How do we keep mother languages alive?
Governments, organisations, and the public are starting to recognise the importance of maintaining home languages as a way of preserving language diversity. But how do we do this? Where are we falling short?
We’ll find some answers on this episode of Talk the Talk.
Listen to this episode
You can listen to all the episodes of Talk the Talk by pasting this URL into your podlistener.
http://danielmidgley.com/talkthetalk/talk_classic.xmlPromo
Daniel chats with Antonino ahead of the show, and finds out about his home language experience.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/17100145
Full interview
Here’s the full audio of Daniel’s chat with Ingrid Piller of Macquarie University. She’s the author of the fantastic book, “Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice“. We chat about how linguistic discrimination intersects with racism, how bilingual education needs to be fixed, and why citizenship shouldn’t be tied to language proficiency.
Thanks to Ingrid Piller for this chat.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/17080756
Cutting Room Floor
Does the rest of the world have egg slicers? We don’t know, but we discover a mutual love of the Country Women’s Association.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/17219703
Animation
by the Mystery Animator
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Show notes
Language is learned in brain circuits that predate humans
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180130094713.htm
PNAS paper: Child first language and adult second language are both tied to general-purpose learning systems
https://brainlang.georgetown.edu/sites/brainlang/files/documents/hamrick_et_al-pnas-17_0.pdf
Child first language and adult second language are both tied to general-purpose learning systems
http://www.pnas.org/content/115/7/1487
Stone tools, language and the brain in human evolution
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223784/
Silica Stories: Language co-opted neural structures originally used for tool making
Google Books link
Ingrid Piller – Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics
http://newbooksnetwork.com/ingrid-piller-linguistic-diversity-and-social-justice-an-introduction-to-applied-sociolinguistics-oxford-up-2016/
International Mother Language Day: 21 February
http://www.un.org/en/events/motherlanguageday/
FAQs on Emotional Support Animals
https://www.animallaw.info/article/faqs-emotional-support-animals
What Has Changed For Emotional Support Animals in 2018?
https://therapypet.org/emotional-support-animal-information/
Can Peacocks Be Emotional Support Animals? It’s Complicated
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/woman-brings-peacock-plane-emotional-support-animal-explained-spd/
Woman Was Prohibited From Bringing Emotional Support Hamster on Spirit Airlines Flight, So She Flushed It Down a Toilet
https://jezebel.com/woman-was-prohibited-from-bringing-emotional-support-ha-1822858677
A hamster is the latest victim in the row over emotional-support animals
https://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2018/02/flushed-failure
Student says she flushed ’emotional support hamster’ after Spirit Airlines denied passage
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/08/spirit-airlines-emotional-support-hamster-flush-toilet-florida
“You can’t bring food into the theater.”
“Excuse me, this is my emotional support sandwich.”— Jordan Hoffman (@jhoffman) 8 February 2018
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Talk the Talk, RTRFM’s weekly show about linguistics the science of language. For the next hour we’re going to be bringing you language news language diversity and some great music. Maybe we’ll even hear from you. My name is Daniel Midgley. I’m here with Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Good morning.
DANIEL: And Kylie Sturgess.
KYLIE: G’day, everyone.
DANIEL: On this episode we’re talking about mother languages. Governments, organizations, and the public are starting to recognize the importance of maintaining home languages as a way of preserving diversity. But how do we do it? We’re going to be talking to an author who has some answers on this episode of Talk the Talk.
BEN: What is that voice that I hear?
KYLIE: [LAUGHS]
BEN: What is that cackle? From whence does that sonorous tone emerge?
KYLIE: [RADIO NOISE] I’m calling from the Space Station. There’s aliens up here! Help!
BEN: Kylie, you’re back.
KYLIE: I am indeed.
BEN: It’s good to have you back.
KYLIE: I’ve been busy. Thank you. You’re such a sweetie.
DANIEL: I told you not to do a PhD. I warned you.
BEN: Shall we find out what’s going on in the world of linguistics in the week gone past?
DANIEL: There’s been a debate in language and it’s been a really long standing debate.
BEN: How long-standing?
DANIEL: This debate is kind of eternal, and the question is: is there something special about the way our brains handle language, or do our brains do language using just the same facilities, the same abilities that we use to do other stuff?
BEN: Right. So, is language a function of the bits that are lying around, or is there a special tool in the kitchen of our brain, like those dumb egg slicer things that can only be used for that one thing — language — and cannot be used for any other thing?
DANIEL: Well, you’ve got to admit if we have that thing and other animals don’t, it would sure explain why we do language. Like all of us.
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: And other animals don’t.
BEN: Because they don’t have an egg slicer.
DANIEL: They don’t have an egg slicer.
BEN: Exactly.
DANIEL: Mmm. But if animals do do sorta languagey things, it would mean that we have sort of the same brain capacity and things.
BEN: Or they might just be using a knife to cut eggs wonkily.
KYLIE: As we all do when we can’t find the damn egg slicer.
BEN: I feel like people of an international audience are listening to this all like, “What is an egg slicer?” It’s like a hemispherical dish with like five bits of wire that are designed to cut down through a hard-boiled egg to make like flat disks so that you can put ‘em in sandwiches and stuff.
DANIEL: Well, there’s been a study by Philip Hamrick and a team of Kent State University. They decided to tackle the question of what kinds of memory language learning relies on.
BEN: I seem to recall that previously we had heard that a whole bunch of weird stuff goes on in the brain. Like the idea that there’s one bit that you can stab and all language goes away is not a thing.
DANIEL: It’s not a thing, and we looked at brain mapping when we say individual words, and it turns out that when we say a word, different parts of the brain light up, as though a network were being stimulated. It’s not like there’s one place in your brain that has the word ‘fish’ or something.
BEN: Right, yeah.
KYLIE: I have also seen studies into conditions like hydrocephalus where you get brain fluid, and fluid where the brain ends up being pressured and to some extent damaged by what’s going in, and where people will have capacity to do certain things that doctors might have thought, “Oh, you won’t be able to do that because of this certain amount of damage that’s gone on due to the pressure,” and yet the brain… I’m not sure if the word ‘adapt’ is the right word.
DANIEL: I think it is.
KYLIE: But it facilitates.
BEN: It’s plastic.
KYLIE: It’s very plastic. The brain is weird, man! It is able to get up to all sorts of interesting things and so to think to yourself, “Oh, it’s going to be X is where the spot this is gonna… Broca’s region, that’s this!” That’s kind of misleading.
BEN: So what did they find out?
DANIEL: Well, they they looked at language learning and how it ties into two kinds of memory. We have declarative memory, where we say “Madrid is the capital of Spain” and you can recall facts and things like that.
BEN: Sure.
DANIEL: And then there’s procedural memory — stuff like, well when I wash the clothes I have to do thing one, then thing two, and then thing three in that order. Or tying your shoes or something. They found that learning the words of a language — remembering those words — goes very well with declarative memory.
BEN: Makes sense.
DANIEL: Doesn’t it? But then they found that grammar, especially for second languages, is extremely procedural…
BEN: That also makes sense.
DANIEL: …just like the procedural things that we do. In their experiment, language and procedural memory go hand in hand.
BEN: Grammar is just procedure. It’s the procedure of the language.
DANIEL: You’re lining up words in the right order and you’re saying them.
BEN: Exactly! So, yeah, okay cool. That makes sense. But I guess that means we’ve got two egg slicers in the brain.
DANIEL: Two egg slicers?
BEN: Yeah, like well, we’ve got declarative language memory, and then we’ve got procedural language memory.
DANIEL: And the lexicon seems to tie into the first one, and grammar seems to tie into the second one. But the important thing is that the facilities we’re using for language and language learning are just the same as the ones we use for other stuff that we do. There doesn’t have to be a special language device to explain how we use language.
BEN: Well, I guess then if we take it back to the animals, surely they have declarative and procedural memory. They’ll have memory that will allow them to be like, “This tree with this scent has bees that make honey, and that is delicious.”
KYLIE: “And in order to get the bees out, I have to find the stick, poke it down, make sure the bees are out of there before I go,” and so that’s more procedural.
DANIEL: Well, this actually brings us to another idea about how language arose, because we’ve talked about two: the gestural hypothesis where we started making gestures, and that worked its way into language, and the spoken hypothesis where we started saying stuff.
BEN: And then attached meaning to it later.
DANIEL: Kinda. And according to Dan Everett in his book ‘How Language Began’, he thinks it was, like, both at once.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: But we haven’t addressed a third idea, and that was the technological hypothesis: that we started off making tools, and making tools is very procedural.
BEN: Goddamn it, the wheel just was our undoing, wasn’t it? There we were, happy in the trees, and then someone made a round thing and noticed that it just kept on going, and then everything went downhill.
KYLIE: “Ogg! Ogg! It’s gone down the hill! Help!”
DANIEL: But what seems to have happened is that we developed the ability to make tools, and then language piggybacked on the things that we learned in tool making, and sort of took that over. And that makes sense because both tool making and using language is very procedural.
BEN: Sure.
DANIEL: Not only that: you’ve heard of Broca’s area.
KYLIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, that’s the one where if it’s damaged, you… can’t… seem… to come up with words. But if you do a brain scan of somebody who’s making an old-style stone axe, you know, chipping away bits of obsidian.
BEN: Knapping, I believe it’s called.
DANIEL: What’s that?
BEN: If you’re knapping an axe.
DANIEL: Really?
KYLIE: Mmm.
BEN: K-N-A-P-P-I-N-G.
KYLIE: Flint knapping.
BEN: Yeah, you like hit off shards and it makes a sharp edge.
DANIEL: I’ve never knapped.
KYLIE: Jump on World of Warcraft. You’ll pick it up in no time.
DANIEL: Well, people who are making stone tools when you give them a brain scan — or at least when they imagine making stone tools — they show activity in Broca’s area.
BEN: Ah!
BEN: Which is usually thought of as just a languagey thing.
KYLIE: Exactly what I said. The brain is freaking weird!
DANIEL: The brain is weird. In fact, we often say the brain is too difficult for us to understand because if the brain were simple enough for us to understand….
BEN: We wouldn’t be able to understand it.
DANIEL: We wouldn’t be able to use those simple brains to understand it. So this makes total sense evolutionarily, don’t you think?
BEN: It does. But lots of things make sense to me, and then have been wrong.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: So.
KYLIE: Yeah.
BEN: I’m cautious about my own ability to be like, “Yes, this idea pleases me!” Do you know what I mean?
DANIEL: I do. And yet we know that there are other cases where things have been picked up and used. Like, wings for birds are modified gills from when they were fish. Evolution takes things and just uses them, and I think it’s really cool, the idea that language arose out of existing abilities.
BEN: Stuff that was lying around. Human beings just slicing eggs with a knife like nobody’s business.
DANIEL: Well, we should take a track now.
BEN: I think so.
DANIEL: And this one is Heathcote Blue, ‘Memory Is Kind’ on RTRFM 92.1. Remember, if you have any comments or questions about the show, please get them to us. We would especially love to hear your experience with a home language, if you spoke one.
BEN: You can get in touch with us via Twitter @talkrtr.
KYLIE: You can give us a call: 9260 9210.
DANIEL: Send me an email: talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au.
BEN: And our Facebook community is the bestest, so check out Talk the Talk on Facebook. We do some really cool stuff there.
[MUSIC]
BEN: [IMPROVISES A SONG] We’re talking about mums on Talk the Talk. They are the best… Nah, I can’t keep it up.
KYLIE: [MUM VOICE] Are you talking about me again, Ben? I told you about that.
BEN: Oh, my god, my mom could not sound any less like what you just sounded like.
DANIEL: Mums are the best. It turns out the 21st of February of every year is International Mother Language Day, so as we go to air, it’s tomorrow, Wednesday 21st of Feb.
KYLIE: Is everyone expected to go out and buy a present for their mother language now? What would a card look like?
BEN: A card to English: you’re the very best language virus of all.
ALL: Awwww.
DANIEL: Mother languages or home languages are important in maintaining language diversity. They hold a special place for a lot of people. In fact, they’re able to survive very often, even when they aren’t the dominant language in a place.
BEN: Like we discussed with the language that white people recently realised was a language, which has of course been a language for thousands of years. The one from Malaysia.
DANIEL: Jedek. Jahai is very popular, everyone speaks it, but most people also speak Jedek. So these languages are disappearing, and so the UN is trying to call attention to this, especially in the international domain.
KYLIE: Well, apparently there’s about more than 50% of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken in the world are likely to die out within a few generations. And 96% of these languages are spoken by a mere 4% of the world’s population. That’s tiny!
DANIEL: Precisely. Which is why we need to have more education and better skills at teaching them and preserving them and maintaining them. Well, I decided to talk to somebody who knows a lot more than I do about this, and this is Ingrid Piller of Macquarie University. She’s the author of a book: ‘Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice.’ And I started by asking Dr Piller: is linguistic diversity automatically good?
DANIEL: Like sometimes when I’m talking about language death in my sociolinguistic classes, I struggle a little bit to explain why language diversity is a good thing. I mean, there is a cost to language diversity, isn’t there?
INGRID: Oh, absolutely. Look, and that’s a key point I’m actually making in the book. I think linguistic diversity is just a fact of life. It’s, in a sense, value free. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It just is, right? So there certainly is a cost, and that cost is usually paid by the weaker members of a society and those who do not have, let’s say, access to the kinds of services and opportunities that the people who speak the majority language or dominant language have. So language diversity certainly results in a lot of social challenges, but at the same time there is nothing we can do about it. So it’s not like, “Let’s give up on language diversity, and let’s all speak in the same way” because that’s just not happening, right?
DANIEL: Hmm. I mean it wouldn’t be good to do that even if we could, really.
INGRID: Look, I totally agree. I mean, one of the beauties of human languages is, of course, that they do, you know, give us access to all kinds of points of view and different cultures, and it’s part of what it means to be human, really, to be diverse. And, in a sense the way we speak is very similar to other aspects of our identity. And again, they are neither good nor bad they… they just are. All of us are different in different ways. And I think it’s only with linguistic diversity really that we ask this question. So is it really a good thing, or should we maybe try and create some more homogeneity? I mean, well, you know, no one’s saying “Oh, you know, we should get away with differences in size” because it’s impossible to do. And the same is true of linguistic diversity in a sense.
DANIEL: What I was thinking also was that, you know, this is the nature of discrimination. If we did all speak the same language, then we would just find something else to discriminate about. Because language, like you say, is a proxy.
INGRID: Absolutely, and in fact, many of the examples in my book are actually not about people speaking different languages but discrimination happening on the basis of everyone speaks English (for instance), but then you speak English with a particular accent. And you know standard varieties are more esteemed, or allow you more opportunities, whereas if you use non-standard varieties, if you have an accent that shows that you’re a second language speaker, or that kind of thing, then you know, that becomes the means of discrimination.
DANIEL: Well, that was one weird conclusion I got from the book, because going in, I expected to see lots of cases of linguistic discrimination.
INGRID: Mmm.
DANIEL: And I did. But a lot of the discrimination wasn’t based on language; it was based on other stuff like skin color or gender. I mean, a German speaker speaks a different language, but they won’t have the same expectations placed on them, and they won’t face the same roadblocks. I mean, language is a proxy again.
INGRID: I think it’s both. On the one hand, we can certainly identify forms of discrimination that are specifically language based. You know, for instance, the example that I have of the tourists on the Melbourne tram who gets shouted at by some mobsters: “Speak English or die!”
DANIEL: Hmm.
INGRID: And so that’s clearly an incident of abuse based pretty much only on speaking another language than the one that is expected on a Melbourne tram, apparently. But in most cases — and you know that’s the truth I think of all of us in sociolinguistics that we discover regularly — it’s more complicated, and different forms of disadvantage very often intersect. So the experience of being a minority speaker, or speaking a particular language in a non-standard way, in a non-dominant way, is not the only aspect of your being. It may intersect with being racially disadvantaged, with gender discrimination, and so on and so forth.
DANIEL: I want to talk about education for a bit. One of the things I do as part of my job is I teach English teachers. So I give them the skills, I hope, and then I send them out to teach English. Which is good in some ways because you know, when people learn English, that helps them to join the global conversation, blah blah blah. But I also feel like I’m part of a problem. Like, you know, I’m sending them out to homogenise everywhere linguistically. As someone who does what I do, what should I keep in mind? What would help me the most to prevent becoming part of this evil force.
INGRID: [LAUGHS] Look, I think we sort of really have to be very clear that English per se is not the problem. English is not an evil force or something. In fact, the spread of English certainly has created lots of opportunities, has….
DANIEL: Opportunities for English speakers, yes.
INGRID: Yes, for English speakers obviously, but not necessarily only for native speakers of English. So I think there are many advantages to learning English. In fact, English has become in a sense a basic skill around the world. So I think it’s like you know like being literate and numerate. In the same way, you also need some English language proficiency in order to consider yourself an educated person. You know, the basis of your question, like what should I do to mitigate my participation of this evil TESOL empire? I was trying to say, well, look, that basis is probably wrong. I don’t think English per se is good or bad. In fact, I’m a huge fan of English. You know, I learned it as a second language. I studied it. I loved the literature and whatnot. Having said that, as English language teachers, I think one thing that the whole TESOL enterprise often does is value only particular ways of speaking and devalue other ways of speaking. So learning to speak English, learning to communicate in English should not come at the cost of other languages, should not come — in the case of Australia — at the cost of children’s home languages or, in the international context, at the cost of national languages and the languages that the learners speak. And that’s what is happening very often, and that is of course where the problem comes in. So what we can do as educators, I think, is in a sense be more open to the value of multilingualism, model multilingualism ourselves, and contribute to a greater valorisation of linguistic diversity.
DANIEL: Ingrid Piller from Macquarie University.
BEN: Good news! You’re not an evil person.
DANIEL: You could see, though, how I unleash wave after wave of teachers.
BEN: I called it a virus earlier. Like, I wasn’t joking.
DANIEL: Like Dr Piller said, it’s okay for English to be out there, just as long as it’s not at the expense of other languages. But too often this this does come at the expense of home languages.
BEN: It absolutely does. Yeah, for sure. I would so dearly love to speak another language, right? So dearly. And the number of students who have come my way who are in the process of losing their mother language… right?
DANIEL: You’re watching it.
BEN: Exactly.
KYLIE: Mmm.
BEN: And you can see that there’s just there’s no relevance for them. There’s no value attached to the language that they’re sort of discarding.
KYLIE: They’re missing the context. They may be missing the community that used to exist or exists in their family.
BEN: Even if they have the community.
KYLIE: Yeah?
BEN: Often it’s just like, “Man, that’s what the old people do.” Like and I sit there kind of going, “I’m an adult, man. Oh, man, it’s super sucky and hard to learn a language. Hold onto it. It’s so good.” It’s such a good thing. Like all of the data suggests that being bilingual is just such an asset to you cognitively, professionally, interpersonally.
KYLIE: And yet it doesn’t move into popular culture. The only book that I recall which pointed out that, “Hey, this is something that you should be valuing” was your books like ‘Looking for Alibrandi’, where the lead character Josephine would talk about the struggle of being told, “No, you’re Italian, you should be valuing your culture,” and then being told “But you’re Australian! Why aren’t you focusing and building your English skills?” and the pull between those two. There’s not many examples of that out there that I think are being pushed hard enough.
BEN: Not in American-centric Western culture, which is what I describe us as.
KYLIE: Yeah.
BEN: You see it in European culture all the time, where people are regularly trilingual.
KYLIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: We do seem to lack — as we’ve seen in other shows — we seem to lack a culture of language learning.
BEN: Oh, absolutely.
KYLIE: Yeah.
BEN: Surely we’d have to be really far up there on the monolanguage sort of scale, right? Like we’ve got so many home languages kicking around there.
DANIEL: It’s a funny old thing, because there are a lot of us who are multilingual in this country, but for some reason that just doesn’t seem to translate into the public area.
BEN: At all! Like at all! It’s at the point where foreign languages on signs in touristy spots are kind of like, “Oh, okay, so we must get a lot of tourists here.” Right? Like that’s the only reason that we’ve ever done it, as far as I can tell.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, we’re going to have more of a discussion with Dr Ingrid Piller of Macquarie University, talking about what to do about this educational difficulty, and how we can help with home languages. But first, let’s take a track. This is the Dirty Projectors and Björk with “Beautiful Mother” on RTRFM 92.1.
[MUSIC]
BEN: We are in the midst of discussing mother languages. For those of you who don’t tune in to Talk the Talk very often, and you’re like, “What’s this weird linguistic stuff?”, mother languages is that idea that the language at home is not the dominant language of the society in which a particular person finds themselves in. We’re big-upping mother languages because it’s Mother Language Day tomorrow.
DANIEL: We’ve been talking to Dr Ingrid Piller of Macquarie University, author of the book ‘Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice.’ We’ve alluded to the educational problem. We’ve got one in three school kids in Australia who speak another language at home.
BEN: That’s so cool.
DANIEL: One in three!
BEN: That is just so dope.
DANIEL: It is! It’s fantastic.
BEN: I’ve never once told that statistic to people and not have them be surprised, unless they are from one of those families.
KYLIE: Yeah.
BEN: And even then a lot of those people are surprised as well, because like you were saying it just doesn’t translate to pop culture, so a lot of these different home language speakers — or no longer speakers, as the tragic case may be — feel isolated in their second language-ism, right? They don’t realize that a whole third of the school they’re at potentially is also going through what they’re going through.
DANIEL: So I decided to ask Dr Piller about the educational angle. How do we encourage language learning?
INGRID: Oh, look, it’s a big problem, and the problem really is we take multilingual kids and turn them into monolingual English speakers, and then we take those same monolingual English speakers and try to teach them French or Indonesian.
DANIEL: Yeah.
INGRID: And we don’t do that very well. So we give them, you know, like a couple of hours of French, Indonesian, Japanese, Italian, whatever, in year seven and year eight, and then that’s it. And they go away with this sense like, “I’m totally hopeless at languages, and you know, I’ll never get anywhere.” They kind of don’t consider that they only had one hour or two hours per week over — let’s say — a semester, or maybe in the best-case scenario two years, and obviously that’s not enough. That’s not going to do much for their language proficiency.
DANIEL: So how do we fix that problem?
INGRID: I think there are two approaches that really are needed in the Australian education system. One is to actually value the home languages that children bring to school, and support children from bilingual backgrounds to actually develop their home languages. Also into literate proficiency, so that they learn how to read and write in their home languages, and to develop academic proficiencies in those languages. Mostly we talk in multilingualism studies about the “kitchen language”. You know, they learn kind of home language that is very reduced and that, you know, works well within the family, but can’t really be used for any academic purposes or any professional purposes. And in particular they often don’t know how to read and write, and that really limits your opportunities to communicate in a particular language. So that’s one part of the approach we need to take – support home languages to high levels of proficiency. And the other one needs to be actually compulsory language education in school, and the way we do it at the moment, that you know languages are mostly optional, and they are only compulsory for two years, and then really no one takes them seriously — that’s just not good enough, you know. And excuses like the the crowded curriculum, or the fact that they need to learn English first, and that they need to learn math, and that they need to learn whatever whatever — that all doesn’t really cut it because so many other school systems around the world actually do manage to teach the national language, and to teach at least one foreign language, if not two or three or more. And so why shouldn’t we be able to do it here in Australia?
DANIEL: I’ve noticed that if you are a heritage language speaker, it’s really not worth it to take a language, to take your home language as an ATAR subject because it’ll be steeply discounted.
INGRID: Absolutely, and that’s really another disincentive, another huge problem because one thing that we know about migrant kids is that they are often academically ambitious. You know, they want to get good marks. They want to go to university. They want to succeed.
And if we organise our scaling and our scoring in a way that tests or disadvantages taking your heritage language and scales them down and what not, then of course they will not take it. And that is just like a really silly kind of aspect of our language in education policy that we have here in Australia. And it’s also I have to say a somewhat racist policy, because it only affects certain languages. So the difference between a heritage and non-heritage speaker — in New South Wales at least — only applies to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian I think, but not for other European languages. So not all languages have the scaling discrepancy between background speakers and non-background speakers.
DANIEL: Holy crap. I did not know that. That is really off. [LAUGHTER] It just goes on and on, doesn’t it?
INGRID: It does.
DANIEL: I want to give you the magic wand of policy in Australia. Fix everything. Go.
INGRID: Well, so look, I’ve already mentioned the language in education problem, and that isn’t that difficult to fix, in fact, because as I said we’ve got good models around the world of how languages are valued and taught in the education system. If we actually got to fix our language and education policy, I think that would be a huge step forward because not only does that actually mean we maintain home languages and can then, you know, use that multilingual population for all kinds of human resource and development benefits in a sense — you know, it’s always good to have multilingual speakers who can make connections, who can do business around the globe and whatnot — and it’s also just good in terms of, you know, cultural connection and understanding and education. And if we can also fix the problem of actually teaching everyone who goes to school in Australia a foreign language to intermediate to high level of proficiency, we’ve also done all of us a service. And again, there are the obvious economic and social benefits. There are also the kind of mental health benefits. And there’s also just the benefit that education should be a holistic enterprise, you know. And we learn lots of things in school that we consider to constitute an educated person. And many of us you know never need chemistry again in our lives, but still it’s something that you need to know about, I think, to, you know, be able to function in the modern world and we all agree on that. And in the same way we need to agree that in order to function in today’s globalised society, you need to speak more than one language.
If we fix our education system, then I think that would be a huge step forward also in terms of the problems of adult migrant discrimination that we spoke about earlier, because if we all learnt another language in school and had gone through the experience, I think we would be much more sympathetic to some of the challenges and trials that migrants face. Very often I see people dismissing like, you know, oh you know, “Anyone can learn another language,” like it’s an easy thing, and it’s not an easy thing. And to study content at the same time that you try to improve your English, or to work a job in a good and efficient way at the same time that you try to improve your English is always an extra burden and an extra challenge. And I think many of us who’ve been through that experience just feel that a bit of additional sympathy would really go a long way to keep the motivation going.
And so again, if we had that kind of empathy, then that would certainly also just broaden our multilingual imagination and our imagination around what the challenges and opportunities of a linguistically diverse society are. And recognition of the challenges is certainly a first important step towards actually solving those problems, because at the moment many of the challenges that I describe in my book — they weren’t even recognized as challenges, and that’s what makes them so hard.
DANIEL: Dr Ingrid Piller of Macquarie University. She’s the author of ‘Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice’, a book which by the way won the British Association for Applied Linguistics Book Prize for 2017. It’s a good read. Highly recommended.
BEN: Brava.
KYLIE: Well done.
BEN: So, cool… our curriculum is racist. I mean, I kind of already knew that with the whole, like, “white people came to Australia and brought laws”, but I did not know the structural discrimination against Asian languages and not against European languages.
KYLIE: I knew a little of that because of the amount of number of students I had who were discouraged from going in to study academically. I thought it was intriguing how she used the term “kitchen languages” and that struck a chord with me. I mean, how many of us might be handed a book: “Okay, let’s study the novels of Elena Ferrante, the Neapolitan series — in the original Italian, you know — and then let’s discuss it.” Where it’s more likely to be something that’s just spoken around the house in a more casual situation.
BEN: Rudimentary. You’re not gonna know the word like your mother language for ‘vicissitude’ in the kitchen, because you don’t need it.
DANIEL: You can see how this ties into a lot of things. It ties into education. It ties into prestige of languages. It ties to things like social injustice and discrimination.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: And these are threads that are not easy to unwind.
KYLIE: I would love to hear what other people have in terms of their magic wand of being able to change things.
BEN: Yes! What do you do with the magic wand?
KYLIE: Let us know.
DANIEL: Why don’t you send me an email: talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au, and remember this is part of a very much longer interview with Dr Piller. Fascinating stuff, I’ve got to say, so if you want to hear the whole thing unexpurgated and untrimmed, go ahead and head over to our Patreon page.
BEN: Shall we take a track? and then we’ll come back for a word of the week.
DANIEL: Yes, please. Let’s listen to Kardajala Kirridara with ‘Ngabaju’ or ‘Grandmothers Song’ on RTRFM 92.1.
[MUSIC]
BEN: We come together as one body. One group of humans.
KYLIE: [REACHES FOR PHONE]
BEN: Don’t touch the phone! Touch my hands. Touch them!
KYLIE: I don’t know…
BEN: TOUCH THEM!!
DANIEL: I think he wants us to hold hands. Here. There. There we go. There we go.
BEN: One group.
KYLIE: Oh god.
BEN: One body of humans united in a single holy purpose.
KYLIE: This feels so icky.
BEN: To come together and ruminate on Word of the Week.
KYLIE: I need hand sanitiser. Anyone got any hand sanitiser?
DANIEL: I felt like we had a spiritual connection, and it was profound.
KYLIE: [LAUGHS]
BEN: I felt… I felt like one of the corners of the triangle wasn’t trying very hard.
KYLIE: PBTHBPTHBP!
BEN: Yeah, that corner.
DANIEL: Yeah, that was the one.
BEN: So, what do you got? What do you got for me? Come on.
DANIEL: Our Word of the Week this week is ‘emotional support animal’. There have been a few stories in this week about this concept, and in fact it’s even going through some extension. You can have emotional support dogs. You can have emotional support cats. What about an emotional support peacock?
KYLIE: [SIGHS]
BEN: Peafowl?
KYLIE: I’m sorry. I know there’s probably people listening who are like, “But I love my hamster!”
BEN: Well, actually…
KYLIE: There’s something in me that just goes, “PBTHBPTHBPHHH!” I’m sorry.
DANIEL: You’re skeptical.
BEN: I gotta put this out there. Kylie’s, like, one step from being a cat lady.
KYLIE: It’s not my fault. It’s my family’s fault.
BEN: Pfft, don’t you give me your excuses, cat lady. But you got to admit like you are one step from being a cat lady, and you love your cats so hard.
KYLIE: There is no way I would be taking my cat on the plane because they’d be absolute little brats the entire time. Sod it! They stay at home. They are house cats, end of story. I’m not inflicting that not even one-year-old kitten on anybody. It’d be just chaos.
BEN: However…
KYLIE: However.
BEN: Were I to come to your house…
KYLIE: Yeah.
BEN: …and murder your cat, you would be very unhappy.
KYLIE: Well, yeah, but I’d save on cat food.
BEN: You say that, but I remember the last one dropped off the perch, and Kylie was not a happy chappie.
DANIEL: Destroyed.
KYLIE: But there’s a difference between, you know, my personal relationship in my own personal space, and then bringing a peacock on a plane!
DANIEL: Let’s talk about the peacock.
BEN: I 100 percent put my hand up and say I would like to go on a plane with a peacock. Not my own peacock.
KYLIE: Have you heard them!?
BEN: Yeah. Just imagine that. You’re just like…
KYLIE: [SCREECHING NOISES]
BEN: No, they’re way nicer than that.
KYLIE: They are not way nicer!
DANIEL: Those of us who have been to UWA.
KYLIE: Yes, hands up, everyone! All of us.
DANIEL: In the Arts Building.
BEN: No, they sound like this: [PLEASANT CALL].
DANIEL: Ah, they do sound like that. Actually, peacocks have about three different calls. One of them is as you have described. Another one is the horrifying scream [HORRIFYING SCREAMS] and then….
KYLIE: Hey, I think I know what I’ll do. I’ll just hop up onto the window and completely disrupt Daniel’s lesson in the middle of what he’s doing.
DANIEL: It’s happened.
KYLIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: The third call is one that I only heard when I was called upon to wrangle peacocks in the Arts Building.
KYLIE: [GASPS] Really?! They said, “Oh, no, no, no — the peacocks are naughty! Let’s get Daniel to deal with them.” Oh, shoot!
DANIEL: It wasn’t exactly like that. It was more like one bird needed to be transported to the peacock farm, where they sometimes… it’s like a spa for them. They go on holiday, away from the rigors of university life.
KYLIE: So the peacock needed emotional support.
DANIEL: It did. So I wasn’t going to be one of the guys that grabs the bird. I was just gonna be standing there, so that it wouldn’t try to escape in my direction.
BEN: Right. You were, you were a… what’s it called? You were shepherding.
DANIEL: I was.
KYLIE: You were herding it.
DANIEL: Other peacocks were watching. As we closed in on the bird, they started making noise that sounded like this: [FOOOOT]. They were trumpeting [FOOOOT] as a warning sign to the bird.
KYLIE: Oh, wow!
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: So they are noisy friggin’ birds.
BEN: True.
DANIEL: Imagine trying to take one on a plane. And yet that’s what happened at the Newark airport. A conceptual artist by the name of Ventiko — so already, you know this might be….
BEN: We are fringe.
DANIEL: This might be somebody who doesn’t quite…
KYLIE: This is someone who would have fitted in really well in the Arts area of UWA.
DANIEL: Someone who doesn’t quite live in the real world.
BEN: Someone for whom social norms are suggestive at best.
DANIEL: Someone who you wouldn’t describe as down-to-earth.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Brought the peacock along, and by the way the peacock’s name was Dexter.
KYLIE: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: And said that this was an emotional support peacock. Dexter did not get on the plane.
KYLIE: Aww…
BEN: Pause. Pause, pause, pause. Is an emotional support animal a thing? Is it a legal thing?
KYLIE: The National Education for Assistant Dog Services says that there’s no such thing as a service dog registry. There is a service dog training program.
DANIEL: Okay, but I feel like there are two different things going around here. One is registered service animals, which is totally a thing.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And then there are emotional support animals. And registered service animals have more legal standing than emotional support animals, but even that can be a bit loose.
KYLIE: There is a federal law in America, the Air Carrier Access Act, where airlines are required to accept emotional support animals if there’s a note from a doctor or a licensed therapist.
BEN: Okay.
KYLIE: However, it’s a bit of a cottage industry. There’s all these online sites where for about $50 to $200, you can get your certificate. They can even throw in — there’s a leash and a vest, or you know an extra laminated element that says, “Oh, yes, this is a service animal.” But there’s another law, the Americans With Disabilities Act, which protects people from having to produce any documents. Now these laws don’t require proof because they’re meant to protect people with disabilities who need service animals from harassment, because when they take the animals into public spaces. But there’s people who are starting to use that leeway, and start bringing in what is essentially the breaking of an honor system in order to get things like peacocks on the plane.
BEN: So people are potentially flirting with the idea of feigning a kind of disability in order to….
KYLIE: It’s an honor system. I mean, they trust that people are going to be doing the right things by the airlines. But for some people if it means a cheaper way of getting their pet on the flight rather than sticking him in cargo, or if they do believe that, you know, a peacock needs to have its own seat — which apparently Dexter did have, it’s got its own ticket — people might give it a shot, and people as we can see are giving it a shot.
DANIEL: But yeah, this notion of emotional support animal fill-in-the-blanks — could be a horse…
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: …according to the Americans With Disabilities Act.
BEN: And in fact I imagine many of them would be, because riding for the disabled is a massive massive program.
DANIEL: And so a lot of people feel like people are pushing it. It’s trivialising the idea and it’s making it difficult for people who maybe do have a legitimate need, because support animals can do some good.
BEN: I’ve got one at my school.
DANIEL: Okay.
KYLIE: Is it a peacock?
BEN: No, it’s just a dog.
KYLIE: Damn!
BEN: Kaiser, the therapy dog. And he just… he’s there for the sort of emotionally higher-needs kids.
KYLIE: We have one that pops into our university library in order for people to have a chat to and have a hug with, yeah.
BEN: Now, what do we do about our held beliefs that mental illness is a disability, a person with depression has a disability. That person might be able to find support in an animal, right? Where’s the line there?
DANIEL: Well, maybe it’s the kind of animal, and the size of the animal, and the inconvenience of the animal.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Dogs and cats….
BEN: …most people tolerate.
DANIEL: Even hamsters. There was a sad story about a hamster, but I can’t even go there. So people are starting to celebrate the silliness and talk about emotional support sandwiches.
KYLIE: What?
DANIEL: I know. “You can’t bring that food in here.” “It’s my emotional support sandwich.”
BEN: Ugh. That’s no good.
DANIEL: No. We don’t want to trivialize the concept, but at the same time, sometimes we wish that people were a little more sensible about things.
BEN: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I feel like there’s a middle ground here that we can find. We just need to find it, and strike it.
KYLIE: I’d be very interested in hearing other people’s take on this, because I’m skeptical. I’m along the lines of “pop it into a crate, carry the pet in the back, and just say g’day to it when it gets to the other end of the line,” as it were. But I’d be intrigued to see what other people feel about it. So hit us up on social media.
BEN: Yeah, for sure.
DANIEL: Our Facebook page is vibrant and interesting. Twitter @talkrtr.
BEN: You can email us: talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au.
KYLIE: Or give us a call: 9260 9210.
DANIEL: But now here’s Mercury Rev with ‘Emotional Free Fall’ on RTRFM 92.1.
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: You’re in the closing minutes of Talk the Talk. Great talking to June who phoned up. She spoke Polish as a home language, and even today she feels like English is kind of meh, and Polish feels like home. Which I think a lot of people feel like with their home languages. It would make sense. Her brother, a little younger, stopped speaking it and just would only respond to parents in English, which I think is a very common thing. I keep hearing that this is what kids do. She finds that she’s still fluent in Polish but a little rusty sometimes and she has to get back into it. But she mentions that she was really glad that her parents took the effort and gave her that. And for some parents it’s not an option. Some parents are marginal in English at best, so the home language is the one that they speak most fluently and that’s the one they communicate with. Great to talk to you, June.
DANIEL: Nikki says, “Man, I really wish we had the same sort of second language education they have in Europe. I studied Japanese for seven years in school and still wasn’t even conversational. It’s so disappointing, like I wasted those prime language learning years.” Well, yeah. What I always say with that is: you know you can’t go back and do it again, but you can do it now. And it’s a bit of a myth that you can’t learn if you’re not a child. Adults do come with certain advantages in the learning game. But it does help if there’s a tie-in. If the affinity with the culture isn’t your parents, then it will have to be your own enthusiasm that you bring.
DANIEL: Aaron on Facebook says the same thing: “Wish I was raised bilingual. Trying to make up for that by learning Dutch and French as well as I can.”
DANIEL: To parents: keep it up. I’m not a native speaker, but I’m speaking to my young one in phrases at the level that I feel comfortable with. Don’t feel bad if they knock it back, and don’t worry about implementing it the best way. There are no disadvantages to this.
DANIEL: Thanks for listening to this episode of Talk the Talk. Check us out on Patreon, and until next time… keep talking.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
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