131 00:13:07,860 --> 00:13:12,900 because that can be huge variation within a single country, of course, between Britain and Germany. 132 00:13:12,900 --> 00:13:19,200 Yeah. And of course, there's different requirements for different countries and for different regions of the world. 133 00:13:19,200 --> 00:13:24,390 And generally the problem in Germany is that foreign degrees are generally not recognised. 134 00:13:24,390 --> 00:13:29,400 I think it's only within the EU and some other maybe the U.S. I'm not quite sure, actually, 135 00:13:29,400 --> 00:13:34,080 but if you have a fine degree, that won't translate into it and to a degree in Germany. 136 00:13:34,080 --> 00:13:39,070 So these are a lot of hurdles that are facing you on top of it. 137 00:13:39,070 --> 00:13:47,650 Rosemary. So you're looking at another immigration issue in the news, but you say everything's kind of slowly turned his head of the border and again, 138 00:13:47,650 --> 00:13:52,570 be kind of well, whether you can have every opportunity to end up somewhere different. But I think you're opposite again. 139 00:13:52,570 --> 00:13:58,420 Absolutely. And I think one of the things that's become clear in in the conversation we've been having so far is 140 00:13:58,420 --> 00:14:05,080 that in contexts where immigrant populations are people of colour are disadvantaged in some way, 141 00:14:05,080 --> 00:14:13,600 usually economically. These tend to be in Europe, in the US, in the U.K., you have one type of linguistic situation. 142 00:14:13,600 --> 00:14:21,040 You have policy and to a large extent policing going on about the way people speak, about the way immigrants speak. 143 00:14:21,040 --> 00:14:25,030 And a lot of the time those goalposts are removable. 144 00:14:25,030 --> 00:14:27,430 You know, it's very convenient for governments, 145 00:14:27,430 --> 00:14:36,490 native speakers of English in the UK to be the judge of whether an immigrant is proficient in the host language. 146 00:14:36,490 --> 00:14:43,030 And as Nancy said, whether or not they're multilingual in all kinds of other ways is largely ignored. 147 00:14:43,030 --> 00:14:51,670 But I work on Bermuda, and that's an interesting context, because it's a place in it's a post-colonial context and it's a place in the world 148 00:14:51,670 --> 00:14:58,750 where immigrants or a large part of the immigrant community is white and very wealthy. 149 00:14:58,750 --> 00:15:07,120 Bermuda is a tax haven. What you have in Bermuda is you have white, wealthy immigrants who come to work in the financial sector in Bermuda. 150 00:15:07,120 --> 00:15:15,520 And usually they are because of what linguists call a you can't really do scare quotes on the radio, but standard variety. 151 00:15:15,520 --> 00:15:20,710 So you'll have immigrants coming to Bermuda from the U.K., from Canada, from the US, 152 00:15:20,710 --> 00:15:25,490 and now tend to speak of a variety of English that's privileged around the world. 153 00:15:25,490 --> 00:15:30,910 So it makes it easy to get a job, makes it easy to get housing or those kinds of things. 154 00:15:30,910 --> 00:15:37,600 And I research the ways in which expats, as they're called, the Bermuda whitewalls, wealthy expats, 155 00:15:37,600 --> 00:15:44,980 use Bermuda and English, which is a very unusual dialect as a way to try to construct belonging in their new place. 156 00:15:44,980 --> 00:15:52,750 So I'm interested in the ways in which expats in Bermuda perform basically perform black English in Bermuda. 157 00:15:52,750 --> 00:15:59,250 They it kind of speaks for itself. If you if you hear some I'm definitely not going to perform any for you on the radio. 158 00:15:59,250 --> 00:16:07,930 Right. But basically I look at the ways in which these expats appropriate features, 159 00:16:07,930 --> 00:16:13,600 linguistic features of Bermudian English in order to seem authentically Bermudian, 160 00:16:13,600 --> 00:16:22,720 in order to I guess on the surface, in order to try to seem like they belong and assert some kind of authentic Bermudian identity. 161 00:16:22,720 --> 00:16:29,980 But also at the same time is that you've got mockery and racism going on in those linguistic performances, if that makes sense. 162 00:16:29,980 --> 00:16:36,100 Yeah, so it goes both ways. It's maybe on a certain surface a level of conformity, 163 00:16:36,100 --> 00:16:43,330 of appropriation to assimilate to the environment that they find themselves in, but at the same time, something slightly lesser. 164 00:16:43,330 --> 00:16:49,060 I think as linguists it's always important to we learn, he said. 165 00:16:49,060 --> 00:16:58,480 We can't separate culture from language and the context of somebody who speaks a variety that will open all kinds of doors for them in life. 166 00:16:58,480 --> 00:17:02,380 Appropriating features of another dialect is very, 167 00:17:02,380 --> 00:17:09,910 very different from somebody who's moved to Berlin and that their livelihood depends on on the government's 168 00:17:09,910 --> 00:17:17,260 perception of of the language proficiency and so the social context in which the language makes all the difference. 169 00:17:17,260 --> 00:17:26,440 Yeah. So we're also talking about learning how to perform a dialect rather than learning a second language, which in many ways is a lot easier. 170 00:17:26,440 --> 00:17:36,280 It would be difficult for, say, a British expat in Bermuda like me to fully acquire a real Bermudian accent. 171 00:17:36,280 --> 00:17:45,240 But my research has shown that it's quite easy for them to pick up on a few iconic features and reproduce them in a periodic way. 172 00:17:45,240 --> 00:17:49,600 I thing I picked up, so I'm very sorry that we lost nothing. 173 00:17:49,600 --> 00:17:54,610 But this use of appropriation of language from Mochrie reminds me a lot research. 174 00:17:54,610 --> 00:18:02,950 So you're working on language on Israel and Palestine and particular about the use of Hebrew by the Palestinian community. 175 00:18:02,950 --> 00:18:10,090 So the expectation is that these are two monolingual groups and that the language is a use of Palestinians, 176 00:18:10,090 --> 00:18:14,470 Arabic for Israelis, Hebrew index their nationality. 177 00:18:14,470 --> 00:18:19,450 And because of the conflict is this equation is exacerbated and made very salient. 178 00:18:19,450 --> 00:18:23,740 But then there's also, apart from the conflicts, also points of contact. 179 00:18:23,740 --> 00:18:32,830 And what I was looking at was a mass phenomenon of migrant workers, of Palestinian manual labourers who go to Israel to work and then come back home. 180 00:18:32,830 --> 00:18:38,890 And they've acquired Hebrew in the process or some Hebrew. I mean, how many people are we talking roughly? 181 00:18:38,890 --> 00:18:43,410 So before before the second intifada, so before the year 2000, 182 00:18:43,410 --> 00:18:50,430 it was estimated that about one hundred and eighteen thousand Palestinian workers from the West Bank. 183 00:18:50,430 --> 00:18:55,590 So this is out of a population of about two point two million. 184 00:18:55,590 --> 00:18:58,440 So it was a large proportion has always been. 185 00:18:58,440 --> 00:19:03,510 So, for instance, in the West Bank, it was 35 percent of the labour force was working inside Israel for many years. 186 00:19:03,510 --> 00:19:08,190 Now it's greatly reduced due to due to movement restrictions. 187 00:19:08,190 --> 00:19:19,560 So now it's about 16 to 18 percent of the workforce, predominantly male and predominantly in construction and and cleaning jobs for manual labourers. 188 00:19:19,560 --> 00:19:25,890 And so these people learn some kind of what I thought would be functional basic Hebrew in order to have 189 00:19:25,890 --> 00:19:31,950 these jobs and access this economy and also to get through the checkpoints in order to access the economy. 190 00:19:31,950 --> 00:19:35,580 So they'd have to also deal with some kind of military administration. 191 00:19:35,580 --> 00:19:44,700 So that I thought that it would be precisely this kind of functional use that we expect somehow from migrants in order to get by. 192 00:19:44,700 --> 00:19:53,860 And then I was going out to document this. And then what I found was something you allude to, that they have many different uses for Hebrew. 193 00:19:53,860 --> 00:20:04,970 And some of them, in fact, were to poke fun at its positions of authority or positions of power, so they would be, for instance. 194 00:20:04,970 --> 00:20:15,640 So there was one woman who was criticising. She was criticising a man she knew for being like thinking he's just, you know, just the best. 195 00:20:15,640 --> 00:20:19,870 He's the big cheese in his little community. And he's such a big head. 196 00:20:19,870 --> 00:20:24,190 And he's not only married, one woman is married to women. Can you imagine that? 197 00:20:24,190 --> 00:20:32,680 And he's a university professor. And the word she she called him, he thinks he's he's he's the big boss and the big boss. 198 00:20:32,680 --> 00:20:38,110 She used Hebrew for in it. In Hebrew, in Israeli, Hebrew. 199 00:20:38,110 --> 00:20:46,060 That word just means the boss, the director. And when Palestinians use it, it means the guy who thinks he's the big boss. 200 00:20:46,060 --> 00:20:51,640 So it's got that parodic added sarcasm just by virtue of using Hebrew. 201 00:20:51,640 --> 00:20:58,240 And so this there are these political connotations which obviously link the way people use language then to the, 202 00:20:58,240 --> 00:21:03,400 you know, the socio economic and political context and interesting and surprising ways. 203 00:21:03,400 --> 00:21:08,780 And and obviously, this mockery was one of them. Yes. In your case, it's a mockery of authority. 204 00:21:08,780 --> 00:21:16,970 Yes. Not necessarily Israeli, but by association. She drew Hebrew, gets associated with that quote is from from Rosemary's. 205 00:21:16,970 --> 00:21:24,070 It's the reverse. It's I would say what my white appropriators of Bermudian English are doing is mocking Raith. 206 00:21:24,070 --> 00:21:29,290 There are all sorts of clues in the content of their performances and in things like the voice 207 00:21:29,290 --> 00:21:34,590 quality of their performances that show that they're not just mocking a kind of generic Bermudian. 208 00:21:34,590 --> 00:21:38,860 That very definitely is a racial element to these performances. 209 00:21:38,860 --> 00:21:41,980 But I think what what Nancy and I have in common, in fact, 210 00:21:41,980 --> 00:21:49,210 all of us in our examinations of of language in this context is that we see it as sociolinguist now 211 00:21:49,210 --> 00:21:56,230 do as we see language as a resource rather than as something that naturally happens to all of us. 212 00:21:56,230 --> 00:22:02,590 We see speakers as agents who make use of language in order to construct identity. 213 00:22:02,590 --> 00:22:08,450 You're you that's something that you. I agree with that. Yeah. 214 00:22:08,450 --> 00:22:16,300 Maybe I paused earlier. We should go into a few more of the specifics of actually how the research is collected in the field. 215 00:22:16,300 --> 00:22:22,090 I know you personally. You went out to Bermuda for several months and went around with a microphone recording people. 216 00:22:22,090 --> 00:22:27,940 Yes. It's a very nice place to do fieldwork. Well, someone's got to do it yet. 217 00:22:27,940 --> 00:22:37,870 So the classic way of collecting fieldwork for sociolinguist and it's very different for linguistic apologists and depending on your subdiscipline. 218 00:22:37,870 --> 00:22:43,540 But what I did was the classic sociolinguistic interview with a twist. 219 00:22:43,540 --> 00:22:52,960 So the classic sociolinguistic interview is a way of collecting a large amount of high quality speech data in a relatively short amount of time. 220 00:22:52,960 --> 00:22:56,800 So you sit down with a speaker, you try to make them comfortable. 221 00:22:56,800 --> 00:23:04,990 You have a long conversation about their life, their views on anything, really anything to get them speaking against Geekcorps naturally, 222 00:23:04,990 --> 00:23:10,010 because, of course, if people know they're being listened to, they may well change the way that they speak. 223 00:23:10,010 --> 00:23:13,630 So the aim is to have a comfortable, long conversation. 224 00:23:13,630 --> 00:23:17,350 And then depending on which linguistic variables you're interested in, 225 00:23:17,350 --> 00:23:26,590 you may include a reading task or a word list or something for somebody to read so that you can go away and analyse those linguistic variables. 226 00:23:26,590 --> 00:23:33,910 What I found, because I'm interested in this linguistic performance of race of black Bermudian English, 227 00:23:33,910 --> 00:23:41,470 often I didn't need to prompt people to do this because as a white Bermudian interviewer, they came out on their own. 228 00:23:41,470 --> 00:23:48,850 There was an assumption that I was complicit in these strategies of mocking black comedians so often I didn't even have to ask. 229 00:23:48,850 --> 00:23:56,950 But one thing I did do in my interviews was ask speakers, what does a comedian English accent sound like and can you do a bit? 230 00:23:56,950 --> 00:24:03,430 And these really rather problematic performances would flow out. 231 00:24:03,430 --> 00:24:06,400 And so you felt that because of being the person you were, 232 00:24:06,400 --> 00:24:14,590 you could get a sense just by doing one on one interview of how what immigrants might speak to each other, because I guess you all were. 233 00:24:14,590 --> 00:24:20,530 I guess so. I mean that I'm looking at older white Bermudian men so that there's an age difference 234 00:24:20,530 --> 00:24:23,980 and there's a gender difference between me and the people I'm interviewing. 235 00:24:23,980 --> 00:24:29,620 But the type of linguistic performances I'm interested in do seem to take place only in white spaces. 236 00:24:29,620 --> 00:24:33,610 So I'm talking about a very theatrical, um, we all do it. 237 00:24:33,610 --> 00:24:39,640 And I think it might be interesting to have a conversation generally about when people mock an accent. 238 00:24:39,640 --> 00:24:40,750 It happens all the time. 239 00:24:40,750 --> 00:24:51,040 Um, actually, I was I was reading an article in a book that's recently been published by Nick Shukla and one of the writers in that kookier. 240 00:24:51,040 --> 00:24:58,230 And it talks about I don't know if. Listeners will know the YouTube sensation, one pound fish. 241 00:24:58,230 --> 00:25:08,060 I think they made it was it was a hit. It was a target. And it's I think it's a good example of how easy it is to miss that. 242 00:25:08,060 --> 00:25:18,140 Linguistic mockery can be incredibly offensive. The humour of that piece basically rests on somebody living in the UK, not having a British accent. 243 00:25:18,140 --> 00:25:27,200 And the Yates says there's something in the article like this is a chart hit that the success rests on mocking the dialect of my grandfather. 244 00:25:27,200 --> 00:25:30,390 Know, it's really not that funny. 245 00:25:30,390 --> 00:25:38,470 I've lost my thread a bit now that you're asking about what I was saying, so I just can continue his theme of discussing methods and research. 246 00:25:38,470 --> 00:25:43,000 So naturally, you but you said you'd be going after Israel and Palestine for many years. 247 00:25:43,000 --> 00:25:51,320 And what this particular field work to do that the research book on how long did that take you to? 248 00:25:51,320 --> 00:25:54,500 So I was in the field on that occasion for nine months, 249 00:25:54,500 --> 00:26:01,970 the way it works is I tried to then make a network of Connexions in refugee camps because that's where the 250 00:26:01,970 --> 00:26:07,280 highest proportion of these manual labourers live due to the specific conditions in the refugee camps, 251 00:26:07,280 --> 00:26:12,050 in Palestinian refugee camps, in the in the West Bank. 252 00:26:12,050 --> 00:26:19,590 So what you do then is you try to get to know people gradually, usually I'd offer to help with, let's say, 253 00:26:19,590 --> 00:26:28,790 NGO funding applications for which they'd need maybe somebody who speaks English and get to know people a bit better and through introductions. 254 00:26:28,790 --> 00:26:40,280 That way, I'd start off by talking about work in Israel, which I had identified as the greatest source of Hebrew acquisition for these Palestinians. 255 00:26:40,280 --> 00:26:46,160 And from that. Somehow, gradually, you'd have to obviously, 256 00:26:46,160 --> 00:26:53,030 I couldn't mention directly that what I was hoping for was that they would discuss the Hebrew or show me how they use the Hebrew, 257 00:26:53,030 --> 00:26:55,460 because then that makes people very self-conscious. 258 00:26:55,460 --> 00:27:03,140 And so what I got in the in the research then was in these interviews where I'd ask them about their life experience really in kind 259 00:27:03,140 --> 00:27:13,700 of general terms and get what Hebrew is appropriate for them to mention to a foreign researcher who comes to their refugee camp. 260 00:27:13,700 --> 00:27:17,990 And so, you know, maybe knows something about the conditions, 261 00:27:17,990 --> 00:27:26,330 but can ask very seemingly material basic questions about so what tools do you use in your in your daily work 262 00:27:26,330 --> 00:27:33,470 or how do you actually get to your workplace in the morning and where do you get your permit to access? 263 00:27:33,470 --> 00:27:38,750 So I'd ask some kind of questions which would then lead to a narrative about their daily life, 264 00:27:38,750 --> 00:27:46,040 hoping then that some of the terminology and some of the most interesting data you'd get would be after a few months of living with these 265 00:27:46,040 --> 00:27:54,620 people and you get invited to a communal dinner and you get to witness some conversations between the people when they're more at ease. 266 00:27:54,620 --> 00:28:03,500 And and then you get out a little ethnographic radar and try to remember as much as possible to take notes afterwards. 267 00:28:03,500 --> 00:28:11,810 So I guess it's a combination then of participant observations and and interviews whereby the function of the interview is not only to gather data, 268 00:28:11,810 --> 00:28:21,290 then it is also to make yourself known and your kind of interests known in the community, which is a very, very close knit community. 269 00:28:21,290 --> 00:28:28,370 So the word spreads quite fast and make yourself a bit more approachable and not ingratiate yourself, 270 00:28:28,370 --> 00:28:40,790 but make it possible then for other sorts of situations to come about like like dinner time or outings to the shopping centre. 271 00:28:40,790 --> 00:28:48,470 So sometimes it's also important to notice that your participants have certain expectations from you as a 272 00:28:48,470 --> 00:28:55,730 researcher and from they kind of think about you as a person and being interested in this in one particular thing. 273 00:28:55,730 --> 00:29:02,790 And I'm thinking about my study where I was interested in multiplicity of voices and multiplicity of experiences of life. 274 00:29:02,790 --> 00:29:06,080 So I was I've observed that during my participant observations, 275 00:29:06,080 --> 00:29:10,880 I observed that there were people who were developing new speaking styles and that they existed. 276 00:29:10,880 --> 00:29:15,950 But then I started doing my fieldwork and at the beginning I thought I would use this snowball technique. 277 00:29:15,950 --> 00:29:24,400 So you ask the person to give you contact details to a person who could meet your criteria and then you go and interview their friends. 278 00:29:24,400 --> 00:29:26,960 So a friend of a friend technique, of course, 279 00:29:26,960 --> 00:29:34,820 but then was a bit useless for me simply because because of the fact that there was tension in my community. 280 00:29:34,820 --> 00:29:42,980 So people who were speaking in new ways were perceived as unreal and weird people by people who are more nationally oriented. 281 00:29:42,980 --> 00:29:46,850 And when I asked them to give me contact details to other people, 282 00:29:46,850 --> 00:29:52,790 to other participants in a nationally oriented individuals would be like, oh, I know a good person for you study. 283 00:29:52,790 --> 00:29:56,300 And then they would give me contact eaters to people who are like them. 284 00:29:56,300 --> 00:30:04,820 And at some point I was just stuck with all the like like in a circle of friends who were very similar and had very similar life stories. 285 00:30:04,820 --> 00:30:07,720 And that was interesting on its own. 286 00:30:07,720 --> 00:30:17,570 It's fascinating, but I had to develop other ways to get to the people who are actually also part of this community who existed, 287 00:30:17,570 --> 00:30:24,080 but who were not easily approachable in a way because the other people didn't want me to interview them. 288 00:30:24,080 --> 00:30:29,000 They were like, oh, no, you should not talk to them. They're not alone. 289 00:30:29,000 --> 00:30:32,840 So then you have to find your other ways to get to them, 290 00:30:32,840 --> 00:30:38,660 which is also quite I think that shows you that research in general when you're 291 00:30:38,660 --> 00:30:43,490 conducting research and social sciences can be skewed because of your very methods. 292 00:30:43,490 --> 00:30:51,620 So sometimes researchers may not be aware of like all the discourses that there are just because they use certain methods. 293 00:30:51,620 --> 00:30:57,080 So you use this friend of a friend technique and then you're like you have just one story in a way, right? 294 00:30:57,080 --> 00:31:07,790 Yeah. It's an illusion that you have multiple channels and you can end up making very big claims, but it may not be the full picture. 295 00:31:07,790 --> 00:31:13,700 That's what I'm trying to say. Well, I didn't have the very divide that your research suggests might exist. 296 00:31:13,700 --> 00:31:21,980 Was what was making it hard for you in the first place to. Yeah. Find the individual to express that, because also, like I said during my interviews, 297 00:31:21,980 --> 00:31:29,060 I would talk with those people about other members of the Polish transnational community who would meet my criteria. 298 00:31:29,060 --> 00:31:30,680 And they often said, yes, 299 00:31:30,680 --> 00:31:37,220 there are those people who speak in new ways and they would reflect the language you use and they would make comments about them. 300 00:31:37,220 --> 00:31:43,360 But then when I asked them about contact details through these people, they were like, no, we're no longer friends. 301 00:31:43,360 --> 00:31:51,370 It's difficult, but, you know, you you have to work harder to get to those people actually and to make them interested, 302 00:31:51,370 --> 00:31:56,680 and they have other reasons to participate. So you can see that some people, for instance, in my case, 303 00:31:56,680 --> 00:32:04,390 some people participated because they wanted to participate because they were so naturally oriented, 304 00:32:04,390 --> 00:32:11,500 interested in politics, and they felt obliged to share their stories because of the very topic of my research. 305 00:32:11,500 --> 00:32:16,000 And then there were people who were like those cosmopolitan speakers, participated for other reasons. 306 00:32:16,000 --> 00:32:19,180 So they said, oh, I really value education, I want to help you. 307 00:32:19,180 --> 00:32:26,740 And that is that you can see that they're guided by different values, I guess a different reason. 308 00:32:26,740 --> 00:32:32,770 How are you going about finding migrants and refugees in the German immigration system to talk to you? 309 00:32:32,770 --> 00:32:37,720 Are you going in by the authorities? Are you going by a back door? 310 00:32:37,720 --> 00:32:40,460 So I'm just designing my methodology at the moment. 311 00:32:40,460 --> 00:32:46,600 I go into the preparing to go into the field and a year from now, so I'm still in the early stages. 312 00:32:46,600 --> 00:32:51,460 That being said, I have concentrated my master's research on the same topic. 313 00:32:51,460 --> 00:32:58,840 So in my master's, I got in touch with several language instructors at these government funded schools, 314 00:32:58,840 --> 00:33:04,540 and I conducted some structured interviews with them to understand their perspective on the system. 315 00:33:04,540 --> 00:33:11,510 And I've stayed in touch with them. And they're going to try to help me get access to the schools as a volunteer. 316 00:33:11,510 --> 00:33:17,180 The challenges I'm going to be facing is getting approval from from the schools, 317 00:33:17,180 --> 00:33:23,690 I might have to get approval from the federal Office of Migration and Refugees because they fund these courses. 318 00:33:23,690 --> 00:33:30,580 And I might it'll be challenging to actually get fully informed consent of everyone in these classrooms if I'm going to be doing recording. 319 00:33:30,580 --> 00:33:34,880 So I have a lot of methodological details to tease apart. 320 00:33:34,880 --> 00:33:43,280 But in general, my methods will be very similar to Nancy's so very long field work between a year and a year and a half in these schools, 321 00:33:43,280 --> 00:33:49,880 spending as much time as possible with migrants and refugees to develop a relationship so I can spend time with them outside of school, 322 00:33:49,880 --> 00:33:58,250 try to understand their journey more clearly, but also mixed in with interviews so that I can get more pointed questions across. 323 00:33:58,250 --> 00:34:03,950 Fascinating for me as an outsider. Well, that sounds exactly what anthropologists would do, 324 00:34:03,950 --> 00:34:09,020 but it is the mixture of the two disciplines you talk about that you can't really separate the two from each other. 325 00:34:09,020 --> 00:34:18,200 Well, I think I have an interesting education. Instead of studying linguistic anthropology at a US institution where that's much more established, 326 00:34:18,200 --> 00:34:24,290 I studied linguistics in my undergrad and in my MFL and then I moved into the anthropology department. 327 00:34:24,290 --> 00:34:32,930 So I'm really taking the two methods and bringing them together rather than the streamlined approach of actually studying the field. 328 00:34:32,930 --> 00:34:40,520 I mean, one of the main aims of the conference that we were organising at the moment is to promote linguistic anthropology as a discipline. 329 00:34:40,520 --> 00:34:44,090 Well, let's discuss more about this conference in the final 10 minutes or so. 330 00:34:44,090 --> 00:34:47,760 So this is happening at the end of March, just as a back story. 331 00:34:47,760 --> 00:34:55,970 This is our second conference. We ran one at the beginning of this year in April, and it was originally Nancy Canga. 332 00:34:55,970 --> 00:35:02,060 And I was another colleague who was no longer on our team. And this year we have a chance to work with Rosie. 333 00:35:02,060 --> 00:35:07,070 And our idea basically was that our research wasn't really getting enough platforms in 334 00:35:07,070 --> 00:35:13,400 the UK and we wanted to provide one for people in our field to have a bigger discussion, 335 00:35:13,400 --> 00:35:17,210 be able to have a discussion about these topics that are really not being covered enough, 336 00:35:17,210 --> 00:35:23,900 in our opinion, in European academia, not to do feel the subject is much bigger than in the US. 337 00:35:23,900 --> 00:35:28,850 I think it is a bit bigger in the US, but the more platforms, the better. 338 00:35:28,850 --> 00:35:33,920 I guess in general in Europe, it's not there. It's probably growing. 339 00:35:33,920 --> 00:35:38,900 It's growing. There is interest, you can tell. And that's what we kind of saw last year, 340 00:35:38,900 --> 00:35:44,000 that we had a lot of people interested in the conference and we got a lot of abstracts all 341 00:35:44,000 --> 00:35:48,380 over the world and in many people participated in the conferences auditorium as well. 342 00:35:48,380 --> 00:35:57,350 So we're hoping that we were like provoking further discussion on those topics and that we can make it more established. 343 00:35:57,350 --> 00:36:01,310 It's already established in a way like more in Europe. 344 00:36:01,310 --> 00:36:10,310 We've inherited knowledge from our disciplines which are to do with anthropology and part of the European history of colonial expeditions, 345 00:36:10,310 --> 00:36:22,970 et cetera, that we have acquired this this baggage of, especially in area studies whereby we've acquired a lot of knowledge about the world, 346 00:36:22,970 --> 00:36:32,030 but in a way connected to European power that now we are still grappling with and trying to, yeah, 347 00:36:32,030 --> 00:36:38,090 really challenge our disciplines in light of different perspectives maybe from around the world. 348 00:36:38,090 --> 00:36:47,240 But Europe does have a tradition of knowing a lot about language and then and also about anthropology is just making it into a modern discipline that 349 00:36:47,240 --> 00:36:59,870 would reflect maybe some of the new ways of looking at identity and interaction and constructed categories like what we are going to try and look at, 350 00:36:59,870 --> 00:37:08,480 which is immigration and national identity, and then how these are actually fluid and challenged and contested and also 351 00:37:08,480 --> 00:37:15,260 replicated and and used to include and exclude certain categories of persons. 352 00:37:15,260 --> 00:37:23,870 So I don't as the European and the American US I mean, North American experiences are slightly different due to our history, 353 00:37:23,870 --> 00:37:31,370 but we do have a lot of very, very rich scholarship over the centuries from various studies. 354 00:37:31,370 --> 00:37:39,990 And I think there are actually many people in Europe who do similar things to what linguistic anthropologists in the US would do, 355 00:37:39,990 --> 00:37:46,730 where they've called differently many times. And we have those multiple names for the same. 356 00:37:46,730 --> 00:37:53,420 So maybe that's where we are coming from and we wanted to bring them all together. 357 00:37:53,420 --> 00:37:57,020 I mean, would you say there is any useful distinction that can be made between 358 00:37:57,020 --> 00:38:01,460 sociolinguistics linguistic anthropology or are they just two sides of the same coin? 359 00:38:01,460 --> 00:38:10,040 I think there is a there is a significant difference, but they are very, very related fields with the risk of being attacked by my colleagues. 360 00:38:10,040 --> 00:38:17,020 I would say that. And general sociolinguistics is interested in how social factors affect languages. 361 00:38:17,020 --> 00:38:20,080 So if you think about traditional variation and studies and things like that. 362 00:38:20,080 --> 00:38:24,760 So how do things like gender and religion and ethnicity, anything like that, play into the language we use? 363 00:38:24,760 --> 00:38:32,020 Whereas I think linguistic anthropologists start from the premise that language is social practise already. 364 00:38:32,020 --> 00:38:37,480 So it's it's always an interaction with all of these all these factors. 365 00:38:37,480 --> 00:38:41,290 So I think there's a slight chance I might get moving in the same direction that these 366 00:38:41,290 --> 00:38:46,090 disciplines and there are other related disciplines like philosophy of language. 367 00:38:46,090 --> 00:38:52,930 And we I mean, we wouldn't monitor these borders very, very carefully. 368 00:38:52,930 --> 00:39:00,400 Maybe would we'd see it more as an project of bringing what is necessarily a complex 369 00:39:00,400 --> 00:39:05,900 way of looking at language and society and bringing all these themes together. 370 00:39:05,900 --> 00:39:11,380 But I think the distinction would which we would make is that these categories, 371 00:39:11,380 --> 00:39:17,380 these social categories, we would not say that they are distinct and then related to language. 372 00:39:17,380 --> 00:39:21,160 What we see is that they are constitutive of each other. 373 00:39:21,160 --> 00:39:28,450 And what does what does unite all of our approaches, I think, would be definitely the emphasis on field work. 374 00:39:28,450 --> 00:39:38,290 So as opposed to, let's say, theoretical linguists, we do require that anybody who participates has been in the field, recorded how people speak, 375 00:39:38,290 --> 00:39:48,940 and then try to both familiarise themselves with how the speakers see their own categories in their place in society and use language to 376 00:39:48,940 --> 00:40:00,040 maybe perform that in certain ways that are relevant to this immediate context and then also how everybody else receives that performance. 377 00:40:00,040 --> 00:40:05,650 So we are we are definitely looking at the performance. So we want that material from the field. 378 00:40:05,650 --> 00:40:09,610 We want that data, which we would call them the linguistic data. 379 00:40:09,610 --> 00:40:19,630 We don't we we cannot accept things that are, let's say, you know, found in a laboratory or in the imagination of a specific linguist. 380 00:40:19,630 --> 00:40:27,490 I think I think that where sociolinguistics where sociolinguistics has moved into what we call its third wave. 381 00:40:27,490 --> 00:40:34,330 It's where it has drawn on anthropology. It's where it has borrowed concepts around topology and become more open to anthropology. 382 00:40:34,330 --> 00:40:37,480 So the boundaries are fluid. And Nancy's right. 383 00:40:37,480 --> 00:40:45,420 We wouldn't want to monitor them. And that's why we want to bring them together in this process of things and on. 384 00:40:45,420 --> 00:40:52,150 But there's a lot more about linguistics and popular culture with this film Arrival, which you feel is terribly old fashioned. 385 00:40:52,150 --> 00:40:57,070 A single disappear wolf hypothesis is not where the field is moving at the moment. 386 00:40:57,070 --> 00:41:03,610 No. So this is a pure hypothesis is a little bit of an outdated theory in linguistics. 387 00:41:03,610 --> 00:41:11,350 It proposes that the structure and content of your language affects the way that you think and see the world. 388 00:41:11,350 --> 00:41:18,790 So the classic example is if you're from a cold country, you may have several more words for white and for snow. 389 00:41:18,790 --> 00:41:24,400 Then if not, then you would have twenty three words for snow. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of thing. 390 00:41:24,400 --> 00:41:26,110 So in arrival, 391 00:41:26,110 --> 00:41:39,220 the aliens that Amy Adams playing a linguistics professor has to learn the language of and translate have something called nonlinear syntax. 392 00:41:39,220 --> 00:41:46,420 And what that means in the film is that the handwriting or their orthographic 393 00:41:46,420 --> 00:41:53,440 system has lots of circular symbols that represent entire phrases rather than, 394 00:41:53,440 --> 00:42:03,460 say, an alphabet like we might have in English. And the hypothesis in the film is very sort of Pavlovian in that this circular syntactic 395 00:42:03,460 --> 00:42:08,050 orthographic system means that the aliens can see into the future and into the past, 396 00:42:08,050 --> 00:42:13,860 and which, when Amy Adams learnt the language, means that she becomes all knowing. 397 00:42:13,860 --> 00:42:19,180 So having attended this film with a bunch of linguists, we went away and had a laugh about it. 398 00:42:19,180 --> 00:42:26,830 But I think probably the most accurate thing about the film was the representation of the linguistic professor's office, 399 00:42:26,830 --> 00:42:34,060 which looked very like a linguistics office. It left reality, but yeah. 400 00:42:34,060 --> 00:42:38,500 Well, I hope you forgive me for that slightly less, but thank you very much for listening. 401 00:42:38,500 --> 00:42:40,947 Join us next week on In Our Spare Time.