B-MEIS Newsletter - March 2021 (Plain Text Version)

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In this issue:
LEADERSHIP UPDATES
•  LETTER FROM THE CHAIR
•  LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
ARTICLES
•  PARENT ENGAGEMENT IN A NEW ERA OF PANDEMIC
•  LANGUAGE COLLABORATION IN IMMIGRATED SPACES AMONG SOUTH-ASIAN MULTILINGUAL SPEAKERS
•  CONNECTING EMERGENT BILINGUALS IN A GLOCALIZED CONTEXT: A MODEL FOR EMBEDDED COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
•  INTEGRATING VISUAL THESAURUS AND CORPUS-BASED DICTIONARY INTO VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION TO DEVELOP BILITERACY ACQUISITION OF WRITING IN ONLINE LEARNING: A PILOT STUDY
•  FOSTERING HOME SCHOOL CONNECTIONS: WHEN TESOL PROFESSIONALS DOUBLE UP AS PARENTS OF MULTI-BILINGUAL CHILDREN
•  WHERE CAN HIP-HOP AND AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE STAND FOR MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION IN THE CONTEXT OF EFL

LANGUAGE COLLABORATION IN IMMIGRATED SPACES AMONG SOUTH-ASIAN MULTILINGUAL SPEAKERS

Kashif Raza,English Department, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

Language politics influences the ways a particular language is viewed and treated by its own speakers and/or others, and how it exists in collaboration or opposition to other languages within a nation state or beyond. Modern governments endorse certain languages and their development through policy enactment or lack of it, which gives these languages a legal status as official or state languages and thus encourages people to invest their time and energy in learning them. In addition to creating socio-economic inequality among less privileged or minority language speakers, these policy decisions also create a competition between languages where feelings of love or hate develop towards dominant languages or its speakers. This is particularly true in multilingual countries like Pakistan, India, and Nepal which are socially multilingual but officially mono/bilingual.

Sociolinguists have been writing about the political influence on the identity construction of different languages and how this creates feelings of likeness or dislikeness towards specific languages (Reynolds, 2019). This can be observed in language policy discourses within nation states where certain languages enjoy higher status than others because of their legal status, political support and economic efficiency. For instance, Pakistan is a multilingual country where more than 70 languages are spoken, but the country has mainly restricted itself to English and Urdu for educational, administrative, judicial, economic and foreign affairs. A recent example of this trend is Pakistan’s adoption of English as the official language for the operationalization of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) despite the involvement of a multilingual workforce that does not speak English but utilizes shared language resources for communication at lower levels (Raza, 2020). Similar examples can be borrowed from India where the current government is promoting Hindi at the expense of other languages and thus creating a competition between different language speakers.

However, despite governmental support for certain languages over others within national boundaries, people from different language groups continue to communicate with each other through the utilization of shared language resources. One area that sociolinguistics can pay more attention to is how the shared knowledge and resources help distinct language groups involve in discourses in immigrated countries. This is what I refer to as “language collaboration in immigrated spaces.” Blommaert (2010) called this ‘polyglot repertoires’ and argued that these repertoires do not fall under the definition of traditional national or regional languages such as Urdu, Hindi, or Punjabi or to specific national spaces like Bangladesh or Pakistan. Ideologies that identify and label certain languages as distinct in certain contexts, put languages in competition against each other, and halt linguistic interference or infiltration between two similar languages become less significant in immigrated spaces. This competition can be across borders or within a country. For instance, a tussle is observed between Urdu and Hindi in India and Pakistan, Hindi and Nepali in India and Nepal or within a nation state like Urdu in Balochistan, Punjab and Sindh and Punjabi in Sindh, Balochistan and Islamabad or acceptance of different accents of Urdu. Socio-political factors play a great role in highlighting these differences, and consequently, provoke competition. A recent example of this competition can be observed in India where the current government is renaming buildings, areas and places from Urdu to Hindi and Sanskrit because Urdu poses a threat to particular religious groups.

With immigration and the need to communicate with people, the common linguistic resources between such languages become a skill and allow collaboration between different language speakers who share similar lexical or pragmatic resources. For instance, in Canada, USA and Qatar, I have observed Pakistani communities from different language backgrounds communicating in different Urdu accents without any hesitation. Similarly, different dialects of Punjabi which are visible in Pakistan (e.g., Hindko, Seraiki, ShahPuri) and India, and are problematized by researchers and language based-politicians, seem to become less significant and irrelevant in immigrated spaces. Another example is of transnational communication between language speakers from South-Asian countries such as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Maldives communicating with each other using lexical resources and sentence structures that are mostly understood by language speakers from these different countries and language groups. For instance, Urdu and Hindi, belonging to the Indo-Aryan language family but using different scripts (Urdu uses Nastaliq and Hindi uses Devanagari), have a lot in common, which makes it easier for the speakers of the two languages to communicate with each other orally; however, a written communication between the two language speakers is also observed on social media where Roman alphabets are used to spell out Urdu/Hindi/Punjabi words. These developments are a good example of translingual discourses between languages that follow indifferent scripts and may have implications for literacy. Image 1 is an example of a dialogue between a Hindi (from India) and an Urdu/Punjabi (from Pakistan) speaker discussing Rakhi Bandhan. They are wishing each other on a Hindu festival, Rakshabandhan, where a brother and a sister express their love for each other. Since Hindi and Urdu use different scripts, both language users utilize Roman alphabets to communicate their feelings for each other, thus crossing the traditional boundaries between the two languages that are drawn by political differences and written scripts.

Similarly, speakers of Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Nepali, Bangla, Sinhala, Tamil, Telegu, Sindhi, Pashto, and Dhivehi can also communicate with Urdu-Hindi speakers because of shared vocabulary and pragmatics. To some extent, this shared lexical resource also helps communicate with Arabic speakers. One of the reasons for this is the Bollywood and Lollywood movies and dramas (Ahmed, 2018) that use a mixed form of language that is understood in many of these neighboring South-Asian countries.

The point that needs to be noted here is that most of this communication and collaboration happens for business, education or social purposes and is observed as a competency in these immigrated spaces. If this multilingual competency can also be promoted at school in immigrated spaces and in these neighboring countries, it may have a lot of educational as well as socio-politico-economic implications. For instance, the resources spent on highlighting the differences between such languages (e.g., the case of renaming places in Uttarakhand) can be used to promote collaboration between them to enhance cooperation and collective efforts for progress, innovation and human resource development. Similarly, the accent based biases that are monitored across these countries (e.g., Punjabi-Urdu, Bihari-Urdu, Gulabi-Urdu, Urlish, Punjabi-Hindi, Tamil-Hindi, Nepali-Hindi, Jangli-Punjabi, Mahajri-Punjabi) maybe discouraged and a respect for differences can be promoted in the classroom as well as in society. This will allow creating a connection between home/social education with school education and thus link classroom learning to the outside world. Another implication of this collaboration will be the acceptance of different dialects and languages in the classroom, which can assist in moving multilingualism from social level to classroom level. This is an area researchers of multilingualism in Asian contexts can further explore to provide guidelines for language policy developers in home countries as well as in immigrated spaces like the Gulf, Americas and Europe. Last but not least, an investigation of how multilingualism functions among transnational speakers can also provide models of linguistic competency/collaboration beyond borders and an opportunity for creating resources that can benefit a wide range of language speakers.

References

Ahmad, R. (2018). My name is Khan…. From the epiglottis: Changing linguistic norms in Bollywood songs. South Asian Popular Culture, 16(1), 51-69. https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2018.1497600

Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge.

Raza, K. (2020, July). Language policy for China-Pakistan cooperation. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/language-policy-for-china-pakistan-cooperation/

Reynolds, D. (2019). Language policy in globalized contexts. Appeared as part of the 2019 WISE Research Series. Doha: World Innovation Summit for Education. http://www.wise-qatar.org/2017-wise-research