Ingrid Piller

Identity constructions in multilingual advertising

Contemporary social identities are hybrid and complex, and the media play a crucial role in their construction. A shift from political identities based on citizenship to economic ones based on participation in a global consumer market can be observed, together with a concomitant shift from monolingual practices to multilingual and English-dominant ones. This transformation is here explored in a corpus of German advertisements. Multilingual advertisements accounted for 60–70% of all advertisements released on various television networks and in two national newspapers in 1999. The subject positions that are created by multilingual narrators and multilingual narratees are characterized by drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, and on point-of-view more generally. In order to test the acceptance of or resistance to these identity constructions outside the discourse of commercial advertising, the uses of multilingualism in nonprofit and personal advertising are also explored. All these discourses valorize German–English bilingualism and set it up as the strongest linguistic currency for the German business elite.

Passing for a Native Speaker: Identity and Success in Second Language Learning.

In sociolinguistic interviews for a research project on cross-cultural marriage, 27 out of 73 second language (L2) users of English and German were found to claim that they had achieved high-level proficiency in their L2 and that they were passing for native speakers in some contexts. Based on these insiders’ accounts, the article provides a description of passing for a native speaker as a (frequently overlooked) form of L2 ability. The introduction discusses ethnographic research into success in second language learning (SLL) and explains why other approaches tend to identify a significantly lower incidence of high-level achievement. Quantitative analysis of the data suggests that the age of first exposure to the target language is far less crucial to success than has so far been assumed. The L2 users themselves distinguish between age of first exposure and age when they ‘really’ started to learn their L2, thereby pointing to the role of motivation and agency in successful SLL. Qualitative analysis of the L2 users’ accounts indicates that, for them, passing practices are quite different from widely held assumptions about passing. Passing is described as a temporary, context-, audience- and medium-specific performance. The article ends with a discussion of the evaluation of passing and its role in (perceived) success in SLL.

Neoliberalism as language policy

This article explores how an economic ideology—neoliberalism—serves as a covert language policy mechanism pushing the global spread of English. Our analysis builds on a case study of the spread of English as a medium of instruction (MoI) in South Korean higher education. The Asian financial crisis of 1997/98 was the catalyst for a set of socioeconomic transformations that led to the imposition of “competitiveness” as a core value. Competition is heavily structured through a host of testing, assessment, and ranking mechanisms, many of which explicitly privilege English as a terrain where individual and societal worth are established. University rankings are one such mechanism structuring competition and constituting a covert form of language policy. One ranking criterion—internationalization—is particularly easy to manipulate and strongly favors English MoI. We conclude by reflecting on the social costs of elevating competitiveness to a core value enacted on the terrain of language choice. (English as a global language, globalization, higher education, medium of instruction (MoI), neoliberalism, South Korea, university rankings) *

Advertising as a site of language contact

While the study of advertising discourse is a well-established research area in applied linguistics, language contact phenomena in advertising have often been neglected. This chapter reviews work on language contact phenomena in advertising. Recent work has shifted away from a long-standing focus on borrowings and loanwords. Currently, more emphasis is being placed on multilingual discourses in advertising and the ways in which these index identities, both of the products and services with which multiple codes are associated and of the consumers who peruse them. The chapter is also concerned with the various functions of different contact languages in advertising. Languages other than English imbue a product with an ethno-cultural stereotype about the group who speak the language. By contrast, English has largely become a nonnational language and has been appropriated by advertisers in non-English-speaking countries to index a social stereotype. English has become the language of modernity, progress, and globalization. The chapter ends with suggestions for future research deriving from recent developments in marketing, namely the emergence of the global super-brand.

Multilingualism, Second Language Learning and Gender

This volume presents a comprehensive introduction to the study of second language learning, multilingualism and gender. An impressive array of papers situated within a feminist poststructuralist framework demonstrates how this framework allows for a deeper understanding of second language learning, a number of language contact phenomena, intercultural communication, and critical language pedagogy. The volume has wide appeal to students and scholars in the fields of language and gender, sociolinguistics, SLA, anthropology, and language education.

Naturalization Language Testing and Its Basis in Ideologies of National Identity and Citizenship.

National belonging is a central facet of modern social identities. In Europe, nation-building often went hand in hand with linguistic nationalism. While the monarchial empires that preceded the modern nation had been multilingual polities (e.g., the Habsburg Empire), nations were founded on the ideology of “One Language, One Nation.” Nations are not only “Imagined Communities,” that is, systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community, but also exclusionary historical and institutional practices to which access is restricted via citizenship. Linguistic restrictions to such access can be found in naturalization language testing, which usually takes place during the naturalization interview and tests the applicants proficiency in a countrys official and/or majority language. In this paper I examine the interrelationship of ideologies of national and linguistic identity and the ways in which they impact upon ideologies of citizenship. I describe current naturalization legislationina number of countries and the ways in which it is based on these ideologies. The paper has a special focus on Germany where naturalization legislation changed on January 1st, 2000. I describe the linguistic tests as they are stipulated by law and as they are conducted in actual practice. Finally, I turn away from the national ideologies behind these language tests to the linguistic ideologies that (mis)inform them. The data for this analysis come mainly from legal texts pertaining to naturalization, but also from newspaper accounts and interviews with naturalization candidates. I will show that the relationship between naturalization and language requirements depends on the different national ideologies that the various countries hold. The paper ends with the conclusion that most of the practices I report on are compatible neither with a contemporary understanding of citizenship nor with recent advances in linguistic research and the study of multilingualism.

Linguistics and intercultural communication

Our times are often referred to as the ‘new world order’ with its ‘new economy’. What this means is that capitalism has been restructured on a global scale, and people of widely different cultural and linguistic backgrounds have been thrown into contact more than ever before. Cultural and linguistic contact may occur in the flows of information and mass media, as well as in the flows of actual people in migration and tourism. Given the ubiquity of cultural and linguistic contact, mergers and hybrids, it is unsurprising that there should be a strong interest in Intercultural Communication, both outside and inside academia. Linguistics as a discipline makes two key contributions to the study of Intercultural Communication. (i) It is the key contribution of discourse analysis and anthropological linguistics to take culture as empirical and cultural identity, difference and similarity as discursive constructions. (ii) Intercultural Communication by its very nature entails the use of different languages and/or language varieties and sociolinguistics, particularly bilingualism studies, illuminates the differential prestige of languages and language varieties and the differential access that speakers enjoy to them.

Linguistic diversity and social inclusion

Abstract This introduction provides the framework for the special issue by describing the social inclusion agenda of neoliberal market democracies. While the social inclusion agenda has been widely adopted, social inclusion policies are often blind to the ways in which language proficiency and language ideologies mediate social inclusion in linguistically diverse societies. If language is written into social inclusion policies, it is often done in a top-down manner informed by linguistic ideologies of monolingualism and linguistic discreteness rather than an informed understanding of the realities of communication in linguistically diverse societies. By contrast, the contributors to this special issue draw on ethnographic case studies to show that the key linguistic challenge of the social inclusion agenda is the promotion of inclusive language ideologies and language practices that value diversity. We end the introduction by elucidating implications for policy and research.

Language, employment, and settlement: Temporary meat workers in Australia

Abstract Australia is one of the world’s largest beef exporters. However, meat processing jobs are widely considered undesirable and are increasingly filled with employer-sponsored migrant workers on temporary long-stay visas. Against this background, our paper explores the role of language in the employment and migration trajectories of a group of meat processing workers from the Philippines in a small town in rural Australia. Methodologically, we employ a case study approach combining macro-data from language and migration policy documents and media reports with micro-data from ethnographic fieldwork. We explore the role of language in recruitment, in the workplace, during leisure time, and in gaining permanent residence in Australia. To begin with, language is not a recruitment criterion as the primary visa holder is hired on the basis of a so-called ‘trade test,’ i.e., observed at butchering work in the Philippines by an Australian recruiter. Spouses of the primary visa holder are also issued a temporary visa and are offered unskilled employment in the same plant. Once in Australia, the participants had few opportunities to practice English at work or in the community. In this way, temporary migrants came to Australia with limited English and had limited opportunities to improve their English in the country. However, visa extensions or the conversion of their temporary visa to a permanent residency visa is contingent upon their English language proficiency and only granted if they achieve a score of Level 5 or above on the IELTS (International English Language Testing System). Because of their limited education and limited practice opportunities, this proficiency level was out of the reach of most of our participants. We conclude by arguing that – in a context where de facto there is no need for English language proficiency – the imposition of English language proficiency requirements for visa extensions and for permanent residency serves to secure the permanent contingency of a sector of the agricultural work force. In a neoliberal global order where the value of agricultural exports and the unemployment rate are fluctuating unpredictably, English language proficiency requirements have thus become a politically acceptable way to ensure a ‘flexible’ labor supply.

Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism

Tony Liddicoat shows that English-language research publications about multilingualism are by and large a monolingual affair. Only 7% of the references cited in his corpus of multilingualism resear...