1 Migration as Stunde Null
Malte Kleinschmidt: I’m very happy to have you both here today for the conversation.
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: Radhika, can you expand on what you have already brought up in your chapter (in this volume) about the Stunde Null [zero hour] concept and the German case? I wondered, how much do you think what you are looking at is specific to Germany, and how much do you think is more widely relevant? In other words, what do you think we can learn from looking at the German case? As a follow-up question linked to this, what do you think the role of mono-culturalism is here?
Radhika Natarajan: Thank you so much for the questions. Stunde Null, zero hour, as it were, is a concept that comes from military jargon and is perhaps a bit in-your-face for the German audience. But I have been thinking about the concept and how it relates to an understanding of migration as tabula rasa and immigrants as bereft of speech [sprachlos], perhaps even voiceless [stimmlos] (cf. Blommaert 2001; Natarajan 2016a, p. 269). My research is about refugee women from Sri Lanka and how they negotiate languages in Germany. They are Tamil-speaking women of different age groups from the island country where a civil war was waged for about three decades. The apparent bone of contention was language between the minority Tamil and the majority Sinhalese, which has led to a kind of linguistic nationalism ( de Votta 2004). In my ethnographic research coupled with participant observation, I have interviewed people who arrived at different stages of the war, in the 1980s, the 1990s and the first decade of this century. They were confronted with various, ever-changing regulations—opportunities and restrictions—which partly determined their mode of entry, either with tourist visas, as asylum seekers or via family migration.
Now, depending on who you ask, the civil war is supposed to have begun either in 1978 or 1983 (Wickramasinghe 2014). I started with interviews for my case studies around 2008 and they went on till 2011, some even till 2013. When my research project commenced, it was not clear that there was ever going to be a ceasefire, in the sense that it was 30 years of what had been happening with no end in sight. And then suddenly, the war ended. In 2009. That’s when I was able to conduct a major set of interviews. Open biographical narrative interviews with Tamil-speaking women from Sri Lanka who had fled as adults, in a language of their choice, i.e. Tamil, English and/or German. Tamil, by the way, is a language spoken both in Sri Lanka and in India where I come from, both countries erstwhile British colonies.
I also had access to those who had arrived as children and teenagers, attended school, gained vocational training or higher education here in Germany and now, as young adults, were willing to share their experiences. I believe the change in the political scenario created a need, however temporary, to narrate, share and make sense, or at least try to make sense, of what was happening. The end of every war purportedly heralds a new beginning. It could be seen as a new ‘zero hour’, as though a wilful erasure of time and a reset with a stopwatch could help deal with and wrap up the past quickly. Except, I believe, it merely camouflages the wounds briefly by covering and leaving them to fester instead of healing, treating them and actually dealing with unreconciled and possibly irreconcilable issues.
My interest was in the concept of ‘language’ and that was one of the major aspects they spoke about. I come from the field of German Studies and German as, now here I need to pause, and add German as ‘whatever’. It is open to debate: German as a second language, foreign language, additional language, the dominant language, the first language. For instance, why is German not considered the first language for all those who are brought up here, irrespective of the family languages, and who speak German as their dominant language? ‘Language’ is apparently used as a generic term, but more often than not ‘language’ in the German context is equated solely with German, the knowledge of this particular language, and that too, written and spoken in a particular fashion. The questions that ensue are, what is then the role of multilingualism here and how this plays out. We’ll come to that in a while.
Our enquiry and questions as researchers are shaped by the methodological tradition in which we find ourselves, our training and, of course, by our unconscious beliefs and implicit bias. In the context of my research, I found myself therefore wondering about migrants, and how it is very often imagined that their life begins somehow as a kind of tabula rasa, a clean slate or a blank slate, as the case may be, in the new homeland. As if they did not have any life or significant experiences before they migrated. Exiles, immigrants, refugees—these are merely variations and connotations of mobility, legality and temporariness. The opening question in an interview with an immigrant is often: How is your life here? One doesn’t always start with how your life was there. And immigrants too, frame their narrative in this fashion and start talking about themselves as if they really started out here, being and becoming people and subjects in Germany. Instead, you can take a step back, reflect and say, ‘Do tell me about your whole life’. Especially in the German context, you have the empirical research tradition of Fritz Schütze (1983) and Gabriele Rosenthal (1995), where you consider the whole life history to be relevant, not just when you started as an immigrant or a refugee. Then they come up with entirely different facets.
My focus, as I said, was on language and its role in dealing with everyday life [Alltagsbewältigung]. It then dawns on you that the refugee women I have interviewed know and have had access to so much linguistic variation in terms of languages and dialects earlier; this also reflects complex social stratification and power relations. Tamil is a diglossic language, meaning that the written language is quite different from the spoken variant, further divided by class locations, gender and caste entrenchments as well as regional and national affiliations (cf. Natarajan 2016b). And when these Tamil refugee women arrive in Germany, their whole life, especially if you just focus on this aspect of languages, is framed in terms of how much German do they speak. The emphasis is on displaying the willingness to learn quickly, the subtext being: shove aside and bury everything else, in terms of languages and experience. And of course, no matter how quickly and how well you might manage to speak German, this would never be considered sufficient. In my paper on voluntary work done by and the agency of Sri Lankan Tamil refugee women, I have chosen the term ‘biographical baggage’ to capture this moment (cf. Natarajan 2013). This encompasses the burden of the past, their ‘baggage’, but also the women’s abilities, ‘the biographical capital’ (Lutz 2000), which is an inextricable part of them. This is sometimes not taken seriously and is treated as if the past and the present can be compartmentalised and neatly severed. In another paper, I have reflected upon how voluntary work, trauma and political activism can be inter-generational in nature, inherited and bequeathed in a diaspora context (cf. Natarajan 2017).
Now, to come to the idea of the zero hour and the concept of a clean slate. My interest in these vivid pictorial terms is not that of a historian or a political scientist but as a student of language and the underestimated power and reach of language. These terms offer metaphorical and thereby real and consequential possibilities of starting anew, dealing with the present by distancing oneself from the past, to some extent even negating, not remembering and intentionally forgetting the past. This is indeed fraught with new tribulations, yet filled with the prospect of hope and thereby riddled with contradictions. The interplay between the individual and the societal level of memory, negotiation, mobility and stagnation, I find, is of relevance and could be promising for acquiring a better understanding. Now, living and communicative memory spans about three to four generations, around 80 to 100 years (cf. Assmann 2011). In the German context, Stunde Null, this temporal military concept has been used very effectively to characterise the ruins, a spatial reference captured in numerous photographs and films, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It epitomises for me the contradiction between the means to deal with the gory past and come to terms with an uncertain present [Vergangenheitsbewältigung]. Nonetheless, it affords an effective denial of the enormity of the crimes, thus donning the garb of the victim while violently shrugging away guilt and unpleasant, even untenable memories (cf. Adorno 2020). It is like dealing with the past to manage the present without, however, confronting it head-on.
So, we have this ingenuous idea of creating artificial discontinuities. Stunde Null, the zero hour, is deployed, after all, as a means of distancing oneself from and severing these twelve years of the National Socialist regime from 1933 to 1945 from history and from the idea of the German nation state. What then, one might rightly enquire, marks the continuity? One of the main continuities in the post-war West German context is the concept of language, meaning Hochdeutsch or standard German, which Anja Stukenbrock (2005) characterises as linguistic nationalism with a long history to fall back on. According to the education historian, Marianne Krüger-Potratz (2000), the introduction of compulsory school education in the Prussian state for most children, with its emphasis on the teaching of German as the subject and teaching in German as the medium, laid the foundation of the nation state in the 19th century. The constitution of the nation state in 1871 resulted in the consolidation of the German language. And thus ‘language’ marks an important continuity. As I mentioned earlier, it is used as a generic term but nearly always stands for German in the context of Germany.
This is one of the frameworks I have addressed in the paper in this volume. I’d like to quickly summarise the second framework too. It is the idea of how external structures, laws and regulations determine life decisions, mobility corridors, dominant narratives and negotiation by individuals. Among many possible references, I have identified three such moments which are intricately enmeshed with, initially wilfully ignoring and later lopsidedly acknowledging languages: the bilateral labour recruitment agreements [Anwerbeabkommen] starting with Italy in 1955 and ending with the former Yugoslavia in 1968, the change in the laws of naturalisation in 2000 [Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht] and the immigration law in 2005 [Zuwanderungsgesetz].
While the labour recruitment in former West Germany started in the 1950s on a rotational basis with men and women from Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, South Korea, Portugal, Tunisia and Yugoslavia, it took half a century to come to the point of passing an immigration law, albeit with the caveat of restricting migration (cf. Natarajan 2019, 2021, pp. 4). What, pray, is the role of multilingualism and the German language in this period? For decades, there was no coherent policy in place and no structural support was offered to adults and immigrants to learn German. It is only this century, after a new immigration policy took shape, whatever its limitations may be, that the issue of German language has been addressed and been made available from 2007 onwards in so-called language and orientation courses for new immigrants, known in common parlance as ‘integration’ courses. The bone of contention here being that initially only new immigrants were catered to, which then shifted and expanded due to a huge demand by long-term residents who have never had access to these kinds of courses, despite it being their long-standing demand (cf. Hentges et al. 2010). Well, so it takes fifty years to come to the second point, which partly answers your question of mono- and multi-culturalism if thought of in terms of the bias of monolingualism and the reality of multilingualism.
After the Red–Green regime came to power in 1998, there was a paradigm shift and a change in the laws of naturalisation, on how to become a citizen of Germany. The new law in 2000 marked a shift from the exclusivist principle of blood and descent, jus sanguinis, to a more inclusive principle of territory and birthplace, jus soli. If you are born in Germany, on German soil, as it were, whether your parents and grandparents are Germans or not, irrespective of their citizenship, you have the right to become a German citizen.1 This marks a paradigm shift and signals an important step towards recognition and rights (cf. Hamburger et al. 2005). After decades of being addressed as ‘foreigners’ irrespective of their place of birth and schooling in Germany, children of erstwhile labour migrants and refugees who are born in Germany can for the first time become German citizens. In educational research, there seems to have been a need, nonetheless, to coin a new term, ‘background of migration’ [Migrationshintergrund], to distinguish and mark these new Germans who can no longer be called ‘foreigners’. With the so-called PISA-shock in the early 2000s, you can observe a new narrative emerging. First, you have a reframing by blaming those who are marked and identified as having a ‘migration background’ and who, as a corollary, do not speak German like ‘Germans’ despite officially being German citizens. They are marked as the reason ‘our’ education results are not as good as they should be. But then, in this context, suddenly, the new narrative tells us that multilingualism is supposed to be a resource. It was always there, unacknowledged, scorned and looked down upon. But suddenly now, the very same multilingualism is being framed as a ‘resource’.
And now my question as an academic is where this new recognition for multilingualism comes from and what it means. What is the reason for this volte-face? I would like to know how much this new take on matters is just meant for people to learn German and not to actually do anything about the other languages to which they have access. For these first fifty years, nobody talks about so-called multilingualism. People—adults and children—were of course multilingual with various levels of fluency and proficiency. They could speak their family language and other languages, and they were also learning, speaking and communicating in German. Well, so these are the three different moments where I would like to examine the role of multilingualism, the interplay of family languages, school languages and German, and work out these aspects in the chapter briefly.
I do have a couple of questions for you too, Aoileann. I find the way you have worked out the idea of acts of citizenship (AoC) (this volume) extremely interesting, and what you have to say about these unfamiliar acts. Well, I’d just ask you to expand on how you’d like to frame these familiar and unfamiliar acts. Perhaps if you wish to, with the concept of gender. I find it very interesting because you have mentioned ideas in your own way that I have raised here. I happened to be at one of those conferences where Heike Wiese introduced the concept of Kiezdeutsch at the Institute of German Studies in Mannheim in 2012. So, it’s great if you could expand on that.
2 Ambiguous Linguistics in Post-Colonial Constellations
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: Okay. It’s quite an open question. I’ll address the concept of gender first. This came up in a question that Malte asked me to think about in advance of this interview. He noted that in one reading, my concept of ‘unfamiliar AoC’ can be understood as a feminist intervention into the discourse of AoC which can be seen—in a way—as very male-biased, where acts are associated with public, offensive protests, blockades, demonstrations and so on, and covering or excluding all the acts in the cultural sphere—such as language or everyday life’s solidarity. He asked if I shared this reading.
I don’t think I would entirely share this reading, no. I think that the feminist questions of embodiment, creativity and the sensory have always been given possible room in the AoC literature. Indeed, one of its strengths is to open up such possibilities. If we recall, this is because it has set out to specifically try to move away from the dominant masculinised Western traditional ‘scripts’ through which citizenship has played out. It asks us, instead, to consider how these are interrupted through acts which contest and challenge or disrupt existing socio-historical processes (Isin and Neilson 2008). There are examples furthermore of how the AoC literature reflects on personal experiences and everyday lives as central to public grand-scale interruptions here (such as protesting, demonstrating and blockades), by linking these to injustices that are felt and embodied (see, for example, Darling 2014; McNevin 2006; Nyers 2010). There has been less emphasis, however, on how creativity, the everyday and the cultural sphere might be a starting point for asking about enactment of citizenship. Therefore, I think there is room to draw on decolonial interventions for theorising citizenship here. As I discuss in my chapter (this volume), the decolonial literature (see Anzaldúa 1990; Mignolo 2013) starts from a prioritisation of the cultural and the sensory. By opening up questions of sensing and the body as a priority, it provides a space to think from the cultural sphere as a starting point for reflecting on acts/enactment of citizenship (rather than merely about the cultural sphere).
In other words, a decolonial engagement enables us to think about how we can start from the premise of creativity, sensing and the body. It enables us to consider how this can be the first point of thinking about AoC. Not just something that gets built into it; not just something that can be added to our existing understanding. And how doing so can help us strip back and think about knowledge more generally: the way we approach knowledge about citizenship, the way we understand protest, the way we understand disruptions in(to) citizenship. I argue in my chapter (this volume) that such a line of questioning opens up an emphasis on ambiguity and multiplicity as alternative starting points for thinking about what citizenship is.
I think that this question of ambiguity and multiplicity appears in a lot of what you, Radhika, were talking about linked to language. When we start with sensing and the body, we start with people offering a series of different (often contradictory) options that are all equally true; so that someone can say “I’m German and I’m also all of these other bits that are mixed into that as well. These don’t undermine my German-ness/my being really German” (e.g. as Eko Fresh does, which I discuss in my chapter in this volume). People are drawing on all these influences because they make sense to them and they feel them. What I try to explore in my chapter is how national identity can be grounded in this multiple ambiguous relationality (and inter-connection)—made between placing a range of linguistic processes together (e.g. Turkish, Kurdish and German influences together, as is the case with Straßendeutsch)—rather than national identity, needing to be grounded in a clear link between a single language and a single ethnicity (what Blackledge 2003 refers to as ‘language homogeneity’ or ‘monoglot standardization’).
In my chapter, I look in particular at why it is important to consider the sensory aspects of language use (rather than just who is speaking and why). This line of inquiry is influenced by the importance post-colonial and decolonial thinkers take on the aesthetics of language—understood as the invoked feelings, perceptions and imaginations. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986: 385), for example, has written at some length and influentially about the need to understand the “use of words, images, inflexion of voices to effect different tones”, and the significance of this to “human experience, culture and, perception of reality”. Authors like Franz Fanon (2008) and Jacques Derrida (1998) have elsewhere emphasised the importance of psychological relationships with language—for example, Derrida discusses how shame of Otherness undermines the ability of the colonised to inhabit either the(ir) European language—given the accompanying fear of performing it improperly without the correct accent or heritage—and to inhabit the(ir) indigenous/heritage languages which have been devalued for so long under colonialism. What they draw attention to is how people’s relationship to language thus extends far beyond questions of intent and technical usage, and how questions of belonging and identity are bound up in very complex sensory relationships with language (Ní Mhurchú 2019).
My interest in these questions is, in some part, informed by personal experience. I grew up in (the Republic of) Ireland where we have a funny position of being a formerly colonised country (by Great Britain) while also having played a role in the British Empire through involvement in the slave trade. In other words, we have a history of being colonised (and the associated Othering of an indigenous culture, language etc. which goes with this), but we have also been involved in enabling the colonisation of other people. Our national language is Irish (Gaeilge), but most people don’t speak it because English (as the language of the dominant imperial power for 800 years) was prioritised over Gaeilge which was devalued as an indigenous language for so long, with schoolchildren experiencing punishment if they tried to use it at various points. But it is felt very strongly as the language of the nation and has been formalised (in various ways) as such since the nation was created in 19222. What you have now is a situation where the language is seen as a key aspect of Irish identity, but at the same time people don’t speak it very much. Indeed, despite several revival attempts, less than 4.2% speak it on a daily basis outside of education (Census of the Population 2016). I was someone who grew up speaking Gaeilge (alongside English) at home. And I came to realise I was in an unusual position in this context, given how little the language is spoken more widely. While Irish might have a special place in the imagined community of Ireland, most people who identify as Irish speak only English or English with a little Irish—very, very few people speak regular Irish in their daily lives. This experience has made me very wary of any attempts to link a single language to nationality. I have met many people who feel much more deeply ‘Irish’ than I do, despite not speaking Gaeilge, and, indeed, the majority of those who feel ‘Irish’ around the world are those who do not speak Gaeilge on a daily basis.
This challenges the way in which ideas of ‘mother tongue’ are being built into education through presumptions that there is a single language everyone has access to, linked to their identity, which can be used to draw people in. Sinfree Makoni (2003) notably points out that mother tongue language policy ignores how people may have more than one mother tongue (see also Mills 2004 on this). Indeed, Radhika, you were pointing out that people often have several languages when they come to school; that’s one of the big differences I think that we struggle with—to imagine that somebody might have more than one ‘home’ language or ‘host’ language (with which they have an intimate relationship).
I furthermore spent time living in France as a child (and attending school there), and I think in relation to both French and Irish, I could see that there was a strong identity built around a dominant version of these languages, but at the same time, there’s so much play and diversity in how they are used. You might call this diversity a form of multilingualism within each of these languages that is often ignored. For me, this is why the monolingual/multilingual dichotomy doesn’t hold up very well when you think about how languages actually work on a day-to-day basis—and all the diversity here. Even in the German case, we can see this at play. For example, Heike Wiese notes that dialects in Germany are highly revered (2012). They’re seen as an authentic part of the way German functions, despite a strong emphasis on the importance of standard German at the same time—as dialects are seen as reflecting a part of the history and people. This is an acknowledgement of the diversity within ‘German’ as a language. Yet, as Heike Wiese goes on to note, at the same time people baulk at the idea that Kiezdeutsch would be considered a dialect; this is not seen as ‘German enough’, given how it draws on words and influences from language communities outside of Germany. Interesting here, I suggest, is how diversity in language use (a type of multilingualism) is celebrated when people are seen as using different strands of the ‘German’ language, but not when it involves links with other languages which are not seen as part of this same German history. Yet post-colonial and critical linguistic scholars emphasise rich creative historical practices of language mixing across different language communities as the norm in many situations (see, for example, Canagarajah and Liyanage 2012; Makoni 2003). In my chapter, I therefore try to draw out some insights from decolonial studies to reflect on what this has to teach us about language use—in particular, I consider the importance of exploring and embracing the sensory (aesthetic) elements of vernacular language use. I discuss how reconnecting the felt and the embodied to questions of what is worth usefully knowing about the world is an important decolonial move. As Mina Salami (2020) points out—colonial power has been based around devaluing sensory knowledge precisely because of the difficulty of acquiring and quantifying this type of knowledge. It has posited sensing as being inferior to rational forms of knowledge. I discuss how starting with sensing and the body therefore has the potential to open up questions of how we have come to know dominant forms of sayability, audibility and thinkability.
3 About Languages, Dialects, Non-Languages and Power
Malte Kleinschmidt: I was wondering about the concepts of mono- and multilingualism and their connection to power. You both mentioned it, and maybe you can expand this idea a little bit more. I am also interested in the possibly colonial hierarchy of languages. Would it be the same situation for people, for example, coming from France to Germany, or from Spain to the UK or Ireland, as for people from the Global South? I think not. You have already mentioned, Aoileann, that some German dialects are accepted as normal. Kiezdeutsch is not. So, there is, again, the question of power. Which languages are seen as part of German or French or English? Or better, which language practices are seen as being part of the legitimate language or an accepted dialect and which are not? Maybe you both can expand on this idea within your perspective? That would be interesting for me.
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: Do you want to go ahead, Radhika, because I’ve just spoken.
Radhika Natarajan: Yes, okay. Thanks for the question, Malte. Dialects are indeed important, but again, there seems to be a difference between dialect and dialect in terms of development, the prestige attached and their presence, or rather absence, in school policy. In the sense that, historically speaking, the dialects closer to standard German have taken a back seat, especially in northern Germany (cf. Bonfiglio 2010). On the other hand, dialects and regional varieties in southern Germany—let’s say Bayerisch [Bavarian] or Schwäbisch [Swabian]—have a high prestige at the regional level, though maybe not across Germany. This depends on the way it is politically framed, and the way powerful users and legitimate speakers of the dialect pride themselves on their particular variety. Thereby, being authentic can mean using the dialect. Politicians, for instance, deploy the dialect strategically to show that they are part of the polity. Whereas perhaps another dialect, like Sächsisch [Saxon], may not enjoy this prestige, even though it is equally accessible to local residents.
From my students in Hannover, I gather that Plattdeutsch [Low German] is a variety spoken mostly by grandparents; even admitting this in a seminar was accompanied with embarrassment. Regrettably, the association is either/or, meaning, if you speak the local dialect, you do not speak Hochdeutsch well. So, with unfortunate connections being made regarding intelligence and so-called accent, the real experience of impediments in educational settings has led parents and grandparents to actively discourage their children and grandchildren from dialect usage. The ideology of monolingualism doesn’t, in this case, spare the dialects or regional varieties. And we need to underscore the varied status of the very dialects which exist within the territorial space of today’s Germany. That’s the first point I would like to make here. Would you like to continue on some other aspect of dialect?
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: I think the point you make is well made. There is indeed a hierarchy in terms of how dialects are valued in German society, and this should not be ignored. There is notably an emphasis on the need to speak Hochdeutsch if you want to get by in industry, and get jobs, and so on and so forth, regardless of how much people also value different regional dialects and want to maintain these. The point I was just making was that sometimes when we think about monolingualism in contrast to multilingualism, we have this idea that we are all just using the exact same language, in the exact same way, on a constant basis. Whereas actually, in society, we use languages quite differently and that’s allowed for. We justify this by saying “this is how I speak with my grandparents” or “that’s how they talk in Bavaria”. Yet, when we think about these different dialects, we have to question also: What does it mean to call something a dialect in the first place, as opposed to a language? The answer to this indicates where the hierarchy and the power relations lie. The term dialect is one which is often used to control what we think of as a correct or proper way to speak and use language. Hochdeutsch is considered a language—evident in how we teach it to people when they want to learn German, but we refer to a ‘Bavarian dialect’ and this isn’t what people are taught when they learn German as a second language. So how we describe languages is also hugely political.
It’s also often a question of who speaks it, and I think that links back to Kiezdeutsch as well. When some people speak dialect (such as Swabian or Bavarian) in Germany, it elevates them. They’re one of the locals. Other people who might speak dialect are presumed to be struggling to learn German the right way and failing. Heike Wiese (2014, 2015) makes this point when noting that Texas German (spoken predominantly by people of white German heritage in the USA) is seen in Germany as a new German dialect, but Straßendeutsch or Kiezdeutsch spoken by young people growing up in Germany with Turkish roots is described as a result of ‘failed integration’. She urges us to think beyond the language itself, therefore, and to reflect on the social norms underpinning language use to recognize that whether or not we accept something as German and/or as a German dialect depends on whether we accept the speakers as German or not!
Radhika Natarajan: Indeed! One of the points of conversation in my research interviews was the difference between the language taught in the ‘integration’ courses and the everyday use of German with different interlocutors. As most of the interviews were conducted in northern Germany, the reflection about the use of the German language in different parts of Germany is illuminating. I need to add that some of the women interviewed have been living for decades in Germany, have a wide network of relatives and community members in various parts of Germany and Europe, and are well-travelled. For example, they mentioned that it makes sense to speak in a particular fashion and try to use as much standard German as possible in northern Germany. But that, for example, in southern Germany, this kind of textbook German wouldn’t be seen as proper or as what is required to gain access to certain spaces that are not an academic or language-testing setting. If you want work in a particular place, for example, a factory, construction site or in a restaurant space or in care work, then it doesn’t make sense to merely have access to Hochdeutsch taught in the German courses. Neither customer service nor access to co-workers would be possible with only standard German.
In fact, according to this line of argument, one would be doubly classified as an outsider, not merely because of the physiognomy or supposedly being an immigrant, but due to the lack of dialect or regional variety and, in this sense, class-appropriate language use. So, the interesting thing that I found out empirically was that, to be part of everyday life, it isn’t sufficient to learn the language to get through a particular examination or test, but what is expected depends on your interlocutor, with whom you are speaking, or what the occasion is. But even within this framework, you need to know with whom to speak what kind of language to gain access and acceptance. Otherwise, you’re seen as being too arrogant if you try to speak this textbook German everywhere.
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: Yes. These are really important points you are making here about the performative aspect of language—with people’s bodies playing an important part in how someone is seen to be able to speak a language more or less correctly, and the need for people to learn the rules of languages (such as when to use which one in what situation) to be heard—rather than people needing only to acquire technical skills to speak a language. In my chapter (this publication), on unfamiliar AoC, what I look at is the idea that language mixing in Verlan and Straßendeutsch when engaged in by working-class migrant-heritage youth (who are often made to feel like they don’t belong) enables them to (indirectly) challenge, however, the idea that there is only one way of performing ‘French-ness’ or ‘German-ness’ linguistically. What I look at is how, when used by them (to draw on inversions, mix up grammatical rules, draw words from several language communities together and develop slang), these vernacular languages invoke ambiguous meanings of ‘French-ness’ and ‘German-ness’. This is because they produce a series of atypical sounds and structures which give rise to competing feelings about what ‘makes sense’ within a particular ‘national’ context. They refuse to simply repeat the dominant Eurocentric performance which emphasises the need to speak a so-called standard to call oneself a member of the national community. What such practices of language mixing do is show how a single, dominant linguistic performance is indeed challenged rather than taken for granted. They draw attention to the multilingual nature of these European countries despite attempts to impose monolingualism (Alexander et al. 2007; Fortier 2018). In my chapter, I am keen, however, to emphasise that we should not understand these challenges as direct challenges which present themselves through a familiar declaration along the lines of a statement or a direct invocation which says “here is how we can see a challenge to the designation of exclusion”. Instead, I explore how these uses of vernacular language can be understood to indirectly affect the categories through which the nation state operates—its practices of racialisation, its cultural and social boundaries—in the sensory processes they invoke (feelings, embodiments and soundscapes). Looking primarily at these sensory processes helps us to reflect on ‘challenges’ we might otherwise not see, I argue, if we are only focused on intent. Focusing on sensory processes as indirect responses to experiences helps us think about challenges that might not easily translate into more straightforward verbal discourse (Erel et al. 2018, p. 70). I like Kye Askins’ (2015) concept of “a quiet politics” to think about what is at play here in the types of power relations which are circulating between linguistic dominance and challenges to these.
4 Unequal Multilingualisms
Radhika Natarajan: Would you like to elaborate on this point about performance? Did you have a similar experience, to say whether it makes sense, for example, in Ireland, to speak English in a particular way. For instance, I don’t know if you could speak English with an Oxford accent and if it would make sense when, say, simply shopping. Whether it kind of puts people off that one is being ‘uppity’ or if people think “Oh, you have class!”. I don’t know which of the two reactions works where and in what manner, where perhaps Gaelic would work better and where, on the other hand, you are so much part of the scene, wherever you come from, that it doesn’t matter. But throwing in a few words and a smattering of the other language probably enhances the sense of belonging.
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: That’s a very interesting question and the answer is “Yes”. There are lots of different ways in which speaking English is regulated and only certain types of performances seen as authentic or correct. Anne-Marie Fortier (2018) writes about this when looking at English language tests which are now requirements for acquiring citizenship status in the UK. She notes that the emphasis is not on testing (and disciplining) people’s ability to simply access English and be understood, but on testing people’s ability to speak English and communicate in a standardised way (using a certain grammar and accent, etc.).
One of my students several years ago was from Singapore and had English as their first language, but when they went to try and get a job teaching English as a second language to others (having acquired their diploma for this) they were told by the organisation that the people taking these classes wanted someone who ‘looked’ and ‘sounded’ more English than they did. The student in question ended up writing their dissertation on this topic, linked to the issue of ‘epistemic injustice’, as they came across a lot of literature which confirmed their experience as a typical one.
I guess it makes me think when we’re having these conversations about language, we start from the (false) presumption that we live in a monolingual world and that what migrants do is to bring multilingualism (by bringing in another language or two) into these monolingual worlds. Then the argument is that this is difficult to deal with because we are trying to bring two different ways of life together—the host monolingual world and the migrant multilingual world. Whereas if we think about it, and I think this is what you’re pointing to in your interviews, everybody goes through their life negotiating different registers and therefore being multilingual to some extent. Notably, on a day-to-day basis, we speak differently to our grandparents and our friends. We don’t write essays in the same way as we speak to our lecturers. And so, you are going through these different modes of language. And like you were saying, it’s interesting that people are learning one language in the classroom and then it’s just not suitable for everyday life. And so, this is another level of multilingualism that they’re having to learn. Therefore, we can see how language rigidity, in certain respects, is limiting for everybody rather than just for migrants and/or people of migrant heritage.
Radhika Natarajan: Yeah. I would like to take up this point that you very rightly make about people who might not be migrants or might not see themselves as immigrants. The disconnect that is imagined between the monolingual world of the nation state, like in Germany, and the multilingualism, ostensibly imported and alien, is only possible to sustain if multilingualism is associated with migration and the other (cf. Natarajan 2016a). If one would connect that, for example, to the German education system, we could speak of two types of multilingualisms prevalent here, i.e. ‘prospective’ and ‘retrospective’ (cf. Hufeisen 2011). The first kind is in the making and lies in the future, it is yet to come: ‘prospective multilingualism’. When a six-year-old kid is schooled, it is a given that over the course of school education more than one language will be introduced, taught and tested. The assumption being, kids come with German as their family language and first language (cf. Mecheril 2004) and this will be taught during the entire span of school life, 10 to 13 years, for this is how long it takes to gain some level of mastery to read and write, not just speak the first language. Schools in Germany are of different durations, 9, 10 or 13 years, yet even the shortest offers more than just German as first language.
Depending on the school system, English is introduced as the first foreign language in primary school, other European classical or living languages like Latin, French, Spanish, etc. as the second foreign language in middle school, and in high school there is even a possibility of choosing a third new language. So, this kind of prospective multilingualism is taken for granted. The longer the school education, the more languages on offer. But this occurs in a controlled space. It is controlled by the curriculum, the teachers and the system. They tell you how to speak the language. They teach you how to write the language. They tell you how. In a sense, it’s only in a controlled atmosphere of this kind that educational multilingualism is allowed, expected, even demanded, and given space. There is nothing novel about elite multilingualism. And if you are lucky enough to get into university, you have further possibilities. For example, in Germany at the Hannover University, like at every other university, you have a language centre [Fachsprachenzentrum] where you can learn languages free of charge. You just have to say that you would like to learn Turkish or Russian or Greek or Italian and Voilà, it’s possible, it’s even part of the understanding of Europe, the European Union and multilingualism. So, this kind of prospective multilingualism controlled by tests, grades and with numerous certificates, coordinated and recognised at the European level—the system seems to be able to work with that, as long as it is a ‘foreign’ language.
The problem, or the supposed problem, which the nation state and its most important executor and henchman, the education system, have, is with ‘retrospective multilingualism’. The multilingualism which a six-year-old kid brings to school, everyday-life multilingualism [lebensweltliche Mehrsprachigkeit] (cf. Gogolin 1994), somehow sends a shiver down many a spine. What is this? A six-year-old kid can speak three different languages and say the same thing in myriad ways! Even two different ways. Initially, even in academic discourse, the concept was simply bilingualism. An influential handbook, not too long ago, for example, was still called the Handbook of Bilingualism (Bhatia and Ritchie 2008). Then, taking into consideration countries like India, where multilingualism is the norm, and other developments like migration societies, it’s been changed to the Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism (Bhatia and Ritchie 2013). ‘Retrospective multilingualism’, however, isn’t the multilingualism initiated, controlled and certified by the school. That seems to pose a problem for the school and its understanding. Acquisition, on the one hand, and teaching and learning on the other—although institutional language teaching claims to model its goals on natural language acquisition and wishes to emulate this in classroom settings, the reality is an outright rejection of naturally acquired language use, “multicompetence” (Cook 2008). And thereby, the people involved—adults and especially children—who have such access to various languages are marked and made into problems. So much so that, instead of appreciation and recognition for linguistic skills, there is a pathologisation of the same, with a disproportionate number of children with a so-called migration background being sent to ‘special schools’ and attested as having learning disabilities (cf. Walgenbach 2018). This is one part. I have a second part which I’ll just add quickly as a caveat to that.
On the other hand, you might have children who look for example, like me. Different, not German, not German enough, who might enter school and who might speak German as their language. German might already be their dominant language or German might become their dominant language. That’s another phrase which I think is very important to use—dominant language. And when you juxtapose this with the nomenclature ‘migration background’, you can see the disconnect. Because with people who it is claimed have a migration background, whatever they say, even before they open their mouth and say anything, it is assumed that they will not be able to speak the German language. And even if they go through 12 or 13 years of school, they will still not be regarded as being able to speak or write the German language the way it should be, ought to be. So, it could very well be a fact that German is their dominant language, the language that they can write, speak and communicate in as well or as badly as every other person who looks like a so-called ethnic German child.
5 Colonial Hierarchies and Language as Practicality
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: I think for me, this conversation has clarified some things I was thinking about. I think it links back directly to Malte’s question about power and hierarchies. What I’m thinking about is how colonialism is not just about controlling the use of certain types of language (by elevating European languages over other languages), it is also the approach we have to language which I think goes back to the colonial project that we need to mention here. This is about the desire to control, to standardise, to create and understand things in terms of technicalities—which theorists have identified as central to the project of modernity and nation-building (see Foucault 1977; Gramling 2016). The reduction of language to these technicalities with standard forms enabled languages through colonialism to develop as discrete entities which could be linked to a particular group of people with a common history, occupying a specific territory, in the name of ‘nationalism’. And the distinction between prospective and retrospective multilingualism, plays into it.
Prospective language is the language we can control, the acquisition we can control. It involves teaching people the ‘right’ grammar. They learn Italian, or French or Turkish as a separate language in this way, and then they have German too; it’s an additive process which sees discrete languages being linked to different groups and histories and cultures; it reinforces and helps create ideas about how separate these cultures are. However, the child that comes in at the age of six with several languages, is often a child who doesn’t have the experience to reduce these languages to a series of technicalities and to be able to say, ‘I’m fluent in each of these languages so I can add those skills together.’ Instead, they demonstrate an ability to move between them in a less systematic way. By shifting between these languages in this manner, they undermine rather than reinforce ideas about how separate these cultures are. And I think that’s what feels out of control: that’s why, yeah, there is this sense of fear and danger when somebody does show up doing this because they are doing something with language that can’t be controlled. They are undermining the links between nationhood and language which we rely upon to make sense of our modern world.
I think you also note then, in the second point you were making, about how certain bodies are essentially unauthorised to speak dominant European languages. And they, I think in some ways, will always fail to speak them because language is not only about technicalities ultimately—as we’ve touched on above. Language is also about performance—how the tones work, and how the accents sound or how the body moves. And if we link it back to colonialism, because the colonial project has been about ‘othering’ (the creation of the self and other), then the Other who is, by definition, the colonised, will always perform the dominant European language ‘slightly wrong’ because they have been set up as outside of this culture and language and needing to catch up. And I think this comes back to what you’re saying in terms of how people, even when they do have these technicalities and grow up with German as their dominant language, there’s always something about the way they speak it which is seen as ‘not quite right’—because this language is not presumed to belong to them nor they to belong to the dominant culture (see Derrida 1998 and Chow 2014 who both write in detail about this experience). It’s important that we note what we’re talking about here is racism—because it is a form of judgement (even though it’s been highly normalised) about people’s skills and ability which is informed by their race and ethnicity.
6 About Heritage Languages and Language as an Asset
Radhika Natarajan: How true! I think you have summarised both the aspects succinctly and with great insight. In the 1980s, the American linguist, Stephen Krashen, came up with the distinction between ‘acquisition’ and ‘learning’ (cf. Block 2003). Though it is not possible to empirically prove whether and what in a language is learnt and acquired, the theoretical distinction helps us realise this: we acquire our first language or languages without somebody teaching us in an institutional framework. Caregivers and people around us help us acquire our first language without wielding a red pen. This is language acquisition. But here, we primarily learn the skills of listening and speaking. In Germany, it is through the education system that we also learn the skills of writing and reading. All the four skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening comprehension are systematically taught and learnt in only one language initially, the German language. Then, without much expectation of prior knowledge, these four skills are imparted and tested regularly from the first foreign language onwards. Over the last several years, there has been a welcome shift in weightage from primarily written skills (in English, French etc.) to a more balanced mix of written, oral and usage-based skills. The moot question is then what happens to the other language(s), the so-called family languages? If there is no formalisation or educational input, they remain and are confined in terms of vocabulary and complexity to the domains of everyday life. If they gain the status of a heritage language, then perhaps there is some level of access to reading and writing comprehension too. Otherwise, they remain divorced from academic life.
Aoileann, you mentioned the language Turkish. In most schools in Germany, hardly any Turkish is taught, only in some federal states, and this mostly at the primary- and middle-school level but rarely at high school. So, what happens is that languages like Turkish or other family languages in Germany remain at the level of spoken language. Or there are heritage language classes which one could take, and then one learns the language. There is a movement that says that this isn’t sufficient and that migrant languages should be offered to one and all as foreign languages. There is an interesting development regarding Russian in certain schools. For instance, two different levels are offered in a neighbourhood school: for those with a family background and knowledge of verbal spoken language skills, and for those without. This is, in the main, due to so-called repatriates [Aussiedler*innen] and late repatriates [Spätaussiedler*innen], whereas there seems to be very little left of Russian as a first foreign language in the former German Democratic Republic.
In contrast, the case of Spanish is noteworthy. Germany has a Spanish migration from the 1960s onwards owing to bilateral labour agreements. There is also a considerable Spanish-speaking immigration from South America. But that isn’t the reason why Spanish is taught. Then it would have been the case with Italian, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian and other languages too. So, you notice that Spanish is not necessarily offered as a heritage language but is taught as a foreign language to everybody who is interested. The concept of including a language is therefore already present in the current education system. And if languages are seen as an asset, if multilingualism is really seen as a ‘resource’, the way it is currently propagated at the national and European level, then educational access and support should be given to many languages which are widely spoken and vibrant in the society itself. These should be brought into the language education system and not merely relegated to the status of an add-on for afternoon or Saturday school like heritage language education. Again, when we talk about the space in which languages are included or excluded, heritage languages and their systematic instruction cannot always be excluded from the main framework.
7 Racialised Language Policies
Malte Kleinschmidt: I can learn so much from both of you! I’m not a linguist in any way. However, Radhika already mentioned some aspects about her utopian perspectives for language education at school. So, you managed to answer this question. I would also like to ask you, Aoileann, about your utopian ideas. You’re now living in Manchester, Britain, am I right?
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: Yes.
Malte Kleinschmidt: Is it in the British context a similar situation with immigrant languages? To explain my question, I think that the setting has been very different because much immigration in the last decades was linked to former British colonies. And, I imagine, the majority of immigrants brought a version of English language with them. Or is this not the case?
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: I think so; there are lots of similarities and there are differences. I think it’s worth acknowledging that we are conducting this interview in English. This, in itself, is a testament to the colonial dominance of English as a language, which is quite unique in some respects; it reflects the global reach of English as a language, given only one of us is based directly in an English-speaking country right now and yet we are all conducting this interview in English for a publication which will, in large part, be in English. It’s also worth mentioning that the concept of ‘Englishes’ plural is used to try to point to the different versions and ways of speaking English around the world. This is the idea, to quote Pennycook (1998), that English is “always in translation”, and allows you to think about the existence of different varieties of English with their own norms and values embedded within ‘English’ (Canagarajah 2012; see also Achebe 1997). However, Anne-Marie Fortier makes the very important observation that the idea of a single standard ‘English’ (which is presumed to be located in the UK) is maintained, nonetheless, through a distinction drawn between what is referred to as ‘English proper’ and what is termed ‘anglophone’ (Fortier 2018). And, yes, not everyone (as we have been discussing above) in the UK is seen as performing the ‘English proper’ version of English. People in particular from migrant heritage populations (often former British colonies in the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent) are constantly asked questions about where their ‘accent’ is from and where they are ‘originally’ from. This scepticism about their identity as ‘properly’ or ‘fully’ British is captured in the book title by Afua Hirsh (2018), Brit(ish).
Yet, even in the UK, we can see there are lots of different accents and therefore alternative ways of speaking English. To some extent there’s growing acceptance of this diversity today—evident in the variety of accents displayed on the radio and UK television these days (whereas in the past, to be on radio or television in the UK there was a requirement to speak what was termed ‘received pronunciation’). That said, there are still entrenched hierarchies (class and racialised ones) which position accents vis-à-vis each other and accord a higher status to some accents over others in the UK.
Furthermore, it’s interesting to consider how, in the UK, language use has been linked explicitly to the issue of danger in recent decades (again). In 2016, the then Prime Minister David Cameron came out and talked about the danger of Muslim women not teaching their children English at home—suggesting that language classes for Muslim women could help stop radicalisation among their children. He argued that non-English speakers could be ‘more susceptible’ to extremism. He furthermore introduced plans to require those on spousal visas to pass a test after two and a half years in the country or face having to leave (Mason and Sherwood 2016). What is significant here are the racialised terms through which language is being understood. Certain populations are being stigmatised for not performing the English language properly. Notably, the use of ‘non-English speaker’ as a concept is highly problematic. We are talking about children growing up in the UK (where the dominant language is English and so they will speak it at school, although they might also speak other languages at home) and about women who have often been living in the UK for many years. Unfortunately, this idea of linking English language speaking to safety (and the use of non-English language at home to danger) is in no way new. In 2002, the then British Home Secretary David Blunkett wrote an essay in the publication Reclaiming Britishness (2002, 2006), in which he argued that British Asians should ‘speak English at home’ to help avoid ‘schizophrenic’ rifts between generations. Again, the racialised aspect of the groups targeted here needs to be highlighted. As several people pointed out in the discussions that ensued after Blunkett’s essay was released, there was not an emphasis in the same way on any concerns about parents who were speaking Spanish or French or Italian at home to their children. Jean Mills (2004) develops a really interesting discussion which is relevant here—looking at the British context—of the problems about presuming that mothers more generally have the capacity (or should always perform the role) of passing on languages to their children which embody a particular culture, ethnicity or sense of nationality. Instead, Mills notes the diversity of language of those mothers from Pakistan to whom she spoke. These women often spoke English plus Punjabi or Mirpuri, plus some Arabic (enough to read Quor’an), and some also spoke Urdu (the official language of Pakistan).
Radhika Natarajan: I’ve read very inspiring case studies by wonderful British socio-linguists and I admire the way they juggle with such rich empirical data, so often drawing such exciting conclusions and offering great insights. Ben Rampton (2018), for instance, talks about crossing and hetero-glossia and how so-called third-generation migrants—who, of course, speak English, that’s not a problem at all—interweave different languages, how this “crossing”, as he puts it, takes shape. This hetero-glossia is not just part of youth culture, but they continue speaking in five different ways, depending on the domain, developing and deploying their repertoire effectively well into adult life and in work-related spheres. Similarly, Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese (2010) have made a remarkable contribution to the field of heritage language research. They show, for instance, how access to the heritage language Bengali is mediated through both English and a particular local dialect of Bangladesh. So, they show how, even in a heritage language class, multiple languages are at play, like the dominant language of the children and family language(s) which might very well be a particular regional variety colloquially accessible to the children. What comes to the fore are the post-colonial and decolonial multilingualisms, the various varieties of language, those with more and those with hardly any prestige and recognition. What is also interesting is the dichotomy between written and spoken languages and how instruction takes place through multi-dialectal and multilingual practice.
Their insights resonated on another level with my research into the take on the language Tamil in Germany and internationally. In India, we have around 60 million speakers of Tamil as a first language; it is the oldest language of India next to the classical Sanskrit. In the neighbouring country, Sri Lanka, of the 4 million speakers of Tamil, more than 1 million are in exile and in the diaspora worldwide. Sonia Neela Das (2011) found out that there was a vast difference in attitude towards the heritage language Tamil in Canada. Whereas Tamil speakers from the Indian diaspora were content with merely learning the spoken language as they had regular access to India and the family language was not seen as endangered, the Sri Lankan diaspora was keen on acquiring written skills too and preserving the language as this was an important identity marker and signified access to the (grand)parent’s homeland. The endangered status of the language and the linguistic nationalism in Sri Lanka had a different impact on the attitude towards language. In fact, according to one interviewee in my project, who was also a heritage language teacher in a Saturday Tamil school in Germany, the hegemonic impact of Indian Tamil and its presence in the Tamil language textbooks required the use of the dominant language German and the Sri Lankan variety of Tamil to mediate the access to Tamil writing. It makes me wonder whether and what kind of possible differences there could be in language attitudes and language preservation between refugee, repatriate and trans-migrant communities. I’ll need to probe into that.
8 About the So-Called ‘Migration Background’
Radhika Natarajan: In my paper, I mention the adage ‘language is the key’ to everything (“Sprache ist der Schlüssel”). This is repeated like a mantra in different forums and directed at children who are labelled as different and, more importantly, at adult immigrants. One wonders what this means, whether all the people who come in are mute, can’t speak or don’t have access to ‘language’ per se. What does Sprache mean here? The empowering image of language and linguistic ability is used as a disciplinary measure. It simply means that a particular kind of language, German, must be learnt and, to include what you’ve pointed out, Aoileann, ‘performed’. I guess that’s what you imply when you mention a closing in and restrictive interpretation of the legislative kind about the way English must be spoken. And of course, those considered to be the Other in this discourse, the Muslim and the poor mother, are imagined as bereft of speech, volition and agency, and thereby rendered voiceless. Though untrue, this attack and the distorted image work very well, at least on the discursive and affective level. That woman who is clothed differently, the sartorial difference evidently bars her from speaking the language of the land, English or German. And perfidiously and with a verbal sleight of hand, the rhetoric determines the reality and the way we perceive it. The greater the reality of many languages, of participation and a multilingual soundscape, the harsher the rhetoric of the need for ‘language’.
I’d just like to make one more point so that there is no mistaking this: I think we have to undoubtedly distinguish between two different experiences and linguistic access: people, young and old, of different ages and educational qualifications, who arrive from other countries and continents with a knowledge of different languages (written and spoken), as opposed to those who are considered migrants, in Germany at least, people with a so-called migration background [Migrationshintergrund] who have no personal experience of migration at all. So, without having the experience of migration, this new taxonomy creates and envisages a ‘background of migration’ as an inter-generational aspect which is passed on as if it is inherited, albeit as a negative characteristic, a blemish. Not only can one be born in Germany, but even if the parents were born here, as long as one grandparent came here from elsewhere a long time ago, the person can still be considered as having a migration background. The census of 2010 noted this discrepancy, so, apart from persons with and without a background of migration, they created a second category of persons with and without experience of migration [Migrationserfahrung].
Such classifications could make sense if this is part of an affirmative action statistically grounded in sound evidence, with the intention of anti-discrimination, redistribution and social justice (see Lewicki and Supik in this volume). But otherwise, if people who are born and brought up in Germany are marked in terms of lineage and generation, it reminds me, if I may use the term, of the so-called Ahnenpass, which Germany had 80 to 90 years ago, to find out, “Are you 1/16th Jew by any calculation?”. This is not part of my research, but this kind of tracing where, how much, what part of you is perhaps of migration background, reminds me of this unholy historical past. Anyway. I’m just trying to make a distinction between how this label is inter-generationally passed and connected to skills of the national language. The claim that the person would not still be able to speak or write German is a matter that needs to be questioned in terms of inclusion and exclusion. They might have German citizenship, but still they are not included as part of the polity. There cannot be an arbitrary collapsing of categories. I guess the countries we have mentioned, i.e. France, Britain and Germany, each have a different way of going about it, but all foster the creation of the Other at home, multiply intersected by class, gender, (im)mobility and language.
9 A Multi-Faceted, Imperfect Understanding of Language
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: Yes. I think the last point in the distinction is really important. I think there is a difference between how people are treated and how people self-identify. A lot of people, regardless of their heritage or where they have grown up or what languages they speak, are treated as migrants rather than as citizens. They are presumed to not belong to the dominant culture in the society in which they live. Yet, in reality, they may self-identify as part of that dominant culture alongside having another (or several other) culture(s) or heritage(s). They may feel that they belong to the dominant language despite speaking this in a non-standard way at home and with friends.
I think as long as we associate multilingualism with something that only migrants have to deal with rather than something that is integral to communication in society, we will fail to engage with the complexity of language which we are all negotiating on a day-to-day basis. It seems like people speak languages in lots of different ways. What this shows is that language is a highly political process, and it would be great to have more of a reflection and education on how it’s debatable and contestable and how it’s multi-faceted.
There’s a rap song that a few students wrote in Ireland which is entitled Is Fearr Gaeilge Briste ná Bearla cliste which translates as ‘Broken Irish is better than clever English’3 (Scoil Iosagain 2015). I really like this as it emphasises the broken nature of a language as having its own value rather than always being defined as a lack. Rather than emphasising the need to perfect language use in schools, I think this provides us with a way of thinking about languages: as those little (broken) pieces of speaking and grammatical structures that people arrange in different ways on a day-to-day basis. What this rap song further emphasises for me is how much knowledge about languages already exists in the community (as it is children who are highlighting these insights) rather than needing to be learned in school. If anything, schools need to learn from how people use language in the community in this bricolage way rather than teaching people how to learn language and presuming there is only one way to do this4.
You mention Rampton’s work above, which is so important to all of these discussions. Rampton (2018) used the concept of “language crossing” to think about how we might understand the intricate processes of language sharing and exchange that take place in multicultural urban (predominantly youthful) environments. Looking at the UK in particular, he considers how different bits of language are brought together by the youth, who wish to articulate complex experiences of being British (and growing up in the UK) within a highly heterogenous population—with roots across the Punjab, Africa, the Caribbean and India (and long histories of Anglo-imperialism across these regions). Rampton and other critical socio-linguists (see, for example, Doran 2007; Wiese 2013) have stressed the need to think about language use linked to crossing of this variety as innovative, creative use of languages which work to undermine race stratification and generate new (more fluid) senses of community and class allegiance which people carry into adulthood. They note that these are, unfortunately, often dismissed as simply failed attempts to communicate or temporary youth practices which people will grow out of. Such dismissal ignores the innovation and creative use of language here.
10 Power, Resistance and Its Relations
Malte Kleinschmidt: I have another question, if you don’t mind. We talked a lot about language as a regime, the monoglot frame, monolingualisms and dominant language as parts of the regime of belonging in nation states as well as the problems with which migrants or people with a so-called migrant background are faced. Aoileann, in your paper, you have already drawn on ambivalence as an answer to this power structure from below. And also you, Radhika, you broach this issue. And I would like that we expand on this topic now.
These questions of a hegemonic linguistic framework, and the answer to it in terms of ambivalence which put into question these power relations can also be seen the other way round: the configuration of the regime can be seen as an answer to the practices challenging it. For example, when David Cameron says that Muslim mothers have to speak English with their children or that they lack the ability or the will to speak English with their children, it can also be seen as an answer to the acts or the struggles of migrants or alleged migrants who are actually changing society. So, my proposal is to think about all these linguistic questions not just like there is a regime, static, and ambivalence as an answer to the static regime, but that the regime is always troubled and has to transform itself in order to deal with the challenge from below. This is kind of a workerist idea that also the regime has to be understood as an answer to the struggles. Have I made my point clear?
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: My response would be I totally agree with you. It’s why I’m less in favour of people cordoning off citizenship as this inclusive space that we then challenge through ambivalence as if ambivalence was separate from structures of power and hierarchies. I thoroughly agree with you that ambivalence isn’t a space absent from the processes of drawing distinctions, identifying and self-identifying through categories such as race, gender and class. I think these all play a role in ‘ambivalence’. The difference is that I think from an ambivalent starting point, we can see that there’s multiplicity at play in how these lines are drawn and how people identify. We can see that there are many different options which come together, and we can start to see multiple possible realities in life for what it means to potentially speak ‘German’ or ‘French’ or ‘English’ etc. and to identify as ‘German’ or ‘French’ or ‘British’; and how there is a place for recognising their validity despite the contradictions here.
In my paper on unfamiliar AoC (Ní Mhurchú 2016), I talked about rap music as well as about vernacular languages as spaces of ambivalence and possible sites of resistance. Yet I also acknowledged that, while rap music can be resistant (and has a history of being a voice of the marginalised), it is built into global capitalist structures and is often highly misogynistic in terms of the lyrics and the way in which images are portrayed. What it points to is how resistance and power are intertwined in complex ways.
You can see that also in what you were talking about, Radhika, with the German case. For fifty years, the language was just presumed and now in the last fifteen years there’s been an opening up, and an acceptance that, “Well, maybe there’s a value in multiculturalism”. But at the same time, because of entrenched power relations, only a particular type of multilingualism is being encouraged. It is the multilingualism which is additive, where languages are treated as separate and self-contained, which is being encouraged. People are encouraged to learn and continue to speak languages that they have mastered or will master fluently in their entirety, which they can separate out, and which have their own separate rules and grammar. What is not being encouraged is the type of languaging mixing and “crossing” (Rampton 2018) which is displayed in Straßendeutsch (aka Kiezdeutsch) or verlan. Yet these uses of language reflect the lives of many people who wish to express their more complex experiences of identity and belonging.
11 Trans-Languaging and Educational Justice
Radhika Natarajan: That’s well put. I’d like to quickly refer to two more concepts which have impacted and altered our reading of multilingualism. In line with your valid critique of an additive approach to languages, Suresh Canagarajah (2012) and Ofelia Garćia and Li Wei (2014) question the notion of languages as bounded entities and talk about “translanguaging”. The idea is to take all the linguistic resources at hand and put them to work, intermingling and employing these to access various linguistic repertoires. Writing, not just in one language, teaching, learning and interacting, not just in one language, but in all the repertoires available to access and understand all school subjects and without censure. This is also an approach that takes ‘resources’ into account, but not merely in the service of the dominant language. One uses everything at one’s disposal to learn as much as possible and it is not a compartmentalisation, where one is told to keep away, discard, supress, even hide what one already knows.
To seriously attempt a whisper of educational justice, we simply must educate the educator. That’s why a paradigm shift is required. There needs to be an openness to fluidity which we can currently observe in so many other social arenas, be they sexuality, gender roles, the idea of a family. This recognition, acknowledgment and embracement of linguistic diversity (cf. Blommaert 2015) is essential to attempt and achieve educational justice. What must follow is a revised understanding of ‘authority’. To realise that it is okay for a 10-year-old to have more, or at least a different, access to linguistic repertoire than their teacher and that this difference doesn’t qualify the child being marked as ‘special’ or ‘speech-disabled’. And, to realise that acknowledging this linguistic diversity does not undermine the teacher’s role and authority.
Like every concept, one could, of course, criticise that perhaps ‘translanguaging’ glorifies certain aspects, in this case, linguistic repertoire. The promise, nonetheless, lies in the fact that it takes pupils as they are, with what they can do and have access to, instead of rejecting their abilities outright and claiming they are wrong, faulty or deficient, the way they are. It is the duty of an educational system to find out how to strive for justice through education, and this cannot be simply by identifying pupils as flawed, in this case in terms of language access and linguistic abilities.
12 Language and Property
Radhika Natarajan: The other concept, which doesn’t stem from immigrant education policies, but from indigenous minority languages in Europe (like Frisian and Sorbian in Germany), their wilful neglect and devaluation, is the concept of linguicism (cf. Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1989). This draws attention to discrimination based on language or the perceived ‘mother tongue’ and is line with other ‘-isms’ like racism, sexism and classism. In critical, diversity-sensitive academic discussion, the neologism ‘neo-linguicism’ has been suggested to address the discrimination of migration-induced multilingualism in German-speaking countries (cf. Dirim/Heinemann 2016).
We also need to question the idea of language as property, as this could be useful to reflect on educational justice. In terms of, to whom does the language belong? We could ask, why does or doesn’t a language belong to me when I speak the language? Why does only one language belong to me? In fact, isn’t that merely a reaffirmation of the monolingual mindset and bias? Why can’t many languages belong to me? Everything that comes out of my mouth belongs to me. All the tongues that I speak, all the languages that I speak in whatever manner, fluently or haltingly. We are justified in wondering why, and defying that our linguistic repertoire be reduced to the ideology of the nation state proclaiming ‘one language, one nation’, an invention of the 18th and 19th centuries. Why should one, in the 21st century, be subjected to this ideology of the nation state of one single language? Even multilingualism is imagined in an additive fashion of a row of neatly bounded entities, standing, in a manner of speaking, in single file. Yasemin Yildiz (2012) draws attention to this and, in line with the post-migrant society, reflects upon a “post-monolingual world”.
The pressure to identify with only one single language is excessive, which begs the question about the different languages to which one has access. I would say that, not just English, the medium of my school education, Tamil, my family language, and other Indian languages from school and everyday life belong to me, but German too, my academic focus of study, belongs to me. In fact, I would also claim to have more than one dominant language. In his examination of the invention of ‘mother tongues’, and the nation state, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio (2010) proffers the argument that there is nothing like a ‘native speaker’. Instead, he focuses on the concept of “native writer” because, unless we are taught to write in a particular fashion over our whole school education, we are not considered as effective speakers and writers or people who have access to a particular level of language proficiency. Benedict Anderson (1983) illustrates how print capitalism and language standardisation helped the creation of modern nation states and imagined communities, while David Gramling (2016) notes that the project of enlightenment wouldn’t have been possible without the consolidation of myriad languages into what we today call English, French and German. We also unfortunately know that neither the project of race nor the taxonomical way of thinking and classifying would have been possible without these historical developments. Post-colonial and decolonial readings help us identify the contradictory nature of ‘progress’ and recognise the simultaneity of the contradictions inherent.
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú: Nicely summarised. I think that’s a great place to finish up.
Malte: Aoileann and Radhika, thank you both for sharing your thoughts in this conversation.