Translingual Practices and Neoliberal Policies

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN LINGUISTICS

Suresh Canagarajah

Translingual Practices and Neoliberal Policies Attitudes and Strategies of African Skilled Migrants in Anglophone Workplaces

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SpringerBriefs in Linguistics Series editor Helen Aristar-Dry, Linguist List, Ypsilanti, MI, USA and Dripping Springs, TX, USA

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More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11940

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Suresh Canagarajah

Translingual Practices and Neoliberal Policies Attitudes and Strategies of African Skilled Migrants in Anglophone Workplaces

123 [email protected]

Suresh Canagarajah Departments of Applied Linguistics and English Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA USA

ISSN 2197-0009 SpringerBriefs in Linguistics ISBN 978-3-319-41242-9 DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41243-6

ISSN 2197-0017

(electronic)

ISBN 978-3-319-41243-6

(eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016945153 © The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland

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Acknowledgement

I thank the series editor, Helen Aristar-Dry, and two of the anonymous reviewers for useful critical feedback. I am grateful to Ryuko Kubota and Nelson Flores for reading the manuscript and offering important clarifications on their positions in addition to challenging my own position in constructive ways. Colleagues Jerry Lee and Chris Jenks have also read versions of this manuscript. Students in my course ApLing.575 Language Socialization, especially Miso Kim and Isaac Bretz, have read early versions of this manuscript and offered significant feedback. I take responsibility for the positions adopted and the remaining limitations.

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Contents

Translingual Practices and Neoliberal Policies . . . . 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Neoliberal Orientations to Language. . . . . . . . . . . 4 Language Policy and Practice in Skilled Migration. 4.1 Confirming Neoliberal Expectations . . . . . . . 4.2 Tensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Resistance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Implications for Development . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 In-Group Communicative Practices . . . . . . . 4.6 Dispositions and Socialization . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Distinguishing Language Ideologies and Practices . 6 Theoretical Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Pedagogical Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Translingual Practices and Neoliberal Policies

Abstract In this book, I respond to recent criticisms that the research and theorization of multilingualism by applied linguists are in collusion with neoliberal policies and economic interests. While acknowledging that neoliberal agencies can appropriate diverse languages and language practices, including resources and dispositions theorized by scholars of multilingualism, I argue that we have to distinguish the language ideologies informing communicative practices. Those of neoliberal agencies are motivated by distinct ideological orientations that diverge from the theorization of multilingual practices by critical applied linguists. I draw from my empirical research on skilled migration to demonstrate how sub-Saharan African professionals in English-dominant workplaces in UK, USA, Australia, and South Africa resist the neoliberal communicative expectations to deploy alternate practices informed by critical dispositions. These practices have the potential to reconfigure neoliberal orientations to material development. I label the latter as informed by a postcolonial language ideology, to distinguish it from that of neoliberalism. While neoliberal agencies keep languages separated and hierarchical, treating them as instrumental for profit-making purposes, my informants focus on the synergy between languages to generate new meanings and norms, which are strategically negotiated for ethical interests, inclusive interactions, and holistic ecological development. I thus clarify that the way critical scholars and multilinguals relate to language diversity is different from the way neoliberal policies and agencies use multilingualism for their purposes.

Keywords Neoliberalism Translingual practice Multilingualism migration Language policy Development Africa

Skilled

1 Introduction The “multilingual turn” (May 2014) has been rightly considered as initiating a paradigm shift in applied linguistics. Multilingual policies have been theorized by critical applied linguists as more egalitarian and democratic for social relations © The Author(s) 2017 S. Canagarajah, Translingual Practices and Neoliberal Policies, SpringerBriefs in Linguistics, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41243-6_1

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within and across nations (see, for example, May 2001; Skuttnab-Kangas 2002). Scholars in other disciplines are also beginning to promote social and institutional policies to accommodate multilingualism. Economists have been arguing that multilingualism can be beneficial for workplaces (Gazzola and Grin 2013; Grin 2001; Pool 1996). Social theorists such as Vertovec (2007) have treated superdiversity as a fact of contemporary life, and motivate sociolinguists to consider how social institutions might accommodate the semiotic resources people bring with them in mobility (see Blommaert 2010). The multilingual turn has now generated a philosophical critique of central constructs in applied linguistics, such as language competence, acquisition, and proficiency (Ortega 2014), not to mention text construction, communicative interactions, and pedagogical practices (see May 2014). While multilingualism is being heralded as a desirable turn toward more inclusive communicative policies and practices in society and institutions, some scholars have cautioned that it might serve the interests and agendas of neoliberal agencies (Flores 2013; Kubota 2014). They argue that neoliberal economics and ideologies value the same dispositions and competencies promoted by scholars in the multilingual turn. This is a timely and well-meant caution. As scholars in the multilingual turn have been more focused on resisting monolingual ideologies stemming from 17th century European modernity (see Blommaert and Verschueren 1992; Bauman and Briggs 2000), they have overlooked the possible appropriation of their work by more recent movements, such as neoliberalism, for profit-making and privileged interests. Examining the way critical applied linguists and neoliberal agencies relate to language diversity will bring about some much needed clarity on language ideologies and help develop more ethical and inclusive language competencies, dispositions, and practices. While this criticism is well taken, some scholars take the argument further to condemn the whole of multilingual scholarship. Pavlenko (forthcoming) has recently charged that the scholarship on superdiversity (to which advocates of multilingualism like Blommaert, Blackledge, and Rampton belong) is an effort to benefit from neoliberal interests of publishing and academic advancement. Kubota (2014) also goes further, unlike Flores (2013), to charge that the “privileged status and the politics of multi/plural turn are implicated in multiculturalism in a neoliberal era” (p. 12). Critical multilingual scholars are presented as disconnected from real life or everyday struggles of ordinary people, and their scholarly constructs are treated as espousing elite and establishment interests. In referring to this scholarship, Kubota states: “its knowledge is becoming another canon—a canon which is integrated into a neoliberal capitalist academic culture of incessant knowledge production and competition for economic and symbolic capital, and neoliberal multiculturalism that celebrates individual cosmopolitanism and plurilingualism for socioeconomic mobility” (p. 2). The constructs of these scholars are characterized as tailored for individual mobility, presumably uninformed by collective interests and power differences. Therefore, she considers this scholarship “a multi/plural bandwagon” (p. 16).

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In this book, I distinguish the language practices and language ideologies of neoliberalism from those of multilingual subjects and scholars who adopt a critical orientation. I demonstrate how the economic and ideological interests behind neoliberalism motivate it to relate to languages in distinct ways. While neoliberalism can be very fluid and expansive, appropriating diverse languages and communicative practices for its purposes, it is also limited by its material interests. Though we have to beware of essentializing social movements and institutions, we have to be also concerned about a stultifying relativism that fails to make important ideological distinctions. We must realize that the appropriation of language practices by neoliberalism is not endless or indeterminate. Of course, neoliberalism might profess ethical values and democratic concerns; but it can’t adopt or practice them without abandoning its material and ideological interests. After a point, neoliberalism cannot appropriate ideologies and practices without sacrificing its interests of profit accumulation and private property. Therefore, we have to delineate the ideological boundaries beyond which neoliberalism cannot proceed without changing its character. We have to identify critical uses of multilingual resources and practices, informed by empowering and collective ideologies and interests, to facilitate ethical communicative and social relations. If not, the scholarship critiquing multilingualism will be one-sided, sponsoring over-determined ideological and social analyses that provide no space for critical thinking or communication. For this purpose, I draw from research into multilingual workplace communication to inform the theoretical debates. I first introduce the discourses articulating the complicity between neoliberalism and multilingual scholarship. Then I review the studies on neoliberal communicative policies in diverse work contexts to delineate the language ideologies motivating them. After that, I proceed to look closely at data from migrant professionals on their perspectives on communication and relationships in Anglophone workplaces. Considering that skilled migration is actively promoted by neoliberal agencies as facilitating global economic and technological development (Kuznetsov 2006), it is useful to look at how communication policies are shaped by these agendas. I analyze how the communicative practices and dispositions professionals from multilingual communities bring to these sites are implicated in neoliberal interests in some ways—while also having the potential to resist and perhaps reconfigure neoliberal approaches to development. Disentangling the resistant communicative practices and language ideologies from limiting polices and practices would be a corrective to painting all multilingual practices with the same brush. I also argue that it is such critical practices and ideologies that most multilingual scholars theorize, correcting the generalization that all of them are promoting neoliberal interests. A terminological distinction before I begin. I adopt the term “translingual practice” for what some applied linguists (such as May 2014) and critics (such as Kubota 2014) have labeled “multilingual”. As I will demonstrate below, this terminological distinction will help us distinguish between different ways of conceptualizing language diversity. Translingual practice, as defined by leading scholars in recent publications (such as Blommaert 2010; Garcia and Li Wei 2014;

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Pennycook 2010; Canagarajah 2013a; Garcia 2009) conceives of language resources as always mobile and in contact, generating new grammars and meanings. Scholars like Monica Heller (1999) and Jim Cummins (2008) reserve the term “multilingual” to an orientation to labeled languages as separate, and maintaining their autonomy, even in situations of contact. May’s (2014) notion of multilingual does come close to the notion of translingual as I define it here. Terms others have used, such as “metrolingualism” (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015) and “plurilingualism” (Garcia 2009) are also similar to translingual practice. Though labels are important to identify, discuss, and analyze communicative orientations, practice always comes first. Translinguality has particularly been defined as a form of strategic practice (Canagarajah 2013a). From this perspective, such practices will always be reconfigured in relation to the dominant ideological tendencies that attempt to appropriate them for limited purposes. Hence the emphasis on “practice” rather than the “ism” in this scholarship. Furthermore, the “trans” in translingual practice has been treated as providing a transformative edge to these language practices (Li Wei and Hua 2013; Garcia and Li Wei 2014). The use of multilingual resources, theorized by these scholars, is not merely for reflecting and constituting pre-existing meanings and relationships, but for transforming them. Note that if translingualism is by definition a transformative practice (not a set of ideas or a conceptual model), practitioners of this approach will always resist and renegotiate any movement, institution, or ideology that attempts to compromise them. Though neoliberal agencies might adopt certain dispositions and language practices that have been identified by translingual scholars, they would be informed by a different language ideology from that theorized by critical applied linguists. Neoliberalism would use them for functional purposes of efficiency and profit accumulation. Therefore, I proceed to distinguish a reductive translingualism (used by neoliberalism) from the expansive translingualism theorized by applied linguists in my analysis below. For purposes of engaging in this debate, I label the scholars critiqued by Pavlenko, Kubota, and Flores as “translingual scholars”. This label is for convenience, knowing full well that it is unwise to essentialize translingualism into a movement or a school. I have discussed diversity among these scholars elsewhere, and engaged in friendly critique to bring out slight differences in our work (see Canagarajah 2013a). In fact, it is salutary that this orientation has not been formalized into a canon, theory, or model. This resistance to being “disciplined” preserves the critical edge of this orientation, as scholars theorize ground up the practices they observe in diverse times and places. I have noted elsewhere that the scholars theorizing this practice come from diverse geographical regions, including Africa, South Asia, and South America. Though the discourses relating to this practice are new in the West, translingualism has been practiced and discussed for centuries earlier by scholars elsewhere (see Kubchandani 1997). Though we must respect the important differences in their orientation beyond their commonalties, I argue below that the dispositions and practices critics associate with neoliberalism are different from those theorized by translingual scholars. Such clarity is important to identify the possibility for critical thinking and communication among those

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scholars (including me) who don’t adopt a deterministic orientation to power (i.e., that all practices will be appropriated by neoliberalism) or a stultifying constructivism (i.e., that demonstrating the distinction between communicative practices and ideologies will lead to essentializing them). It is important to begin with a general orientation to neoliberalism here, though I will show that it too is variable in realization. Harvey’s definition is suitable for our purposes. According to him neoliberalism is “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2005: 2). We have to keep in mind the emphasis on individual freedom and free enterprise, and their association with material well-being. Though neoliberalism might profess different values and appropriate diverse practices, they will be tied to the aforementioned objectives. Yet, neoliberalism finds slightly different representations in terms of its economics, politics, ideology, and governmentality (see Springer 2012). There are subtle tensions between each level of consideration, with some scholars claiming that it is this very inconsistency which neoliberal agencies exploit to achieve their interests (Holborow 2015). For example, while neoliberal economics is based on free market enterprise with limited regulation, the politics of neoliberal agencies assumes state protection of private property, business interests, and capital accumulation of the elite. As we have seen in the US and other countries recently, certain business enterprises expect to be bailed out by the state when they face the prospect of bankruptcy. Neoliberal ideology is that individuals, communities, and institutions have to be enterprising and further their own interests without looking for outside help. Failure is explained as one’s own lack of agency and effort. However, not all such enterprising activities are bound to be successful because the market competition is not inclusive of everyone’s interests. Not everyone is on a level playing field, and the competition is not necessarily fair. Thus neoliberal economics is at tension with its professed discourses. The governmentality (or biopolitics) of neoliberalism focuses on developing the dispositions required for success in the market economy (Foucault 1991). Since one has to be flexible to move across borders and professions as the market dictates, people are expected to develop a portfolio of skills and resources through lifelong learning. However, these seemingly creative and expansive dispositions come into conflict with the requirements of market competition, limiting the skills and resources to those that are profitable. Also, these dispositions are often trumped by one’s biological attributes of class, gender, or race in defining one’s success. This economic inequality contradicts the assumptions behind the egalitarian neoliberal ideology and biopolitics. I will demonstrate below that the neoliberal language implications deriving from these tensions are similarly inconsistent and unpredictable. However, I will also show that beyond the inconsistencies in neoliberalism, there are certain clear material and ideological interests. In fact, the inconsistencies in the values and practices professed benefit its material interests.

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I will label a competing ideology, that which favors subaltern people, collective interests, and holistic community and ecological well-being, constituting communicative practices that are opposed to (and aiming to move beyond) neoliberalism. Some prefer the term postliberal (Petrovic 2014). However, the practices I present as translingual are not recent, and do not follow neoliberalism. Some scholars have presented these communicative practices as late modern (see Pennycook 2010; Rampton 2008), informing contemporary urban forms of superdiversity (Blommaert 2013). I consider what is currently being theorized as translingualism as a form of communicative practice and language ideology that has existed for a long time, though it has been suppressed by modernist European discourses (that favored territoriality, ownership, and stable autonomous structures) since modernist Enlightenment. Perhaps we can adopt the term postcolonial, with the proviso that the label not be interpreted in the chronological sense of a movement following 17th century European colonization. More broadly, postcolonialism stands for resistant ideologies and local practices that defy colonizing discourses and agencies of any time and place (as treated by humanists in the long duree orientation—see Heng 2015).

2 The Critique Before I discuss the ideologies informing neoliberal discourses and its communicative practices, it is important to listen to the scholars who perceive complicity between neoliberalism and translingualism. I treat the seminal publications that make this critique—those of Flores (2013) and Kubota (2014)—as illustrative of a trending discourse on the limitations of translingualism. As these scholars share many critical perspectives in common with translingual scholars, and they have other publications where they develop other features of this argument, we must not treat these publications as representative of their positions in general. What these publications represent is a particular type of discourse on language politics that requires close analysis. I do a close reading of Kubota (2014) later in order to differentiate a form of language politics that is widely shared but differs from that of many scholars theorizing translingual practices. Distinguishing the different ways in which critical applied linguists relate to language politics should help provide much needed clarity in debates of this nature. Nelson Flores (2013) compares the discourses of the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the desired subject for neoliberal economic production with the pedagogical proposals of the Council of Europe. He treats publications sponsored by each organization as representative of their discourses. Featured prominently in his discussion is OECD’s understanding of human capital, which articulates the communicative competencies and dispositions expected from workers in the context of globalization and the knowledge economy. These competencies are supposed to be internalized by entrepreneurial subjects

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through lifelong learning and self-development. Flores finds the same assumptions informing the plurilingual pedagogies promoted by the Council of Europe. Since plurilingualism is becoming popular among professionals in TESOL (i.e., Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) who speak of a “dynamic turn” in teaching English, Flores sees the possibility of collusion: This dynamic turn in TESOL has informed the emergence of plurilingualism as a policy ideal among language education scholars in the European Union. This article argues that this shift in the field of TESOL parallels the characteristics of the ideal neoliberal subject that fits the political and economic context of the current sociohistorical period—in particular, the desire for flexible workers and lifelong learners to perform service-oriented and technological jobs as part of a post-Fordist political economy. These parallels indicate a need for a more critical treatment of the concept of plurilingualism to avoid complicity with the promotion of a covert neoliberal agenda (2013: 500).

Thus Flores alerts us to possibilities of complicity rather than treating the whole scholarship of plurilingualism as tainted by definition. Ryuko Kubota identifies the scholarship of many of the translingual scholars mentioned above (including Nelson Flores’s work on dynamic bilingualism—see Garcia and Flores 2012) as belonging to a “multi/plural turn” that colludes with neoliberalism. She treats as their defining conceptual feature a valorization of hybridity. She associates hybridity as belonging to the postcolonial discourse (defined as a recent western academic movement), as she proceeds to marshal arguments against postcoloniality and hybridity to criticize the multilingual turn. An important dimension of her argument is that the hybridity-focused school of postcoloniality has now become the academic status quo and, thus, elitist. She claims that this status has motivated the movement to ignore issues of power, making it insensitive to the language and communicative practices of diverse contexts and communities, including those of the disempowered. The following statement in her abstract demonstrates her line of reasoning: The multi/plural turn parallels postcolonial theory in that they both support hybridity and fluidity while problematizing the essentialist understanding of language and identity. However, postcolonial theory, which has been influenced by poststructuralism, met criticisms in the 1990s in cultural studies. The notion of hybridity has been especially criticized for its privileged status, individual orientation, and disparity between theory and practice. Furthermore, the conceptual features of the multi/plural turn overlap with neoliberalism and neoliberal multiculturalism, which uncritically support diversity, plurality, flexibility, individualism, and cosmopolitanism, while perpetuating color-blindness and racism (2014: 1).

While Flores warns of a possibility of appropriation, Kubota goes further to see problems with the fundamental conceptual features of plurilingualism, thus damning the whole movement. She sees the values and concepts of plurilingualism as implicated in evils such as privileged status, color-blindness, and racism. Before examining the ideologies behind these diverse language practices, it is important to identify the common rhetorical moves and reasoning processes in these exemplary publications. The equation of neoliberalism and translingualism might be based on certain controversial assumptions that need to be clarified. Thus this

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discussion can proceed to a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between both movements below. I identify the main tendencies in their argument about complicity as follows: (a) Words such as “turn”, “emergence”, “overlap”, “increased focus”, “shift”, and “parallels” in the excerpts above point to the fact that the authors see both movements as recent and co-occurring in time. It is certainly a valid question why translingual scholarship is popular at the time when neoliberal discourses are also becoming dominant. However, we have to be careful not to accuse translingual scholarship to be guilty by association. As this well-known fallacy would alert us, the fact that a set of events happen simultaneously doesn’t have to indicate a cause/effect relationship or signify a commonality between them. Their connections can be complex, not necessarily one of collusion or complicity. Furthermore, as I have pointed out above, translingual practices are not new. Translingualism is the “always already” of how language works in social practice. I have discussed extensively how in both the East and the West translingual practices have thrived before modernity and continue to be practiced despite the dominance of monolingual ideologies after Enlightenment (see Canagarajah 2013a). Recent movements such as globalization, migration, and postcoloniality only bring into visibility in academia and theoretical discourses translingual practices that have always been around. (b) The terms “parallels” and “overlap” are also used by both scholars to point to conceptual similarities. The fact that both movements share certain seemingly common tendencies perhaps makes them appear collusive. In addition to hybridity, multilingualism, and lifelong learning, we can identity many other features shared in the discourses of both movements. They are a focus on diversity, flexibility, collaboration, dispositions, multiculturalism, intercultural relations, and repertoires (of skills and competencies). However, we have to be open to the fact that these constructs might be defined differently by both movements and put to use for different purposes, as I will demonstrate below. Though certainly slippery, suspicious, and prone to deception (which perhaps explains the possibility of appropriation of these terms for oppressive and exploitative purposes by certain interest groups), we shouldn’t let the similarity of terminology go unexamined. We should deconstruct them for their underlying ideologies and interests. While I will closely examine the parallels relating to communicative practices and ideological discourses later, it is important to illustrate here how hybridity (a notion that Kubota treats as central to this collusion) is used by neoliberal agencies and critical applied linguists. We must note, however, that translingual scholars rarely couch their theoretical positions in terms of hybridity. If their position resembles hybridity, it is informed by the distinction Homi Bhabha makes (thus suggesting that not all postcolonial scholars use the term in ways critiqued by Kubota). Homi Bhabha (1999) makes a distinction between hybridity as a product versus hybridity as a practice:

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For me, hybridization is really about how you negotiate between texts or cultures or practices in a situation of power imbalances in order to be able to see the way in which strategies of appropriation, revision, and iteration can produce possibilities for those who are less advantaged to be able to grasp in a moment of emergency, in the very process of the exchange or the negotiation, the advantage. [. . .] For me, hybridization is a discursive, enunciatory, cultural, subjective process having to do with the struggle around authority, authorization, deauthorization, and the revision of authority. It’s a social process. It’s not about persons of diverse cultural tastes and fashions (39).

From this perspective, hybridity as an idea, notion, or claim is different from hybridity as a form of practice. Kubota’s critique is based on the definition of hybridity as a state of essentialized personal or textual attribute. She characterizes it as “more focused on individual subject positions than on group identity” (10, 11). In certain places, she treats translingual scholars as holding the position that hybridity is made up of two individual essences (without citing which scholars she is thinking about). She states, “the notion of hybridity is predicated on the existence of nonhybrid cultures” (6). In other places, she understands hybridity as relating to an individual’s communicative or identity realization, charging that translingual scholars favor “rhetorical hybridity to be achieved by mixing culturally essentialized rhetorical styles in academic writing for unique self-expression” (7). However, translingual scholars analyze how the set of languages, values, or identities multilinguals bring are negotiated situationally in relation to the dominant norms in that context for voice, critique, and representation (Canagarajah 2013b). Following Bhabha, hybridity is a form of strategic renegotiation to resist dominant values and norms that might silence or disempower the speaker/writer. My own understanding and those of other translingual scholars is that of hybridization as collective, politically situated, strategies of resistance for more empowering identity and communicative positioning. (c) Because Flores and Kubota depend so much on “parallels” between both movements to prove their collusion, they fail to discuss the linguistics or pedagogy of translingual scholars. The scholars cited above as exemplifying the translingual orientation are never discussed closely to analyze their research or scholarship. They are reduced to citations to connect their work with neoliberalism. One has to discuss their research, methods, and theorization to develop a nuanced understanding of their position on translingualism and its politics. For example, Kubota charges translingual scholars as insensitive to power. They are treated as uncritical, when she states that they “uncritically support diversity, plurality, flexibility, individualism, and cosmopolitanism, while perpetuating color-blindness and racism (2014: 1). She also presents their positions as individualistic, in her repeated characterization and implication of their scholarship. Thus she calls for “a shift in attention from individual plurality and hybridity to asymmetrical power relations, social injustices, and resistance” (2–3). She goes on to charge that “the discourse that underscores plurality and hybridity sidesteps the hegemonic ideologies and social practices” (17). She further connects translingualism with individual choice and elitism: “The multi/ plural turn thus parallels the

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underlying ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism—that is, individualism, difference-blindness, and elitist cosmopolitanism rather than critical acknowledgement of power” (14). Such a treatment leads to a stereotyping of the position of translingual scholars. However, power is the defining context in which translingual scholars explore language practices, as a close analysis of their work will show. In fact, scholars like Blommaert, Block, and Rampton have a long standing concern for class differences in language practice. There are, however, differences in the understanding of power between translingual scholars and their critics, which I will discuss later below. (d) Both neoliberalism and translingualism are characterized through policy discourses in establishing their collusion. The characterization of both movements is based on policy documents published by OECD and Council of Europe. Kubota in fact invokes the connection Flores (2013) makes in his article between neoliberalism and plurilingualism to develop her criticism. However, there is a big difference between policy and practice. When we consider how neoliberalism works in practice, we will understand many subtle tensions and inconsistencies which would suggest a more complex orientation to languages. Furthermore, the work of most translingual scholars is empirical, as they consider the play of language and power in situated contexts. Limiting the argument to policy discourses without considering empirical contexts where multilingual and neoliberal interests are played out is bound to generate a distorted view of their connections. (e) There is a danger in generalizing neoliberalism according to a set of theoretical constructs such as hybridity or multi/pluri/trans-lingualism. For example, Kubota characterizes neoliberalism as follows: “It is clear that the multi/plural approaches are complicit in neoliberal multiculturalism in that both focus on the individual rather than group solidarity” (15). However, neoliberalism does focus on group interests and collaboration, as we will see below. It promotes ethnic and regional interests in marketing. However, this promotion is for marketing purposes. Therefore, we need to identify the more subtle motivations and interests in the way group solidarity is invoked. Furthermore, equating neoliberalism with multi/pluri/translingualism or hybridity is misleading for another reason. There are differences between the profession, policy, and practice in neoliberal institutions. While some institutions may profess multilingualism and multiculturalism, they are dictated by efficiency and profit-making to enforce as their policy for workplace communication only one language (or a limited set of languages). Urciuoli and LaDousa (2013) point out that modernist notions of productivity and Taylorist work specialization still dominate neoliberal workplaces, turning communication into an instrument for efficiency: “Neoliberal regimes of linguistic production are a contemporary capitalist spin on F.W. Taylor’s late-nineteenth century industrial philosophy of scientific management” (177). Therefore, monolingualism is preferred. However, the institutions might turn a blind eye to multilingualism in informal contexts as workers or clients interact through other languages in the workplace. Loy Lising (forthcoming) confirms this inconsistency

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in workplace communication in contexts of skilled migration. A majority of the studies she reviews demonstrate that despite their profession of diversity, workplaces adopted a single language (usually English in anglophone countries) as the expected mode of communication among their employees. (f) Generalizing neoliberalism according to a set of theoretical constructs such as multilingualism or hybridity is also not sensitive to variations in different geographical spaces. We must note that neoliberalism and its realization are different in different countries and regions. How it is applied shows slight variations in Europe, USA, South America, and China (see Harvey 2005). In fact, sociolinguists have pointed out the “unevenness” of linguistic markets around the world (Park and Wee 2012; Shin and Park 2015). Whether multilingualism or monolingualism is desired, and which language is treated as capital, depend considerably on the configuration of economic, political, and historical factors in each context. Having cleared the ground of some frequent misconceptions and rhetorical moves in such debates, we are now ready to explore how neoliberalism relates to language relations. I provide a brief overview of studies on the orientations to language in neoliberalism to identify the language ideologies motivating these practices.

3 Neoliberal Orientations to Language I will discuss the implications for language according to certain key words of neoliberalism, as identified by applied and sociolinguists (see Holborow 2015; Heller and Duchene 2012; McElhinney 2012) in the manner of Raymond Williams’ (1981) influential publication Keywords. I demonstrate the slightly variable neoliberal language expectations according to different contexts and priorities, but eventually identify some fundamental ideological similarities. I argue that while neoliberalism does utilize and sponsor multilingual resources, its adoption of languages and their forms is limited in scope and practice, shaped by its focus on profit-making and material development. I formulate what emerges as a neoliberal language ideology and bring out its implications for a “neoliberal linguistics” by unpacking the following keywords: • • • • • •

Flexibilization Tertiarization Market saturation Distinction Entrepreneurialism Human capital

Flexibilization (Heller and Duchene 2012) holds that people and institutions have to adapt to fluid market conditions. Production activities have to be ready to

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move to different locations as costs are reduced, new resources are identified, and profit is maximized. Workers move across jobs and work sites as market forces dictate production and marketing activities. While what it means to be flexible with communication in relation to this mobility and fluidity can be interpreted differently (and I will show alternatives from my data), Heller and Duchene (2012) find that many institutions interpret flexibility as deriving from scripted communication. Communication is supposed to gain in efficiency and clarity, whatever language is involved in different contexts, if it is scripted. Cameron (2000) has analyzed the scripted discourse in service encounters around the world (i.e., greeting, solicitation, and closing of transactions). We also know that call center communication is heavily scripted (Uricuoli and LaDousa 2013). Such uniformity of discourse is assumed to help in many ways. Customers all over the world might expect predictable treatment and efficiently transact business, regardless of the language and cultural backgrounds they come from. It is also easy to monitor, assess, and train workers for these service encounters (see Uricuoli and LaDoua 2013). It is as if communication is automated. Even a machine can conduct such scripted communication—as it is very much becoming a reality in many service encounters (Uricuoli and LaDoua 2013). Duchene and Heller point out that there is no place for identity or voice in such communicative acts: “Global management, in its search for taylorist modes of regularization carried through from modern economic activities, often also looks for ways to technicize and standardize linguistic regulation techniques. These techniques construct language as a technical skill, decoupled from authenticity” (Heller and Duchene 2012: 10). Authenticity, in the form of identity, voice, or local values, becomes a distraction or counter-productive for the more efficient conduct of business. The need for uniformity is so important that Urcuoli and LaDousa (2013) point out that the translation from English to French in Canada for bilingual call agents is very mechanical and literal, sounding unidiomatic in French. Facilitating flexibility of interactions across markets is also understood as deriving from the use of a single global language. From this point of view, English is promoted as a lingua franca that can facilitate communication across national boundaries. Though there are different types of English spoken around the world, it is the native speaker varieties that are treated as the linguistic capital in policy circles in industries and immigration. This understanding is clear in the assessment procedures instituted by many countries to make decisions on migrant professionals. In UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, IELTS (International English Language Testing System) is used for making such decisions. IELTS adopts native speaker varieties as the norm for assessing the competence of its subjects. We are finding that this prioritization of English as the language of industries and workplace is being taken up widely by communities outside native speaker settings—in countries in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. The Japanese company Honda recently announced that it will institute English as the language for its official interactions in recognition of its global status (Honda adopts 2013). That English is the lingua franca of global commerce, industries, and other economic transactions has now started shaping language-in-education policies in

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diverse countries. In fact, the “Washington consensus” of US treasury, World Bank, and IMF is promoting the teaching of English together with deregulation in many developing communities (see Piller and Cho 2013). How this ideology has created a mass frenzy for learning English in Korea (locally known as “English fever”) is well documented (Piller and Cho 2013). There are examples of this commodification of English from other countries such as Philippines (Martin 2012; Lorente 2012). Beyond official state policies that promote English in schools, English is also marketed to people by mushrooming private tutorial centers around the world. They all claim to sell native varieties, such as Oxford English or Wall Street English. Ironically, the previous postcolonial move of reviving local languages against the hegemony of colonial European languages has been abandoned without much fanfare as everyone has been swept off their feet with the lucrative neoliberal discourses associated with English. In all these ways, English is being turned into a commodity: i.e., it is not only being sold as a linguistic capital, but objectified as an instrumental language for material purposes, without considering its deeper meaning potential. It has thus been turned into a product (in all senses of that word). There are other damages. Though the promotion of English is presented as a way of expanding one’s multilingual resources, it reduces one’s repertoire, as it is often learned/taught at the cost of local languages. Phillipson (2008) has drawn attention to the irony of English gaining in dominance in Europe and elsewhere under the claim of multilingualism. From another perspective, this is the logical culmination of modernist discourses that envisioned that just as small industries will give way to mass production, vernaculars will give way to a powerful single language for the sake of efficiency (see Heller and Duchene 2012 for a review). As we see, neoliberal agencies might use monolingualism or multilingualism for their purposes. They can also use features of what has been theorized as plurilingualism or translingualism for their purposes. In a much needed focus on non-Anglophone workplaces, Kubota (2013) brings out the expectations of Japanese managers of manufacturing companies in China as to Japanese and Chinese workers. It turns out that the managers don’t expect full and whole competence in languages, but the ability to achieve their functional interactional goals through what Blommaert might call “fragmented multilingualism” (Blommaert 2010: 9), Kubota characterizes their expectation thus: “It is competence to convey messages in a concise, focused, and intelligible manner through written and oral modes of communication (e.g., drawing pictures, writing down, hitsudan (brush talk), whereby expatriates write key Chinese character(s) to convey or confirm intended meaning— see Hwang (2009), paraphrasing, exemplifying, using hand and body gestures, and using real objects” (2013: 11). In this sense, what Japanese managers expect is not formal proficiency but functional efficiency. I would label this “reductive translingualism” as I will demonstrate below that it is motivated by a language ideology and objectives that differ from those theorized by critical translingual scholars. A second keyword in neoliberal economics and discourses is tertiarization. While production based on raw materials and its conversion into synthetic products were the first and second stages of industrialization, it is symbolic production relating to product development, marketing, and networking that are more

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important in the current tertiary stage. To put it cynically, it is not the product or the materials it is made up of that are different, but the way the product is branded. Tertiarization in production activities thus calls for a lot of language work. Whereas it was considered that language or knowledge was not central to production in the first two stages, with body power expected as the main requirement (and talk censored in many factory floors—see Boutet 2012), we now speak of a knowledge economy that gives more importance to communication. We even have “language workers” in the form of those in advertising, translating, interpreting, and ghost writing. However, this increasing importance given to symbolic production is also reduced in significance as it is subservient to the interests of production and profit. In many cases, this type of language work is turned into a product or commodity. Consider ghost writers. As they write for payment, on the demand of production and marketing companies, they are alienated from their own language product. Their texts are sometimes written to promote materialistic and unethical interests, which don’t provide spaces for the writers’ own voice and values (see Brandt 2009). Similarly, translation and interpretation services, which are supposed to facilitate intercultural and intercommunity contact, are leaning towards efficiency and developing less time consuming ways of decoding languages. Technologies developed to facilitate such services are based on algorithms, based on frequency of use, without going into the nuances of situated communication (see Uricuoli and LaDousa 2013). Though there is more scope for multilingual work nowadays then, the needs of efficiency and profit limit the representation of deeper issues of voice, aesthetics, and ethics, in what approximates a “reductive translingualism”. Symbolic work is especially relevant for the third keyword, market saturation. In a context where there is a glut of products on the market, branding gains significance. Niche marketing is one way in which industries can reach new buyers. While branding and niche marketing can employ diverse languages, they can also lead to stereotyping and superficial usage. For example, many telephone companies in the US use a greeting in different languages in their television advertisements to show their commitment to diversity and an international clientele. Using stereotypical greeting forms, almost as a token to represent different communities, cannot be considered complementary to the languages. Such uses depend for their meaning and effectiveness on the “1 language = 1 community” ideology, as they employ each language to symbolize a community. To give another example of niche marketing, some call centers are open to using more than one language in response to the needs of their multilingual clients. For example, call agents in Quebec are open to using English or French, as preferred by clients. However, Heller and Duchene (2012) observe that they are not allowed to mix the codes or tolerate customers mixing them: “both is not an option, either for caller or responder” (13). A similar observation is made by Urla (2012) about call agents in Basque, Spain. The languages permitted are English, Spanish, and Basque, but they are treated hierarchically, in the order listed, and mixing is not an option. Though there is scope for multilingualism in niche marketing, languages are treated as separate and hierarchical. The reason for this might be efficiency, standardization, and surveillance. If languages are mixed, they open the communicative interaction to

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unpredictable meanings and outcomes. Mixing complicates the scripting and uniformity that institutions prefer in the “new regimes of surveillance” (Uricuoli and LaDousa 2013: 184). It might be difficult for supervisors to assess, monitor, and train their employees when the mix of languages is unpredictable. Another response to market saturation is to add value to the products. This calls for distinction (invoking Bourdieu’s 1984 use of the term). Distinction can be provided by the claim that the product draws from a long local tradition that counters impersonal and generic production. As we know, if a product can claim authenticity as added value, it fares better in market competition. Certain forms of identity deriving from tradition and pedigree can provide cachet to those products. Such purposes of distinction and value adding can give scope for multilingualism. In York, UK, I found that a tour guide in a walk through the historic city adopted the local Yorkshire accent, though he mentioned that he comes from another region and adopted a different accent in a conversation after the tour. Thus, he was selling an accent and a locality. Heller discusses a similar case in China, where the guides from urban contexts adopt a rural accent and ethos. Scholars in linguistic landscape studies have similarly shown how certain business enterprises use scripts resembling English, Japanese, or French (which don’t mean anything intelligible) to tap into claims of distinction (see Blommaert 2013). For example, Ben Said (2011) notes that a restaurant selling Japanese food in Tunisia uses Japanese-looking scripts, which are actually undecipherable and don’t mean anything. Thus the use of multilingual resources in these contexts is exploitative. Though there is scope for multilingualism then, the meaning potential of these languages is narrowed down for profit-making purposes. Language is used as an artifact in a product-oriented manner, for commercial interests, without an interest in its complex meaning-making capacity. These types of speech are performative of authenticity, and should be considered exploitative. Though these practices draw from features such as crossing (Rampton 2008) and truncated multilingualism (Blommaert 2010), theorized by translingual scholars, we must consider them a reduced form for limited profit-making purposes, and informed by a reductive language ideology. Value added might lead to different languages being valued in different markets (see Park and Wee 2012). Park and Lo elucidate how the unevenness of linguistic markets might shape the valuation of languages in unpredictable ways. So, Korean nationals who spend much of their life and resources in acquiring a native variety of English in the US or UK might be surprised when they return home. What local enterprises want now is more than English proficiency. They consider proficiency in Asian languages value added. Therefore, Park and Lo (2012) observe, “Transnational Korea is . . . a context where extreme valorization of the neoliberal personhood coexists with persistent belief in the centrality of the language-ethnicity-territory nexus. The new modes of Korean transnationalism interact with these ideologies in complex and diverse ways, highlighting the multiplicity and polycentricity inherent in the process of globalization” (160). Such language ideologies provide space for local languages in addition to English. We can imagine how the dispositions and standards expected would be altered in order to narrow the pool of suitable or efficient candidates for a position. We can also

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understand contexts where other languages such as French, Spanish, Chinese, or Arabic are treated as linguistic capital to suit local/national interests, with global English provided secondary status. While there is scope for resisting the dominance of English here, we must note that the linguistic market is not fully democratic or inclusive. While some languages have economic value or symbolic cachet, many vernaculars and non-elite languages are ignored. Therefore, these language ideologies of multilingualism should also be treated as reductive in implication. The need for adding value can motivate an enterprising orientation and the drive to increase one’s language repertoires by oneself. The ideal neoliberal subject would be flexible, having a portfolio of competencies that can be conveniently deployed as needed in different work settings. As a knowledge worker, the individual would bring communicative competencies adaptable for different cultural and social contexts. Moreover, as profit maximizing companies can’t spend their valuable resources on inculcating these capacities, it is left to the individual to develop them by themselves. Thus learning is expected to be self-directed, ongoing, and non-formal. The development of these skills would adopt styles of language socialization as “lifelong and lifewide” (Duff 2008: 257), similar to collaborative and situated learning as one engages in actual work situations. Such an orientation would certainly encourage neoliberal subjects to expand their linguistic repertoires, genre competencies, and communicative resources, facilitating multilingualism. However, we must note that this enterprising spirit is shaped by the needs of the market. The repertoires and capacities one acquires are designed to position one in advantage for education, employment, and personal socioeconomic advancement. It is understandable therefore that elite and profitable languages would be coveted, and the languages of underprivileged communities would be ignored. In interviews with Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in Canada, UK, and USA, I learn from community elders that families are encouraging the learning of Spanish, French, and German among their children, while ignoring the home language Tamil, leading to the threat of heritage language loss (Canagarajah 2008). The notion of self-enterprising learning has other limitations, as McElhinney (2012) articulates from her fieldwork in the Silicon Valley. Since learning and work now pervade all dimensions of life, including family and personal spheres, workers can be much stressed, losing creativity, critical thinking, and agency. The final keyword to consider, human capital, encapsulates the dispositions the ideal neoliberal subject acquires through such an enterprising orientation to learning and work. Among the many dispositions featured are the following: cognitive dispositions, such as creativity, adaptability, and thinking outside the box; social dispositions, such as networking and collaborating with others across geographical and professional boundaries; and cultural dispositions, such as intercultural understanding, tolerance, and cosmopolitan values. However, the laudable notions of creativity, collaboration, and understanding featured in these human capital discourses shouldn’t be taken at face value. Since profit making is still the key consideration in neoliberal enterprises, these dispositions have to be assessed in relation to other values such as efficiency.

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In her study on Japanese manufacturing companies, Kubota (2013) also finds that employers and workers value dispositions rather than language proficiency. She states: “Ability to communicate is supported by essential qualities, which were mentioned by interviewees and can be called communicative dispositions. They are divided into two categories: willingness to communicate and mutual accommodation” (11). Translingual scholars have discussed such dispositions as important for communication across difference. Therefore, we have to scrutinize the way neoliberal agencies theorize these dispositions. Note Kubota’s wording of them as “essential qualities”, reiterated below as “personal qualities”, thus defined in individual and cognitive ways. She goes on to describe them further: “Success for these manufacturing companies is predicated on producing and selling goods. Thus, distinguished professional competency as an expert in the field is indispensable for success. Equipped with personal qualities and an ability to communicate that is supported by communicative and foundational dispositions and cultural knowledge, expatriates believe that they can manage communicative demands” (2013: 14). We thus see that these dispositions are tethered to efficiency, managing diversity, and achieving material success. She further explains this disposition in another publication: “For these transnational workers, the priority is the ability to communicate, rather than being able to manipulate the language perfectly with native-like proficiency. Information needs to be conveyed precisely, because a major misunderstanding will lead to a financial loss” (2015b: 51). These dispositions are thus cultivated to reduce misunderstanding, and thus achieve efficiency and instrumentality. What we will find below is that multilinguals adopt these dispositions to negotiate diversity with sensitivity to ethics, affect, sociality, power differences, and meaning potential, beyond efficiency. Neoliberal agencies do have a place for critical thinking. Kubota (2013) identifies this feature also in some interviews with Japanese management personnel. She explains: ‘Becoming critically aware of one’s racial and cultural biases, as this statement indicates, constitutes the foundational dispositions. Cultural knowledge works in tandem with foundational dispositions and communicative dispositions, enabling effective communication. It includes an understanding of the history of China and Japan as well as the historical and political relations between the two. For a current expatriate (AC) for instance, Japan’s colonial history in China constitutes essential knowledge; understanding history from “both Japanese point of view and Chinese point of view” provides critical assessment of the legitimacy of a Japanese version’ (13). As we can see, this criticality is defined as a form of propositional knowledge. It constitutes information and facts about culture and history. As the description also suggests, these dispositions are tethered to “effective communication”. What we will find from translingual scholarship is that these dispositions emerge as a form of procedural knowledge (Canagarajah 2013a). It facilitates critical and collaborative communication with diverse others. More importantly, the criticality is not just balanced thinking or knowledge about racism, but a form of self-critical and reflective practice, that leads to identifying racism in oneself in an ongoing basis to guide interactions with others (Canagarajah 2013b). While this focus on dispositions resembles translingual scholarship, then, it is

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defined in reductive ways by neoliberal agencies to facilitate efficiency and profit making and don’t share the language ideology informing translingual practice. Neoliberal criticality is a form of knowledge, not transformative practice. We must also bear in mind the limitations of the human capital metaphor. Treating people and dispositions as “capital” points to a problem. They are valued for their money-making capacity. This orientation will limit the development and application of these dispositions. People’s choice of languages, orientation to meaning-making, language ideologies, and interpersonal negotiations will be constrained by the needs of efficient profit-making and capital accumulation. However collaboratively their learning and communicative skills are defined, the fact that ideal neoliberal subjects are eventually expected to be self-contained in their capacity to accommodate these features encourages a disposition of autonomous selves, with cognitive mastery and individuality (Gershon 2011). Note that it is individuals who are treated as capital, not groups or collectives. This orientation curtails the development of other dispositions such as distributed intelligence, situated thinking, and embodiment which require aligning one’s resources with others for collaborative outcomes. It can also limit dispositions such as self-criticism, reflection, reflexivity, patience, tolerance, and humility, which enhance intercultural interactions. In her articulation of a “code of cross-cultural conduct” for intercultural negotiations, rhetoric scholar Krista Ratcliffe (1999) discusses the need to go beyond appropriating the talk of others into one’s own frame of reference, and to develop more complex skills of critical reflexivity, reciprocity, and relentless negotiations to understand others in global contact zones. Scholars in global feminism also define them as emplaced in networks of structural inequality to consider how they can negotiate these expanding scales of power difference (Dingo 2013). Therefore, there are important ethical and ideological differences in the way collaborative dispositions are articulated by neoliberal agencies and translingual scholars. Once again, if these dispositions resemble that of translingualism, it is a reductive version for limited ulterior purposes. Furthermore, the needs of efficiency and profit accumulation limit the possibility of developing these time-consuming skills through sustained training or socialization. This need explains the limitations of the dispositions workers take across borders in neoliberal enterprises, sometimes after formal intercultural training. Kubota (2015a) finds from Japanese workers in China that they display racism and other biases against their Chinese co-workers. This and other attitudinal limitations prevent meaningful collaboration. Consider also how Filipino nannies are trained by the state to be “workers of the world” (Lorente 2012). English is the primary language constituting their repertoire, with short courses for rudimentary proficiency in other relevant languages (such as Chinese, Malay, or Thai) to demonstrate value added to specific countries to which they might be exported as workers. There is therefore a clear hierarchy of languages and a commodification to the point of treating dispositions as skills for expeditious export. In sum, though neoliberal economics, ideology, and biopolitics accommodate multilingualism, diversity, creativity, and flexibility, these features are shaped by

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the underlying mission of profit accumulation and material development. The contradictions and tensions result in these commendable collaborative values, dispositions, and practices (resembling those theorized by translingual scholars) being curtailed in their scope and complexity. Heller and Duchene (2012) explain this paradox in relation to the interplay between profit and pride. Pride motivates tapping into local tradition, identity, or ethos for adding value to production and marketing. Pride is also voice, and an affirmation of one’s preferred languages and discourses. Pride can promote dispositions that counteract instrumentality, efficiency, and impersonality, connoting community, caring, and engagement. However, pride has to be negotiated in relation to profit in the neoliberal dispensation. Profit requires that the products and services adopt some extent of standardization, efficiency, and management. If the product is too atypical, driven by creativity or authenticity, it will lose its recognizability in the market. Profit also requires expeditious production and marketing. Therefore, there is a limit to thinking outside the box, motivated by pride or authenticity. Profit requires efficiency and control for production. More importantly, a creative and ethical enterprise that is designed to empower ecological or community resources is not in the interest of commercial or production agencies that are fixated on profit accumulation. Eventually, pride has to fall in line with the requirements of profit and allow itself to be curtailed or exploited by economic imperatives. This paradox thus suggests the limits of neoliberalism. It can appropriate diverse language practices and communicative dispositions for its purposes. However, its material interests cannot allow it to go beyond a particular point without compromising or defeating its interests. If it does accommodate the practices and dispositions as theorized by translingual scholars and practiced by critical multilingual subjects, it wouldn’t be neoliberal but favor the subaltern! The review above suggests that we shouldn’t focus only on language practices and communicative dispositions, but consider them in relation to the interests they serve and the ideologies informing their use. From this point of view, it is not monolingualism, multilingualism, or translingualism that is the issue. Neoliberalism can appropriate all of them for its purposes. However, in making these practices serve its material interests of private profit accumulation, it adopts a specific language ideology. In relation to its ideology, its language practices and dispositions will take a particular character. Therefore, some features theorized by translingual scholars—such as truncated multilingualism, crossing, or collaborative dispositions —derive limited functionality, meaning potential, and social significance. Hence my label “reductive translingualism”. Note, in reverse, that homogeneously labeled languages can also be practiced in relation to a translingual orientation and postcolonial language ideology for empowering and egalitarian purposes (as I will demonstrate in a later section). My argument is that we have to go beyond language features and dispositions to considering the language ideologies and social interests motivating their use. For this reason, we need to examine language practices in situated domains, as I do below.

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4 Language Policy and Practice in Skilled Migration Skilled migration is motivated by neoliberal economics and ideologies. It is facilitated by the belief that opening up borders for the free flow of personnel and their talents, and competition in the global employment market, are a win/win situation for both the sending and the receiving countries (Kuznetsov 2006). The discourse can be characterized as follows: Talented professionals from the underdeveloped South get further training and education in the developed communities. As they use their knowledge and skills in global workplaces, they not only contribute to economic and technological progress in the West, they also contribute to the development of their own communities. Skilled migrants have been known to send remittances home to their families and communities; invest in new economic enterprises in their homeland; offer free consultation on educational and industrial initiatives; share their knowledge and skills by starting new development ventures; outsource work from the West to companies in their own communities; and facilitate the migration of others for education and employment in the West. The burgeoning reports and studies on remittances, bolstering the above narrative, have led to eclipsing the former discourses of “brain drain”, as resulting from the loss of skilled personnel from underdeveloped communities (Bhagwati 1976). The new discourse of “brain gain”, highlights the benefits to both sending and receiving communities (Kuznetsov 2006). While scholars have now begun to question the glorification of such benefits in development discourses (Glick-Schiller and Faist 2010), the place of language in the migration/development nexus needs more examination. With that in mind, I have spearheaded a series of studies on the experiences and perspectives of skilled migrants (see Canagarajah et al. 2011, 2013). In this book, I report from an interview based study of 65 sub-Saharan African professionals in English-dominant countries, namely UK, USA, Australia, and South Africa. I chose to focus on sub-Saharan African professionals, as past studies indicate that they are not as well organized or studied as professional diasporas from other countries such as India, China, Taiwan, Korea, and Columbia (Kuznetsov 2006; Mercer et al. 2008). The subjects largely come from professions in the fields of accounting, health care, management, and education (see demographic information in Appendix 1). My collaborators and I conducted face-to-face, telephone, and email interviews. All face-to-face and telephone interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Each interview ran for around 45–90 minutes. We conducted semi-structured interviews to elicit narratives on communication in work, community, and development activities. Our interview questions were framed in relation to the scholarly and policy discourses we intended to examine. The 18 interview questions, adjusted minimally for context, focused on eliciting information on five over riding themes of importance to this project:

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How does English shape the flow of skilled migrants and their trajectories of migration? In what ways does English shape the levels of success of skilled migrants? How do skilled migrants negotiate their different English varieties with those in the host communities? How do skilled migrants negotiate the tensions in identity deriving from different languages in relationships among themselves and with other communities? Are there language-related tensions as skilled migrants undertake development efforts in their home countries? We then coded the data along grounded theory to develop emergent findings (see Canagarajah et al. 2013 for further details on research procedures and analysis). Attempts were made through multiple iterations of open and select coding to arrive at representative themes, and guard ourselves from cherry picking statements for specific claims. However, I agree with scholars in the second wave of grounded theory approach that coding is not a totally objective process (Clarke 2005). The discourses of the migration/development nexus (outlined above) and our research questions framed the coding categories. As it will be seen below, the coding generated perspectives that complicated and corrected our guiding assumptions and questions. Other qualifications are in order for self-reported data of this nature. Since the employers or interlocutors in the interactions narrated by our subjects were not interviewed, no claims are made on the nature of uptake or success of communication. It is widely known that obtaining permissions to videotape workplace interactions is difficult, and I am unable to make claims about the interactional outcomes behind these claims. However, I hold that the attitudes and perceptions these informants narrate are not inconsequential to workplace interactions and development outcomes. People do act on their beliefs, and language ideologies are important for that reason (see Kroskristy 2000). Therefore, qualitative interview data should be valued for its insights into the communicative practices of migrant professionals. We have to also consider interviews as highly shaped and mediated interactions. A clear evidence of this is that informants changed their positions as the conversation evolved. Though nearly all subjects started the interviews by conforming to the established policies and affirming the value of English, they went on in the light of our questions to talk about resistance and diversity in the workplace. For this reason, it is difficult to give a statistical count on the distribution of subjects who agreed or disagreed with dominant policies or ideologies. To reflect this complexity, the report below represents the layered nature of the subjects’ views, explaining where they confirmed neoliberal ideologies and where, when, and why they resisted them. I show their views as demonstrating a mix of motives and attitudes. The objective is to identify the resistant language ideologies and practices for more conscious and programmatic development in future scholarly and policy work. For this reason, I am also avoiding the usual practice of using brief excerpts from the interviews to build my argument, omitting the larger contexts in which they were uttered. I provide expanded quotations to give more context and voice to

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the informants, and more details that might help readers build alternate narratives. Though the focus is on language, I provide data on broader issues of development work, as the attitudes on language practices are explained in relation to these larger objectives of mobile life and work.

4.1

Confirming Neoliberal Expectations

At face value, many of the informants appreciated the benefits of the neoliberal policy for facilitating their migration and employment. They were all thankful to their countries for providing them a strong English language education. They stated that this preparation enabled them to gain access to the opportunities for employment and higher education in the West. They could score well in tests such as IELTS in order to meet the relevant entry requirements to the West and qualifying requirements for employment and education. From this perspective, then, the pressure from the Washington Consensus to promote English education in developing countries had provided them access to better opportunities. They also mentioned how they fared well in adjusting to the educational and employment contexts as they were familiar with the dominant languages. Consider the attitude of one of my informants below: 1. LF (Zimbabwe, female, nurse in Leeds)1: Being a former British colony and the fact that our education was in English of course gave me and others who came here massive confidence given that our training and education was modelled along the British system. It is because I spoke the language that I chose to come here. Why would I have gone elsewhere, say France, when I can’t speak an iota of the language? Britain was a natural destination for me. I couldn’t have gone anywhere else. Other places that I considered going to, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America also speak English. It was just that the lure of the pound was too strong to resist. Then we used to make real money as the value of the pound to Zimbabwe dollar was huge. But, I agree with you, language played a very big role in me coming here. At my age, I wouldn’t have gone to learn another language, say French with a view of going to live and work in France. No one wants to go to France, it’s only now that we go there on holiday but we still don’t speak the language.

1

Broad transcriptions were adopted as the focus is on the content and not on phonetic features of their speech. Pseudonyms are followed by the country of the informant, gender, employment, and migrant location. The Interviewer is indicated by “I”. The following transcription conventions are used: @@@ laughter [xxx] unintelligible [. . . ] omitted from excerpt ( ) pause of 2 seconds or more

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It is ironic to hear LF praising the benefits of colonization. The fact that her country adopted a British-style educational system and English as the medium of education gave her an advantage in skilled migration. As the other desirable destinations for skilled migration are also English-speaking, she finds her home country training advantageous. The new status of English as a global language, as a continuation from its colonial status, shapes her successful pathways to migration. There is an affinity between the language she is proficient in and the countries she finds desirable for her migration. Many other subjects similarly disparaged the vernaculars of their home communities as useless for professional success and mobility when they opened the conversations with us. This favorable attitude towards a privileged Western language was no doubt shaped also by workplace policies which demanded such competence: 2. LA (Zimbabwe, female, nurse in Leeds): Those that are good at talking in English are quickly promoted. One girl I started with was promoted after three years on the job because she can talk fluently. She can write good English unlike me. So writing well and talking excellent English is important in this job. You need to read daily notes and write reports, incidents reports which everyone reads. So if you can’t write properly, then, others can’t understand what you are say. They also laugh at you for making mistakes in you reports. Also when someone comes to hospital and you on duty, you need to write what happened so others can read and know that people’s history, where they were and what kind of people they are. LA details the types of literacy in English required for different responsibilities in her work. She suggests that both fluent speaking and writing are considered important for promotion in the job. Contrasting with the views of administrators in manufacturing who valued functional proficiency in diverse languages, as reported in Kubota (2013), the health industry in UK seems to value correctness of form and monolingualism. This is possibly because nursing requires sensitive interpersonal interactions for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. This is an example of how different neoliberal institutions might value monolingualism or multilingualism as suits the nature of work and interactions. Many of my informants were also thankful for less restrictive national borders. Mobility had provided them better opportunities to develop their knowledge and skills. They mentioned that the traditional values, sectarianism, and hierarchies in their own communities had denied them educational and employment advancement. Even though they were skilled and educated, opportunities were given to those from tribes that dominated the political system in their countries. Such divisions based on language, religion, region or tribe discriminated against them. They were thankful for the competition in the West that enabled them to obtain rewards based on merit. For these reasons, they confirmed the value of free market enterprise for personal and professional development. Consider WA’s motivations for migrating:

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3. I: What motivated you to migrate from Ethiopia to the United States? WA (Ethiopia, male, professor in Seattle): Back home there were different kind of problems especially when you are really working on your professions, there are different things going on. People are going in groups, people are going in tribes. People are going by areas of origin. And it’s not like generally what you do. If you do something wrong you will be criticized that way. WA refers to the restrictive effects of stereotyping. The implication is that skilled migration provides a space for personal empowerment without identity holding oneself back. This view seems to confirm the neoliberal discourse that individual competition of talent and skills in the free market contributes to progress. The suggestion is that traditional values of ascribed identities and group affiliations are to blame for people being unable to develop their potential and their communities remaining underdeveloped. English emerges as a passport for mobility and development. Informants also mentioned how they were able to contribute to the development efforts of their own countries and communities from the fruits of their labor in the West, confirming that skilled migration was a win/win situation. Many said they sent remittances to immediate and extended family to support them. Some sent capital to improve the infrastructure in their villages (helping build wells, schools, and hospitals), thus contributing to the development of their communities. Often, in cases where the state failed to help these communities or discriminated against them, members could bypass the political institutions and send resources directly to their communities. In such ways, they lived up to the enterprising ideology promoted by neoliberalism. They were not looking to their state or social institutions for help, but finding their own resources to improve their families and communities. Here is a sample of the types of remittances they sent back home: 4. GHM (Uganda, female, educational administrator in Bristol): I have a charity with my husband and we have built wells in the, his village. We are now fund raising for a nursery school. We sent money for his parents when they are ill, at harvesting time so they can get some help in. We have provided them with solar panels and we contribute to the school fees of two girls. We are called upon to contribute our share of bride price, funerals, sick parents, siblings and relatives and other family emergencies. We also contribute to the parents’ upkeep. While many of these types of help are for extended family, GHM also refers to funds sent to build wells and schools that help the community in general. AM below shares his knowledge in a professional capacity with his home country. In this way, he is helping in the economic and technological development of his country: 5. AM (Nigeria, male, educational administrator at Penn State): Ok, so professionally I have been engaged with Nigeria in quite varieties of ways, I was the director of the program, the Africa program which involved Nigeria and

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Somali countries for a quite number of years, so that brought to me contact professionally, and many of the universities in Nigeria with whom I did collaborate while at Penn state, in addition of the above. Nigeria is an oil producing country. As a professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering, I saw myself, I’d consulted with a number of a multinational companies operating in Nigeria, brought to me joining my personal responsibility, and I did teach some courses. So, professionally I was engaged with Nigeria, I’ve been engaged with Nigeria almost in a continuous basis. [. . .] We must note, however, that material remittances to the family and community might exacerbate the class divide in these communities. While the local and international elite profited from the economic resources in these underdeveloped countries, the poor depended on self- and family-help, with a good dose of remittances from abroad, for their own survival. Even well-meant service to the poor can sometimes help neoliberal interests. LK, a physician in UK, describes below his efforts in offering his professional service voluntarily to rural hospitals in his country: 6. LK (Zimbabwe, male, physician in Leeds): By going to work in a state hospital, I was helping the communities because they are the ones that use state hospitals as the rich go to private hospitals. I am trying to do this with some friends who come from Bulawayo in particular and Matabeleland provinces in general. While this service will certainly help the poor in that region, this can also be an excuse for the local elite to continue neglecting the rural areas and preserve their own privilege, as the poor are expected to depend on expatriates to take care of their needs. The narration of these experiences provides many insights into the language/development connection in neoliberalism. Many informants seem to sincerely believe that their knowledge of English—which has provided them a passport for mobility, skill development, and professional success—has enabled them to also help their communities and families. They are able to help communities and locations that are overlooked in their home countries. All this is an example of the enterprising attitude encouraged by neoliberalism for communities to find their own means of development. Such stories will only boost the value of privileged languages like English, contributing to the altruistic values attached to it, free market, and skilled migration.

4.2

Tensions

However, as we proceeded further in our interviews, we found that some policies and procedures of neoliberal institutions were at odds with the enterprising attitude and fair competition that was professed. To begin with, English was the dominant

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language in the workplaces of our informants and confirmed its imperialistic status. Some informants found the requirement of English Only, insisting on native speaker varieties at that, very stifling. Despite the professed discourses of diversity in certain areas (as in the employment of migrants and multicultural personnel), the language policy was monolingual and monolithic. In the following excerpt, the informant complains that the language requirement is so stringent that speaking in other languages in the workplace can get one fired. Similarly, demonstrating low proficiency in native varieties of English can result in reduced chances for promotion. (Though “good English” in the statement is open to interpretation, many informants treated it as approximating native varieties of English.) LH claims that language policy (perhaps motivated by efficiency and standardization) gains so much importance that, ironically, one’s productivity and expertise don’t count: 7. I: To what extent is a good proficiency in English important for your current profession? LH (Zimbabwe, female, nurse in Leeds): Very important, [ . . .] you have to speak the language otherwise you end up being reported to the Nursing and Midwifery Council for misconduct. In this country, the patients have too many rights; they get you suspended just by reporting that you spoke in another language that they didn’t understand. I know so many people including Zimbabweans who were charged with misconduct just for talking in their language, you know, you can do that when you are frustrated. The managers when they are looking for someone to promote, it’s about how good is your English instead of how good is your practice. It’s all mixed up but then you have to do as they want you to, which is to speak English fluently, otherwise despite your qualifications you will die in the same band and as a simple nurse instead of where your performance and qualifications merit. The picture LH presents is of language surveillance and control that is very invasive. It is touching that the informant observes that some people might speak in their own language to perhaps find relief “when you are frustrated”. This could get them then charged for misconduct. The English Only policy could perhaps be justified on the grounds that the clientele in a British hospital is largely English speaking; however, this would be true only if we ignore that even UK is multilingual and multicultural, with patients from many language groups coming for treatment. Others mentioned that despite the discourses of free market competition, merit, and social mobility (touted by neoliberal ideologies), their workplaces adopted identity-based discrimination, which reduced their productivity and chances for promotion. In this sense, many informants stated that their skills were not put to full use in the workplace. To begin with, LF mentions that the claim of diversity in the workplace is a myth. Colored professionals are invited only to claim that equal opportunity was given to everyone in the hiring process:

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8. LF (Zimbabwe, female, nurse in Leeds): I think the employers need to be open minded. Instead of judging someone by the colour of his skin and accent they should judge someone by what he is capable of doing. That is the biggest problem with the British, they pretend they are open, that race and colour doesn’t influence things when in actual fact they do, especially when it comes to promotion. They invite you to interviews just to tick boxes, to give an impression that they called a black person to an interview but they weren’t good enough. Given equal opportunities like the white people, I know I have the education and qualities to succeed. Though there are some success stories of migrants who have found good professional positions, this is not true of everyone. Apparently, only a few migrants make it through the race-based preferential system. Even LF seems to imply that she can be more successful if she was given equal opportunity. Many mentioned that they were not given promotions they deserved because of their identity. It was also mentioned that many were underemployed. Those, such as LE below, claimed that their skills were not fully utilized because they were not given the type of work they deserved: 9. I: Do you feel that your skills and knowledge are fully utilised in your current job? If not, how would you account for this? LE (Zimbabwe, male, accountant in Leeds): I think that the skills that I have accumulated over the years aren’t being fully utilised. I am an experienced person but at times I feel like I have risen to the highest that I possibly can, especially for a person like me in this country. I have been overlooked for promotion to more senior roles ostensibly because I didn’t do well in the interviews. Now I have actually stopped applying because I am tired of stressing myself. I think there is a ceiling that people of my colour can rise up and they can’t progress beyond that level which is a shame really because I think that I have got a lot to offer. Despite having a Master’s and an MBA both obtained from Russell group of universities, I still am stuck at the first tier of management. So, I wouldn’t like to lie to you and say that my skills are being utilised, I actually think that I am too qualified for my job. I have noticed that I am actually being used as a sounding board, someone to bounce off ideas against by senior management. They would talk to me about what they intend to do and ask me to do project briefs which two-five months down the line you see being circulated amongst staff with high up people pretending they are their ideas. I think, the fact that I am a Zimbabwean, that I am not British lies at the heart of this. Although I have a British passport and consider myself to be British, I am not British in the eyes of my employer and other potential employers that I have applied jobs to. LE feels that his education and his position don’t match because his skin color confronts a ceiling beyond which he can’t rise. His frustration is palpable when he says that he has stopped applying for promotions or higher positions. More importantly, he feels that he is being exploited by those in higher designations.

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They appropriate and claim ownership over his ideas and knowledge for their own benefit. What such narratives suggest is that while the subjects appreciated the value of the neoliberal economy for their relative professional success and ability to develop their communities, they did demonstrate critical thinking. They were not ideological dupes. They could detach themselves from the glorified discourses of English as linguistic capital, and consider the ways in which neoliberalism rewarded certain people more than others. English was not part of an egalitarian system. Some informants found the knowledge systems and values governing their work reductive. This was partly a result of the dominance of English as the language of work. It didn’t allow informants much space to use other languages and the values and knowledge they were associated with. A university teacher mentioned that teaching in English Only and sticking to the expected curriculum reduced her opportunities to draw from different knowledge traditions for a more rounded and critical instruction for her students: 10. ML (Tanzania, female, professor at Penn State): Yeah, I would love to have a moment where I could expose my students to other cultures which I’m not speaking and which are non-English speaking, but they can appreciate that if have a moment. I talk about India a lot I talk about other places a lot, so that they do see that there is life there, (X) ya in a way the nature of the beast I find myself by utilizing, I wish I could do that as often as I could but I don’t have space to do it, so I go with what is there. So I’m teaching a class about inequality in America and I mean, I try or be in other and I may be concentrate, perhaps talking about the history of native America and little bit related to non-western cultures, so more open that they more appreciate it. But this is very rare, and underutilized, very underutilized, how about I make up for it? Using native America as a springboard. ML finds that knowledge from non-English communities, perhaps represented in other languages, would make a difference in the education of her students. She tries hard to draw from the other languages she speaks to tap into alternate knowledge. She sometimes resorts to choosing from the experience of minority communities in the US, such as the Native American community, rather than drawing from her own community experience in Africa. Anyway, she feels that the opportunities for using such alternate forms of knowledge are restricted. The power of English, the treatment of dominant cultures and ethnicities as the norm, and the homogeneity of knowledge, would reduce the potential of skilled migrants to make a good contribution in their work. Because diversity was not appreciated in their workplaces, many informants sought opportunities for in-group bonding and relief. Some used their own languages to find relief from the stresses of their work, as LH mentioned above (in #7). Others sought out co-workers from their own communities and language groups to socialize. These gatherings became spaces where they could also complain about their work conditions, celebrate their difference, and cherish their diaspora

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connectedness. OI, a Sierra Leoninan female professor at Penn State, mentioned: “What ties us together, that’s, may be the sense of nostalgia, we want to go back home. Most of us for some reason are not very content”. She went on to observe that though these bonds were formed around extra-professional considerations (such as their shared nationality), it helped their work, as they provided support for each other to cope with their professional challenges. OI explained: “So who knows how it started? But one does not even know whether it is extra academic factors that consolidated the relationships or whatever. It’s their academic factors that actually, you know. But I feel like they feed up each other, both the communication and relationships internal to university and outside sort of seem to support each other. So we kind of, have created a network of support for each other”. Similarly, MS, a Zimbabwean male professor at Penn State, mentioned that he and his fellow African colleagues mostly discussed “complaints” about their work conditions when they got together. In many cases, such “communities” were locally constructed, though the members constituting them were from different national and language groups. They developed a solidarity based on their common multilingual and migrant status, and the shared stresses and strains of working in alienating environments. Ironically, the neoliberal institutions that promoted a work ethic of efficiency and standardization, occluding identities and traditions which they treated as distracting, provided the spaces for these diverse people to form ethnicity-based communities right under the noses of their employers. Another irony was that the neoliberal policies that brought them from diverse countries to work in the West provided the space where they could collaborate across cultural and linguistic differences to resist neoliberal work conditions of homogeneity. Consider the manner in which the informant below describes the “community” that has formed in her workplace, constituting people from diverse African countries, in response to the interview question whether she bonded with people from her “native community:” 11. ML (Tanzania, female, professor at Penn State): Here, it seems like it’s a native community in our department. That’s why I gave you example of this department, it- it seems like it is native because it is non-western, but how close that is I’m not sure it’s up to discussion. But it’s not western by all- by all means everybody here is a person of color, so it’s not western. But it is, of course it’s a cohesive in that way because we do know that we are not westerners. (xxx) and excuse my language you are being fucked by the language, just like, ya, all of us, so that is creating cohesive as a native community. But how native is native? It is up for discussion, so what is native and you are in the English, right? @ So we can discuss more about so what is native, what is diaspora, and what have you, and but I can feel the sense of nativeness here in the department. ML’s statement raises some fascinating observations on how such communities of support are formed in what I might label “safe houses”, borrowing the term from Mary Louise Pratt (1991). Though this community is not formed of people from her

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own country, she argues that it feels “native” in a different way. It is bound by other shared features. It is non-western and migrant. It is unified by its opposition to English (even though everyone has to use English to communicate with each other, as they are all from different language groups in Africa). In an interesting paradox, the language that is oppressive (i.e., “you are being fucked by the language”) also turns into a medium to create solidarity among diverse people (perhaps used with their own local accents and idioms). ML also likens it to a diaspora community in the sense that the members are unified by their shared homeland, Africa in this case. This construction of a supportive and, perhaps oppositional, community shows the agency of skilled migrants to cope with the unfriendly work conditions and policies of neoliberalism in their workplace.

4.3

Resistance

The response of the informants to these work conditions of homogeneity, discrimination, and alienation varied in other ways. Some responses were indirect and hidden, as in the excerpts above on how workers sought each other for consolation. There were other hidden sites that provided space for subtle opposition, as I will illustrate below. These are also mild and hidden forms of opposition compared to more direct forms of resistance I will document later. What emerges is a picture of layered and multiple responses to neoliberal work conditions. At face value, the informants conform to the workplace policies and uphold the monolingual language requirements. However, in certain sites of in-group interaction or sites deemed as free of surveillance (which I label “safe houses”), they adopt their preferred forms of communication. In some other cases, depending on the type of work and setting, some subjects were more agentive in adopting their preferred communicative practices and resisting dominant norms. Therefore, the responses have to be understood as contextually negotiated. To begin with communication in “safe houses”, we have to be aware that they might have both compliant and subversive effects, which need to be carefully disentangled and analyzed (Canagarajah 2004). To consider the compliant effects first, the examples above on how informants sought emotional and affinity spaces for relief, could serve the interests of neoliberal agencies. As workers are able to find relief for their alienation by and among themselves, they might return to work more efficiently. They might serve the interests of their agencies as workers address their resistance in spaces that don’t interfere with work and productivity. In fact, workplaces might provide facilities for such “safe house” construction as a strategy to control their workers and channel their resistance in non-threatening ways. However, some acts in these spaces can generate critical thinking, resistant values, and subversive practices with the potential for reconfiguring the neoliberal formation. I now provide some examples of such indirect forms of resistance. The first example is a response to the workplace engendered competition among skilled migrants themselves. Reducing the chances for collaboration is in the interest of

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market productivity and competitive wages. Often English became an instrument for discriminating between workers, thus engendering competition. The informant below notes that even fellow migrants would discriminate against her. English thus became a means for competition among workers. It is not surprising that migrant professionals themselves have internalized narrow language ideologies that treat difference as deficiency: 12. LA (Zimbabwe, female, nurse in Leeds): It is hard when you are on the same shift with people like them because they don’t understand me, they don’t understand why I cant write good reports like them and instead of helping me by reading my report first and telling me where I have made mistakes, they don’t do that. They want to see me get into trouble, and they laugh at my poor English. I get angry and frustrated by such people. they want to see my downfall and they are happy when I am in trouble. I try to avoid being on the same shift with such people. On some occasions, I call in sick if I see that I am supposed to work with them, if I don’t have the supportive Zimbabweans around. I sometimes cancel shifts, that is how I manage the situation because being with them on my own is trying to brew trouble. What we see is that LA adopts some covert strategies to avoid such discriminatory and conflictual situations. She calls in sick or cancels her shift in order to get into shifts with fellow Zimbabweans. In addition to providing her with a supportive work environment, these strategies could have some dysfunctional implications for employers as they have to shuffle the workers around in their work schedule. Such hidden collusion extends beyond finding a collaborative and harmonious work condition. Others extend to getting help in English from compatriots to overcome their limitations so that they were not punished or demoted by their employers. LA continues to describe the types of language help she gets from her fellow Zimbabweans: 13. LA (Zimbabwe, female, nurse in Leeds): I have good strong relationships with other Zimbabwean nurses that work in Leeds. We are friends because we come from same country. We may speak different languages, but we help one another at work. The managers at my work, Zimbabwean managers are very good, they tell me where I need to improve and read what I write before passing them on. They tell me where my report is wrong, where mistakes are and help me to correct it before everyone sees it. Now, if they are doing quota for work, they put me on shift with other Zimbabweans so that they can help me with report. I am a good nurse but I don’t write well. Because of this, I want to work with others from home who can understand me. It’s not like the white nurses can write like the other Zimbabweans who passed from home, they make mistakes like me but they cover for each other, so Zimbabweans are covering for me, helping me, just like white nurses and Asian nurses cover for each other. While identity was considered distracting in the workplace, as Heller and Duchene note (Heller and Duchene 2012), we find here that these workers bond around a

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shared ethos to make their work experience more tolerable, if not more effective. It is also evident that the practice of “covering” was based on identities beyond language, such as those based on nationality (Zimbabwe) or ethnicity (Asians, Whites). In other words, they interacted in the multiple languages they spoke, suggesting the possibility of efficiency and collaboration beyond a single common language (a theme to which we will return below). Furthermore, any inadequacy in formal (grammatical) competency is overcome through collaborative language production—i.e., helping each other with the language resources they have to produce materials that satisfy institutional expectations. Informants found spaces for such bonding and collusion in diverse spaces of the workplace. Even some high stakes professional interactions could offer spaces for such bonding, and for side-stepping employer’s policies and norms. In the following case, YB surprises the interviewer by saying that his boss is a fellow African from Ghana. Therefore, he doesn’t experience any communication problems. This possibility derives from the favorable disposition that the boss might display, in addition to the linguistic skills of negotiating diversity that the fellow multilinguals might share. Note again that these skilled migrants can collaborate and work efficiently despite not enjoying a shared language: 14. I: So does this affect your life, work and life? When you have this like, language barrier or variety things? Does it have any like influence on your career or life? Say, for example, when you have a meeting with your supervisor, I think they are British or something? YB (Burundi, male, social worker in Bradford): No, but I think he—they have—they are from Ghana butI: Ah, really? Interesting. YB: Yes, but I think they’ve progressed. They lived here for many years, yes, but. I: So I think, you don’t have like this problem with communicating with your boss or supervisor? YB: No. Yeah, no. We can imagine how the informants might construct other such in-group spaces in their workplace. This amounts to a case of “space making”, as skilled migrants turn varying work contexts as in-group spaces, depending on the context and relationships with fellow migrants. For example, by switching their language to one that they share, migrant professionals could construct an in-group space inaccessible to outsiders. Of course, this has to be done strategically where such “elite closure” (Myers-Scotton 1990) doesn’t harm important work relationships or result in punishment: 15. YC (Ghana, male, scholar in York): We can adapt to speak our Pidgin English, the broken English- you know, we call it broken English. We can adapt to speak the broken English, that is if we are in the midst of other people that we do not want them to understand what we’re talking about, then we speak our Pidgin English.

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Thus the use of pidgin can serve to construct an in-group space for migrant professionals. Though there is a resistant communicative practice being enacted here, note that the subjects demonstrate a limited language ideology. They call their pidgin “broken English”, reflecting the norms of dominant social groups. In other cases, some professionals found their voice and identity productive for work. They were not prepared to suppress their identities even in interactions with clients from the dominant community. In other words, one’s preferred language and identity was not kept reserved only for safe spaces and in-group relationships. A physician in Sheffield mentioned how he refused to abandon the form of English he was comfortable with. In defiance of ideologies informing IELTS and other workplace policies that favor native speaker varieties, ET considers his own variety of English suitable for professional interactions: 16. I: To what extent is a good proficiency in English important for your current profession? ET (Zimbabwe, male, physician at Sheffield): It’s important but I have also seen some doctors whose first language isn’t English who struggle to speak it but are excellent physicians. I think because it is such a professional job, people are prepared to overlook the language issue. They would rather have an excellent physician who speaks little English than see him go to another country, like US. Besides, I think the patients wouldn’t mind whether the physician who treated them, saved their life was speaking broken English or fluent English as long as they are good at what they do, that is all that matters. I think medicine and other technically demanding fields don’t really need someone to be fluent in English, as long as they can make a diagnosis that is all that matters. It’s more like football, Ronaldo didn’t speak a word of English, neither does Messi, but they are technically very good at it. Most teams now are composed of footballers from different countries who all speak different languages but they still deliver. That is what medicine is like. Though ET refers to the language of his migrant colleagues and himself as “broken English” (again, deferring to dominant ideologies), he has a high estimation of the functionality of their English. Judging by the fluency with which he responds in the interview, it is also clear that what he refers to as “broken English” relates more to superficial features such as accent and idiom. He also decouples language from professional practice, arguing that one’s language competence (perhaps in terms of form) doesn’t have much relevance to one’s practice as a professional. He is focusing on language as part of practice, as he argues for a model of work relationship where people can collaborate and align with each other in producing successful results without abandoning their language difference (as his metaphor of the multilingual football team suggests). From his perspective, efficiency and success don’t depend on a shared or scripted language—as neoliberal policies assume. He presents a model of multilingual collaboration that differs from that of neoliberal policies that favor collaborating through a shared language. This model of communication—one that prioritizes practices rather than puristic native speaker

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norms—approximates the way competence is theorized in translingualism. Note also his political savvy. He is able to use the job market against itself. He suggests that he would move to another market if he is discriminated against by the present country based simply on his language proficiency (without taking his professional competence into account). Thus he demonstrates critical thinking on ways to leverage his resources and strengths in the neoliberal employment market. In certain cases, informants found their repertoires a resource to tap into alternate forms of knowledge and values for learning. We discussed earlier how ML borrowed from diverse knowledge sources to enhance her teaching. Below, she discusses how her multilingualism enabled her to adopt alternate languages in her workplace, as relevant to her clients and audience. This ability to adopt diverse languages helped build rapport with people. Such practices were especially evident in contexts where professionals had considerable control over their work and space, as in the case of the physician above. As a professor, ML enjoyed the power to codeswitch as relevant to the different mix of students in her class, drawing from her multilingual repertoires: 17. ML (Tanzania, female, professor at Penn State): Well, I do feel because we all have some sort of accents and so I could if I want I can play with it if I want to I do that sometimes, I can if I talk with African American I can talk with them with really about (x), if I talk with other people non-Americans then I can’t do that, in Nigerians speak pidgin and so more or less if I talk with Indians I do I will try to so that I’m with the part of that culture, I’m versatile and because of that its hard to pinpoint. My students have hard time to know exactly where I’m from, because my accent doesn’t reflect any, ya why? May be because of these movements from one place to another or multiplicity of languages, I don’t know, it has been even when I speak French, you cannot tell even with French you can know, this from Africa this is from France, my accent does not doesn’t, so how do I do it? I’m versatile. I just go with the flow, or I look at the makeup of my class sometimes and I do, they like it sometimes when I talk like them, anyway, we cruise but I do talk sometimes, I do talk too fast and so for the folks who aren’t then, I have to remind my students to slow me down sometimes, particularly, when I’m excited. I: @@ ya I mean isn’t that fortunate? So versatile, you can adapt to your audience. ML: I can adapt it where they are from. This notion of versatility introduces a different notion of flexibility from that favored in neoliberal policies. While the flexibilization of neoliberalism is theorized in many institutions as scripted and monolingual (we saw earlier), ML gains flexibility from the repertoire of languages she enjoys. She is quick to admit that sometimes she has to show some consideration for her listeners and slow down to accommodate their challenges in comprehension. Note, however, that the physician and the professor in these last two examples are more agentive in adopting their own preferred languages as they have considerable autonomy in their work spaces

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(i.e., physician’s office and the classroom). In this sense, the expression of hidden or direct resistance to neoliberalism should be understood contextually, in terms of the resources and roles informants enjoy.

4.4

Implications for Development

This awareness among migrant professionals of a broader knowledge tradition and language repertoire that were not available in English Only or mainstream institutions also suggested a critical understanding of the types of remittances they could develop and share. As we discussed earlier, their material and economic remittances have the possibility of furthering the neoliberal discourse that communities should find their own way through an enterprising attitude to develop themselves. Many informants, however, talked about remittances related to cultural, linguistic, and ecological resources that had the potential of furthering a holistic notion of development. Such remittances also had the potential to develop resources that resisted the destruction of environmental, cultural, and linguistic ecologies in the name of efficiency, productivity, and control. I will call them “ecological remittances”, to distinguish them from the material remittances that serve neoliberal interests. Development discourses also refer to “social remittances” which refer to networks and values that enhance material development. Hence the need to distinguish ecological remittances. As it will become evident below, communicative practices are clearly implicated in the development and sharing of these alternate ecological remittances for a more holistic sense of community wellbeing. Even when language is not explicitly mentioned in some of these narratives, we have to situate the work and communicative activities of the subjects in such developmental possibilities to understand their critical implications. Some subjects mentioned how they took efforts to improve the local ecology in their own communities. They built wells in areas affected by drought. They helped in the growing of local farms and vegetables. They helped sustain dairy and the breeding of cattle, which were important for local ecology and the sustenance of the rural poor. Consider the remittances sent by LF: 18. LF (Zimbabwe, female, nurse in Leeds): My husband comes from an area which is always ravaged by drought and with a high HIV AIDS prevalence rate. He is also sponsoring children whose parents died of HIV AIDS from primary school to high school. Some of the children that he sponsored have just finished university and his project is bigger than mine because he is doing it with some former school mates who are in South Africa. He has sunk boreholes that are used by the community to start gardens where people grow nutritious vegetables. Overall, I think what I and my husband have done at home has been quite positive. When we go home, traditional leaders such as chiefs and even politicians say that we have made a difference.

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In addition to the boreholes, which help local communities to start ecologically friendly vegetable gardens, their material remittances are also targeted for the poor and sick beyond their own family. Some types of help to develop local environment can have mixed results. While they do help local communities and their livelihood, they also build critical infrastructure that the government should be providing them. The fact that expatriates take care of such resources can be an excuse to the government to ignore those needs. Consider LE’s remittances: 19. LE (Zimbabwe, male, accountant in Leeds): So I started doing this for our local dip, which probably catered for anything up to five thousand cattle. I was spending about twenty pounds for this but people started to come from other areas wanting their cattle to be dipped as well. I ended up doing this for three dip tanks at a cost of sixty pounds per month. When I went home in two thousand and seven, people told me that I was doing a good job, that I was saving their sources of livelihood. Apart from that, I did electrify the nearest secondary and primary schools in my village. I attended that primary school and when the government was doing the Rural Electrification Programme, these two couldn’t raise money for the transformer. I think it was about hundred and fifty pounds, so I chipped in and this has been good because the schools are now attracting qualified staff. I also sunk a borehole which teachers can use and this has stopped them from travelling long distances to fetch water. Having electricity at the school has also meant that the children can do some studying after school which has increased the pass rate. The schools used to be failing schools, their results were poor but they are now among the top schools in the province. Digging water holes for cattle, boring holes for people to fetch water, and electrifying schools are extremely helpful for the rural poor. However, such entrepreneurial work can also motivate the state and other social agencies to turn their resources away from the poor. The informants mentioned how they learned to go beyond their own families and tribes to cross linguistic and ethnic boundaries in their development work. They found that many of the problems they faced were ecological and environmentally connected. If they didn’t work on developing the land of a whole region that was inhabited by diverse tribes, they found that development was not effective or sustained. Being ethnically divided, and developing their own land piecemeal, was doomed to fail all of them. Consider the statement of LE on his changed understanding of development work: 20. LE (Zimbabwe, male, accountant in Leeds): Lately, I have with some colleagues here in Leeds started expanding our help to other areas that are suffering. We work with the MPs of the area as well as faith groups. We realized that we needed to target areas that are at most risk and have dropped the mantra of only helping those from my village. We come from different areas and instead of concentrating on our areas alone, we look at a district, the whole

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district rather than just a village or chieftainship. So for me instead of concentrating on my village alone, I look at the whole of Matobo district. LE narrates how he and his collaborators developed an ecological orientation to their development work. They realize that the resources in their environment are interconnected and they stand to gain if they address a whole district rather than being selfish and developing only the villages of their own communities. Some informants made a distinction between material remittances that were expected by their families and what they considered “sociopolitical work”. Such work was related to raising awareness among local women about issues concerning their health, literacy, and rights. The informants also used local media (such as newspapers and radio) in local languages to communicate relevant information and knowledge to women. This was a kind of “ecological remittance” that they engaged in as a corrective to material remittances that sustained the neoliberal order. It was clearly implicated in a critical use of language and literacy resources. Consider CY: 21. CY (Zambia, female, lecturer in Cape Town): And then, in terms of interaction with my mother and the women’s movement, I circulate their information and advocacy campaigns to the broader network of women’s rights activists across the continent. Because through my work of women’s activists here at (xxx). So there are things that are peculiar to Zambia. So I’ll put it on the list. CY uses her networks with other academics, connection to institutions, and access to information resources to promote advocacy work related to the women’s rights movements in her own community. She also used her connections to promote the knowledge on peace and security developed by local academics in her home country. She sees this work as “sociopolitical” in nature: 22. CY (Zambia, female, lecturer in Cape Town): Oh yes. The researcher I am now working with, who is teaching at the open university. Supporting her writing about Zambia and her experience in working in peace and security and teaching about peace and security. She has done a Masters in Gender and Peace and that’s quite unusual. And she is a young Zambian woman, and this is quite something, to support her thinking and to encourage her to write. So that is certainly quite a important to development, not in a narrow sense of socio-economic development, and not her making some great package of money from her writing, but what it means socially politically. As we can see, CY distinguishes clearly between remittances of money, which she considers “a narrow sense of socio-economic development”, and the support she provides for a junior local colleague to develop and disseminate her critical scholarship. Her sponsorship of the work of the local scholar involves her writing. In this sense, she sees the product of her language and literacy activity as furthering local knowledge and development. In general, many informants also had a good awareness of how local knowledge traditions and ecological resources were useful for communities outside their own

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locality. This was a kind of remittance that could flow in the opposite direction, from the periphery to the center. Informants recognized the importance of preserving such knowledge and ecological resources from extinction. ML observed: 23. ML (Tanzania, female, professor at Penn State): The good part is, I think, as people are starting to realize more and more that there is something to be learned, that also gives me a hope at least a bit of hope that, that indigenous culture will be taken seriously, now more than ever. And indigenous knowledge, we have seen that, what have you, and we have seen that to get to, like to get the herbs from China and other parts of Asia shows that there is acknowledgement, knowing from whichever places. Where in the past, it may be it wasn’t so. It’s going, it gives me hope in some ways but there’s a lot to be done. ML is optimistic that there is greater global awareness of the value of knowledge and ecological resources from the underdeveloped, traditional, or periphery communities. As the informants sought to share ecological remittances with their own communities, many also commented on a linguistic or communicative tension. They were expected to master English as expected by neoliberal policies in workplaces and migrant nations in the West; however, they faced the need to maintain their fluency in local languages for development work in their native communities. For many of them, the pressure to master English was so intense that it often resulted in losing proficiency in their vernaculars. This shows a contradiction in the neoliberal orientation to work and development. If skilled migration is a win/win situation for everyone, skilled migrants have to be proficient in their vernaculars to engage constructively in critical remittances in their native communities. However, the policies in global workplaces and receiving countries worked against preserving their vernaculars. If the win/win discourse is to be meaningful, there is a need for preserving language diversity. Not surprisingly, YV stated how she had to diversify her communicative resources as they suited her work in different local communities. Working in the fields of health and literacy, she attempted to translate the knowledge available to her as an American professor to the communities she visited in her native community in the native languages: 24. YV (Cameroon, female, professor at Penn State): When working with francophone teachers, I encourage French literacy. If in the future I focus on health literacy, I might consider using pidgin English to reach the Anglophone masses in rural communities. If I work with indigenous peoples from my mother’s village of origin, I would enlist the support of someone who speaks Lamnso more fluently than I currently do (I lost it while perfecting my standard English!! LOL) Note that YV needs French and Lamnso, in addition to pidgin English to conduct her health literacy effectively in local communities. In this email response, she

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wryly signals her regret for the loss of proficiency in one of her vernaculars (in fact, her mother’s language, Lamnso) as she experienced the pressure of mastering “standard English” for her work in the US. Many informants went on to state that English turned out to be a hindrance for development work locally. Not only was it not widely spoken, it also alienated those who brought development resources, presenting them as elite or exploitative. Consider the views of CR: 25. CR (Malawi, male, professor in Cape Town): Now English therefore is like the language for the elite. Not for the majority people or the masses. And for me therefore, I see English to some extent as a hindrance. Therefore as a language development of economic—political development for the country, because it allows the elite to continue dominate the masses, because the masses couldn’t speak English, do not like English. So it’s a language of the elite and to some extent therefore the language of the dominant elite, who kind of oppresses the masses. CR was balanced in acknowledging the value of English in obtaining resources from the West, but not in delivering them to the local people. For the latter, he required local languages: 26. CR (Malawi, male, professor in Cape Town): It’s (i.e., English) only important in so far as I can use it to relate with those who can assist me in getting the resources. But in of delivering whatever, I would love to deliver to the local people, to the native people, to the local community, English would not be a factor. Actually it would be a hindrance. I would be, it would be the native language that, I would, it would be the language of relationship between me and the native people, the local people, around the development needs I would be involved in. Others stated how critical local languages were for the success of their development work. They commented on the difficulty of doing critical development work with only English at their disposal. They had to engage with diverse languages for more sustained and effective local development. Here is an excerpt from the narrative of CY on the different types of development work she was engaged in and the language repertoire she needed to be successful: 27. CY (Zambia, female, professor in Cape Town): So really English is not gonna help me in those two States I want to go to. And even in Zambia if I really want to [. . .] since I want to do more research on feminism and traces of power historically that Zambian women inhabited say amongst the Tumbuka and then Nguni you know my ancestral roots, Eastern province, you know in Northern Malawi. How do I do that speaking English? I will really, I will not be able to get that kind of information I need and even if I have a translator or interpreter really I will lose a lot, I’d rather learn the language again and then do it. Do that learning, you know. [. . .] Really, to do my work in terms of what I think development is in the area of you know () creating situations of and

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peace, I need a lot more, I need proficiency in a lot more languages than English. () If am to do this work located in Zambia, then picking up again my Chewa, Tumbuka, and Bemba would be very useful. Then I can work in many contexts and then really do my work and support communities in creating those kinds of spaces of development safely I think. Interestingly, CY sees even translation as not effective in communicating with the communities the types of development work he has in mind. While translation technologies are treated as efficient and cost-effective in some neoliberal institutions, local people prefer engaging in the diverse local languages directly. Based on such experiences, many informants found it important to promote their local languages among their children to resist the homogenization and language loss in their work contexts in the West. In keeping these language resources alive, they also broadened the resilient factors supporting development. Language is part of the local ecology that sustains development. As we saw above, some subjects connect vernaculars to local knowledge, traditions, and values. Therefore, even if these languages didn’t have any economic value in the migrant community (or globally), some families resolved to preserve their languages in their homes. Consider the views of the following informants: 28. LA (Zimbabwe, female, nurse in Leeds): I talk in Shona with my family. My children speak Shona at home when I or their father is talking to them. When they are alone, it’s English. I want them to speak Shona because it is important, it is about them being Zimbabweans. That is the only Zimbabwean thing that they can keep. They need to maintain this as this is who they are. 29. ET (Zimbabwe, male, physician in Leeds): (We speak in) Ndebele and English but mostly Ndebele. There is a feeling that Matabeleland has been marginalised as evidenced by the lack of development in the region. We are also angry that there are Shona teachers in Matabeleland who teach us in Shona thereby making our language extinct. So talking in our language is a way of preserving it. 30. TW (Zimbabwe, male, administrator in Leeds): Shona. It’s perfect and I won’t change it. It is my identity and I won’t want to alter that. I may be poor but I am still a Zimbabwean and my language is an important part of the Zimbabwean identity that I am trying to preserve and protect. It is clear that ET and TW are explicit about preserving their languages despite the lack of any ostensive economic value for them. For TW and LA, preserving their vernaculars is a question of preserving their identity. We also see that they don’t see a conflict between proficiency in diverse languages and maintaining their home/community language. I will argue below that heritage language and translingualism don’t have to be conflictual, as Kubota (2014) implies. With hindsight, some now regretted the policies of their home countries which promoted English in the name of human capital. They saw that developing proficiencies in diverse languages ensured a more resilient and holistic sense of development. Consider ET’s answer to the interview question on language policy:

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31. I: In your view, to what extent is English language important for the social and economic development of Zimbabwe? And is English important for the development work you are interested in doing on behalf of your community? ET (male, Zimbabwe, doctor in Leeds): It has to be taught together with the local languages, that way the development that is going to be made and achieved is going to be sustainable. Any development that is built on English alone is ephemeral and wouldn’t last. It could be said that it is important because I am using the language to source for donations and I got students to make pleas for books on video in English which I am passing around to potential donors, so in that context it is important. It is important to note that the informants were not opposed to English. ET realizes how important English is to obtain resources from outside for local educational development (echoing CR in #26). What he is opposed to is the neglect of local languages at the cost of English. As I will elaborate and demonstrate below, the communicative practice our informants valued was translingual, and involved shuttling between and accommodating diverse languages, including English, in their repertoire.

4.5

In-Group Communicative Practices

We should take a closer look at the communicative practices of the informants in their in-group spaces and local interactions, when they are not surveilled according to neoliberal policies and norms. Many informants said that they adopted communicative practices where they could engage with each other without a common or shared code. For example, the subject below, a nurse from Zambia, mentioned that she would talk to her colleagues from Philippines in their own Englishes, without any problems. She also reveals how their shared perspective as migrant workers coming to Britain to find new opportunities and resources motivates them look beyond their language differences to achieve understanding: 32. I: Do you experience any tensions between the variety of English you speak, and the other varieties spoken in the community? How do you handle these differences? Would you say that these have any implications for your work and social life? LF (Zimbabwe, female, nurse in Bradford): No. I have friends from the Philippines and although they have their own accent, this doesn’t cause any tension at all. We understand that we are different. We know that we met because we are looking for money, you know. There is no point in hating each other when we are after the same thing. Paradoxically, what unites them and creates understanding is the realization that “we are different”. We must compare this communicative practice with the

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assumptions of neoliberal workplace policies which insist on a single privileged language as the shared code for efficiency and standardization (see LA in #2 and LH in #7). While these Zimbabwean nurses conform to the policy in surveilled spaces, they adopt their own translingual practices among themselves. A teacher in a school in Sheffield not only mentioned that he and his multilingual colleagues from other countries like India, South Africa, and Jamaica communicated across their different varieties, but goes on to say that even the local “Britons” have been socialized into communicating with them in their diverse English varieties: 33. NN (Zimbabwe, male, teacher in Sheffield): I live at a school so I have got very strong bonds with other teachers. Our college is outside town and there are houses there for teachers who want to live there. I think as a community, we are very united, maybe it’s because we are isolated from the other communities and we just have to get along well. It could also be because the majority, if not all of us, who live here are foreigners, the other guys are from South Africa, India and Trinidad, so it is easy for us to get together really. We speak different English, we speak it differently but we understand each other. We don’t need an interpreter, which is good, and over the years we have grown to understand each clearly than maybe was the case at first. I: Do you experience any tensions between the variety of English you speak, and the other varieties spoken in the community? How do you handle these differences? Would you say that these have any implications for your work and social life? NN: No. like I said I interact with other professionals from other countries but I haven’t come across what I can say is tension between us or indeed with Britons. I can understand them perfectly and my students can understand me. The fact that no interpreter is needed suggests that the participants in this interaction are able to negotiate their diverse English varieties by themselves. Perhaps the native speakers (“Britons”) collaborate in reciprocating these practices as the migrant professionals are large in number here and they have constructed a cohesive community of practice over time. This practice presents a different orientation to flexibility in communication from the neoliberal scripted communication in a shared code or hierarchical/segregated languages. Before we figure out what accounts for the success of this communicative practice, we have to note that what the informants are adopting for English communication in neoliberal work contexts had been developed in their homelands for diverse other languages. DB mentions below that it is common to have a single conversation in three languages in her homeland: 34. DB (Zimbabwe, female, researcher in Penn State): We speak that language and may be, may be, somebody walks in and speaks Afrikaans. You start speaking Afrikaans and a conversation can continue in three different languages. Somebody speaks Afrikaans and I respond in Zulu and she responds in Tswana and continue talking, nothing unusual there. I understand what he

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says, she he understands what I ‘m saying, I understand what she say and he understands, so we all are engaged in a conversation. And there is nothing abnormal for us. It appears that the three speakers in the above interaction are adopting Afrikaans, Zulu, and Tswana simultaneously in this conversation. Using multiple languages for a single conversation has been labeled “polyglot dialog” (Posner 1991). This practice is possible because each person has receptive proficiency in the other languages. Using this “receptive multilingualism” (ten Thije and Zeevert 2007; Braunmüller 2006), they understand the others and then encode their own contribution in their own language. DB’s statement is probably met by incredulity on the part of the interviewer (perhaps influenced by the dominant assumption that communication would fail if it is not conducted in a shared language) that she repeats that this is “nothing unusual” and “nothing abnormal”. While this communicative practice of translingualism is different from the scripted and separated multilingualism of neoliberal policies, what is more important are the orientations motivating this communication. How does this practice work? It became clear from our interviews that informants were not orientating primarily to form but strategies in achieving communicative success. They took for granted the variability of form, based on the different cultures and communities they came from. They didn’t consider the diversity of grammars and languages a problematic issue. What they focused on were a set of strategies that made them negotiate comprehension and uptake. The key to this communicative practice was the willingness to collaborate in meaning making. Consider MA below on how he manages to communicate, despite the diversity of accents in English: 35. MA (Nigeria, male, university administrator at Penn State): Probably by paying more attention, just like they have to pay more attention to me as well, it is a two-way street, because of my- the combination of Nigerian and British accent and all sorts of things. People had to listen to me more closely to understand what I said, okay? With the same token, I had to listen more carefully to them in order to understand them, [. . . ] It was both ways, so I will, just by paying more attention. He calls this communicative ethic “a two-way street”. Adopting this ethic, multilinguals deploy strategies such as comprehension check, repetition, clarification questions, and rephrasing to negotiate language difference. As scholars have observed, such ability to collaborate demonstrates a solidarity and supportiveness that are bound to guard against communicative failure (Seidlhofer 2004). Note that while neoliberal dispositions expect individual self-sufficiency in language repertoires to manage diversity, our informants adopt collaboration, joint enterprise, and mutual negotiation. What helps them succeed is not the grammatical resources they bring with them, but the ability to work together to make their partial and personal competencies and available resources effective. GHM below notes that not only does he expect this willingness to collaborate, he feels that even “fragmented multilingualism” (Blommaert 2010: 9) would ensure

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communicative success based on this ethic. Fragmented multilingualism refers to resources from different languages, disconnected from an advanced and complete competence in each language. Consider GHM: 36. GHM (Uganda, female, school administrator in Bristol): I don’t feel any tension about my ability to communicate in English and I think that it is sloppy when people say that they do not understand a person due to accent etcetera, as I speak a little of many different languages and try my best to communicate with everybody and expect all to do likewise. Even his competence in “little of many different languages” would be functional if his interlocutors try their best to communicate with him, adopting the “two-way street” ethic. Such willingness to collaborate reduces any tensions in intercultural communication. Those who complain about not understanding GHM are probably not coming with this communicative ethic. It is clear, however, that this form of communication is not devoid of conflict and power negotiations. Others articulated other strategies that facilitated this collaborative orientation. Consider the following comments in response to the interview question on how informants handle “tensions” in intercultural and interlingual conversations when they are confronted with novel grammatical features. YE explained that he listens intently: 37. YE (Kenya, male, businessman in York): I found out that we speak different, depending on where we come from and all. What I have to do is to be attentive, but because of the nature of the job that I do. I have to serve all kind of people. TW confirms this strategy and mentions that he expects this mutual attentiveness from all parties in an interaction: 38. TW (Zimbabwe, male, corrections officer in Sheffield): Most people listen intently when they are speaking to each other because they know that this is not our country and we are bound to make mistakes in the way we say some words. WA discusses speaking slowly. Note that though she undertakes efforts “to improve” after facing communicative problems, she doesn’t go for accent reduction courses (an intervention at the level of form), but adopts the pragmatic strategy of speaking slowly to achieve “common understanding:” 39. WA (Ethiopia, female, nurse in Seattle): And then later after I understood that it was an accent problem, I just took it easy and I try to improve. I try to improve and make myself clear what I am saying or I will try to say it slowly and clearly. So that way we can have common understanding. DB adopts this strategy as a listener. She takes time to understand the accent and form others bring to the interaction. She recommends an attitude that encourages such patience—i.e., “take it easy:”

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40. DB (Zimbabwe, female, researcher in Penn State): So until the ear got round to understand then it takes time, so will that constitute a tension? I think you need to make an attitude to take it easy. And if there is a tension, it may be a big issue. I didn’t take it that way. She suggests that difficulty in understanding is normal and shouldn’t be considered as a “tension”. Thus she rejects the premise of the interview question. Others went further. WT adopts a metapragmatic strategy to change the footing of his interlocutors and motivate them to adopt the “two-way street” ethic: 41. WT (Ethiopia, male, health professor in Seattle): For most of the time, it is not a problem unless others make an issue of it. Then, it may resort to a little bit of educating—depending on how much time or the need to being polite. Mostly it is situational, and requires just patience and tact, time permitting. WT elaborated that the “little bit of educating” meant persuading his interlocutors to negotiate difference. He does this, however, with “patience and tact”, as some interlocutors with more power or status may not be willing to change their footing to adopt this “two-way street” ethic. In this sense, the subjects are aware of power impositions in communication. The interlocutors who make an issue of language difference are making the subject feel inferior or inefficient. What is more important is the critical and strategic response of the subject to renegotiate the interaction into a “two-way street” communication. More importantly, the informants knew that a common or shared language (such as English as a lingua franca) didn’t solve the challenges of communication. There are profound differences in assumptions, contexts, and values shaping the communication even in a single language that one has to adopt suitable pragmatic strategies to negotiate the meaning. It is this assumption that motivates CY to say below: 42. CY (Zimbabwe, female, lecturer in Cape Town): Yeah the contextual meaning—that no amount of technical literal translations will override to get () for proficiency in English is quite improper when it comes to real meaning, you know. In saying this, she suggests that scripted or automated communication to manage language differences will also be unsatisfactory to handle the nuances of contextual meaning. She also implies that formal proficiency in English cannot fully help understand the meaning in its fullest context and implications. Note that the strategies these informants adopt to facilitate successful communication across language difference differs from the approach taken by neoliberal policies. Motivated by efficiency and speed to facilitate production, neoliberal agencies adopt a utilitarian attitude to communication. They don’t spend time or resources on cultivating the types of strategies outlined above, which focus on practices and dispositions that favor patience, tolerance, collaboration, and reciprocity. In many cases, they consider a focus on form as sufficient for managing multilingualism (as we see in the tutoring centers worldwide, tests such as IELTS,

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and the training of workers as in the case of Filipino nannies). Even the reduced forms of translingualism neoliberal agencies adopt (illustrated in Kubota 2013 study) are motivated by efficiency. The informants in this study go beyond efficiency to focus on critical and strategic practices that facilitate collaborative negotiation of meaning and difference in their interactions. Finally, while neoliberal agencies and policies consider individual subjects as capable of developing the competency and control to handle the challenges of communicative difference, the informants consider success as achieved through an alignment of the resources diverse parties bring to the communication and reciprocal effort by all. Communicative success depends on distributed competence and joint enterprise. Therefore, I consider the communicative practices preferred by the informants as different from those adopted in neoliberal policies and institutions.

4.6

Dispositions and Socialization

Furthermore, these strategies and practices of communication derive from a different set of dispositions than those promoted by neoliberal ideologies. The “two-way street” ethic informing the communicative practices of the informants require a radical tolerance, humility, and patience. I have elsewhere theorized these as constituting a “co-operative disposition” (Canagarajah 2013a). It facilitates “ongoing negotiations” of difference (Ratcliffe 1999: 207), with critical reflexivity on one’s own biases and ethical sensitivity not to appropriate the other’s words and actions according to one’s own frames of reference. It involves co-constructing the footing and framing of interactions in order to negotiate meanings with greater inclusiveness and fairness. These dispositions, which are sensitive to the radical otherness of our interlocutors and collaborators, are different from the dispositions based on individual mastery and agency expected in neoliberal discourses (see Gershon 2011). In the latter, while diversity is acknowledged, profit-oriented needs of efficiency, speed, and control prevent people from developing the radically other-oriented “co-operative dispositions” facilitating collaboration. They are expected to embody these dispositions within themselves as human capital. Admittedly, these dispositions are time consuming, demand additional time and material resources to work, and require patience. However, rather than hindering progress, scholars point out that these dispositions lead to more sustained productivity, understanding, and efficiency in the long run (Wible 2013). How are these dispositions developed among the informants in this study? The evidence suggests that the informants are socialized into these dispositions from their everyday social and communicative life featuring translingual practices. Consider OI’s statement, which was confirmed by others in my study: 43. OI (Sierra Leone, female, professor at Penn State): One thing I have realized personally for a while is that I always loved, may be because I grew up in a multilingual society where you always knew there are other languages all

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around you, and so you had to way of opening up of other things. I have a feeling that we- it is easier for us to translate and become something else and understand. But Americans tend to be so unique, language, so just like one language and sound one way. OI attributes her dispositions to her growing up in a multilingual society. What this socialization endowed her with was a habitus to open up to others, transpose herself to understand other points of view, translate perspectives, and adopt diverse identities or perspectives as needed. She differentiated these dispositions from those of people influenced by monolingual ideologies who tend to insist on a one-way street communication, imposing their own norms on the interaction. Thus a critical awareness of power differences, norm impositions, and the need to renegotiate them is also part of her dispositions. As I also demonstrate from the statements of other informants (Canagarajah 2016a), they are sensitive to norm differences and language inequalities, which they are constantly renegotiating for communication to be more inclusive. While they are bringing these dispositions from the multilingual communities they are socialized in (as OI mentions), it is possible to imagine how the translingual interactions in the safe houses of neoliberal workplaces might further socialize the informants into these dispositions and practices. Note that the language socialization of my informants differed from that encouraged by neoliberal agencies and policies. In some versions, neoliberal socialization encouraged an accumulation of skills and codes treated as linguistic capital for productivity and success (McElhinney 2012). In general, they are based on the assumption that neoliberal subjects will develop the disposition of mastering and controlling the resources required for human capital and efficiency for material accumulation. The socialization of the informants in this study, however, leads to the development of a disposition that values criticality, tact, collaboration, understanding, and patience, suitable for a radically two-way street communication. It is focused on developing critical negotiation strategies and a resistant diversified habitus rather than acquiring instrumental skills, dispositions, and codes for production efficiency. Yet, we must note that the practices and values I identify are specific to the work contexts and demographic groups involved in my study. Communicative practices will vary according to topic, activity, and participants (see also Kubota 2015b). That is, workers who frequently interact with each other might have developed a repertoire that they share. Some professional topics might come with a register that workers in that field share, regardless of their first language background. And high stakes professional activities, such as interviews, formal meetings, or consultations, might require standardized and unmixed forms of a language, when informal interactions in the shop floor in a manufacturing company might allow truncated multilingualism. However, such a qualification doesn’t reduce the significance of the findings above. It encourages us to study language practices and ideologies in diverse contexts to consider both the resistant strategies of people as well as the collusive power of neoliberalism.

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5 Distinguishing Language Ideologies and Practices What we find from this study is that neoliberal language policies and work requirements are more narrow and restricted than we are made to believe from their discourses of hybridity and multilingualism. In many workplaces, English Only policies are enforced. Also, job opportunities and prospects for career advancement are based on privileged identities. Thus, the possibilities of mobility and advancement are limited for the African skilled migrants interviewed in this study. However, the translingual practices of the informants help them deal with these limitations in strategic ways. They help them network among themselves and develop bonds to cope with the stresses of alienation and discrimination in their workplace. Also, there are spaces for practices that are resistant. The informants draw from more diverse knowledge traditions, communicative ethics, and subaltern identities that enhance their social and work relationships. Through critical thinking, tact, strategic practices, and metapragmatic discourses, they subtly motivate those in the mainstream to adopt their communicative practices in some contexts. Their translingual practices enable them to engage in ecological remittances that develop environmental resources, languages, values, and knowledge traditions neglected or ignored by neoliberal policies and discourses. Thus the informants counter the designs and effects of neoliberal policies and practices. Their translingual communicative practices cultivate a different ideology of development that is more holistic, diversified, and resilient. Ironically, this resistance emerges from within neoliberal enterprises. By making use of the resources and networks of neoliberalism that enable them to migrate, enhance their skills and knowledge, and interact with each other to develop solidarity, these African migrant professionals go on to subtly develop alternate social, ideological, and economic agendas. We shouldn’t exaggerate the critical thinking of the informants represented here. As I pointed out earlier, some of these coping strategies in the safe houses might make the workers more productive in the surveilled spaces of work, serving neoliberal agendas and outcomes. Furthermore, as applied linguists would remind us (see Kroskristy 2000), language ideologies are layered, inconsistent, and multiple. We have to recognize that the critical language use and ideologies that I articulate above co-exist with other strands of thinking. It is evident that in some cases the informants reflect dominant ideologies in treating their English variants (deviating from native speaker varieties) as deficient. They label them as “broken English”. They also treat English as a superior linguistic capital that they benefit from. They use their language resources for personal gain and success, sometimes discriminating against others whom they treat as deficient in English. However, the informants also demonstrate in certain other contexts critical language practices and ideologies, which I label postcolonial. In this regard, they demonstrate an appreciation of language diversity, a functional competence on truncated multilingualism, critical dispositions that renegotiate power, distributed activity for communicative success, empowered voice that affirms their values and knowledge traditions, and use of communicative resources for holistic ecological development.

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Even in this demonstration of resistant language ideologies and practices, we have to remember that neoliberal agencies can find ways to use their meaningful work and development activities for its own purposes. For example, the entrepreneurial attitude the informants demonstrate in sending remittances to develop their local communities frees up resources for the privileged to expand their own interests. Despite this possibility, we also found that the practices and ideologies of the informants have the potential to reconfigure production and social relations towards more inclusive collective interests, resisting the neoliberal dispensation from within. What I have presented above is an attempt to amplify the critical potential in their language practices and ideologies. My objective in distinguishing the contrasting ideological complexes, neoliberal and postcolonial, admittedly a generalization from several mixes of practices and values, is to help scholars and subjects identify critical possibilities in communication. My position is that we have to go beyond language forms, labels, and practices to consider the ideologies and interests underlying them. In other words, we should look beyond labels such as monolingualism, multilingualism, and plurilingualism to consider the ideologies motivating language use. All of those models of language can be used by neoliberal language ideologies for limited and unethical purposes. However, whether single language or multiple languages, they can also be used for resistant and inclusive purposes, along a postcolonial orientation. As for translingualism, it is true that neoliberal agencies and institutions might use certain features theorized by critical scholars for their purposes. However, I argue that there are also limits to how much neoliberal institutions can appropriate diverse language practices and disposition without losing their material interests. For this reason, I distinguish between a reductive translingualism (exploited by neoliberalism) and an expansive translingualism (informed by postcolonial ideologies). It is the latter that translingual scholars are theorizing in their research and pedagogy. Those who boast of critical interests of community empowerment should distinguish this resistant language orientation, promote it among students and professionals, and further theorize its ramifications. Adopting a deterministic orientation, that no language practice or ideology is free of exploitation by neoliberalism, leads to a politics of despair. More importantly, it demonstrates a reductive view of human agency and social action. People do have spaces to think and act critically, despite the power of neoliberalism. With this in mind, I distinguish between two broad ideological complexes, neoliberalism and postcolonialism, to identify the values and practices that we should promote for critical purposes in our language scholarship and pedagogy. To bring out the differences in orientation to language in both movements, we can now invoke the processes distinguished by Michael Halliday (2002): glottodiversity versus semiodiversity. Glottodiversity indexes the number of languages involved in meaning-making. Semiodiversity is the proliferation of meanings that results from the synergy in language contact and social interactions. Neoliberalism finds it useful to invoke the number of separate languages it accommodates to demonstrate its openness to diversity and multiple communities. For example, treating separate languages to identify separate communities suffices for its marketing purposes. Or a

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rudimentary training in the grammar of separate languages is treated as sufficient for managing interactions beyond borders (as in the training given to Filipino nannies to work abroad). Even when functional bits and pieces of language and collaborative dispositions are accommodated, they are tied to efficiency. In this sense, the proliferation of meanings needs to be efficiently managed. The dialectics of profit and pride would dictate that neoliberalism keeps meaning and identity under recognizable uniformity. Their scripted genres of service discourses are also designed to keep meaning within manageable limits. What we see in the data above is that multilinguals adopt very complex interpretive procedures and interactional strategies to expand meaning-making practices in contexts of unpredictable diversity. They find the larger meaning potential and ramifications of diverse languages enabling them to tap into values and knowledge that enrich their work. In the process, they are also transforming languages and social relationships, rather than keeping them stable or static. Translingual scholars are engaged in accounting for the semiodiversity that results from such activity. The language ideology of neoliberalism is shaped by its communicative objectives. Therefore, it values the instrumental function of language. Language is a tool to conduct work efficiently. As pointed out by Heller and Duchene (2012), issues of voice and representation are a distraction to neoliberal production, which treats standardized or scripted communication as facilitating greater efficiency. When identity is encouraged for distinction, it is harnessed for profit making purposes. However, the skilled migrants interviewed are very sensitive to issues of voice. Rather than treating voice as a distraction to efficiency, they appreciate how it enhances communicative outcomes by drawing from one’s values, ethos, and interests. Furthermore, while neoliberal agencies might be interested in controlling meaning for purposes of efficiency and standardization, critical multilinguals are open to the possibility that meaning-making arises from unpredictable ground conditions. As interlocutors from different language and social backgrounds bring their interests to communication, one cannot assume shared norms, conventions, or meanings. While these differences have to be negotiated ethically and inclusively, the proliferation of meanings can be enriching for work and social relations. Therefore, they work towards an attunement of the resources they bring with them with those of others and the affordances in the context for productive outcomes. Furthermore, for my informants, meaning-making involves strategic negotiation. Therefore, their focus is on critical communicative practice. A reliance on shared meaning or form is not treated as a valid starting point for interactions, as diversity and mobility always create the need to negotiate meanings situationally. For neoliberal agencies, language is a product. It is commodified. It can be manipulated for desired meanings and purposes. Sometimes, meaning can be treated as performative in a reductive sense—as in the symbolic uses of language for marketing purposes. Scripted communication would also lend itself to treating meaning as a product. In scripting, language is turned into a formula. Training in form (as in the teaching of English for scoring well in standardized tests such as IELTS and TOEFL in many countries) is often treated as adequate for certifying one’s communicative skills for employment. People thus treat language as a product, valuing

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test scores and certificates, as neoliberal policies and agencies themselves encourage such an approach. As a result of such policies and practices, language becomes a marketable product, itself coming under free market enterprise. When language as practice is accommodated by some neoliberal agencies, such orientation is focused on efficiency and managing diversity, thus leading to reductive translingualism. If the orientation to meaning-making practices is different in both approaches, it is shaped considerably by their different social visions. Consider first the different orientations to diversity (whether linguistic or cultural) in both movements. We can invoke Homi Bhabha’s (2006) articulation of the constructs diversity and difference to encapsulate this distinction between neoliberalism and postcolonialism. Diversity involves providing different languages and cultures their own space. With each community ensured of its place, without necessarily coming into contact with others, diversity is contained. This is also a form of tokenism, that of ensuring that every community is assured representation, typical of liberal orientations to multiculturalism (critiqued by Kubota 2014). As we saw above, neoliberalism’s use of languages and cultures to profess diversity is based on associating each language with a community or identity. However, difference entails engagement between different social groups. The informants in my study are open to critical, generative, and transformative relations between cultures and languages through contact. From this perspective, languages and cultures are always inhabiting contact zones, where they are coming into engagement. Such linguistic engagements lead to self-critique, reflexivity, and transformation, resulting in the generation of new cultures, genres, identities, and community affiliations, a process that neoliberalism might find distracting for its profit-making purposes. Another ideological difference between both approaches is that neoliberalism treats development purely in terms of material considerations. Profit-making and capital accumulation are treated as developing a higher quality of life, human progress, and social well-being. However, in pursuit of this goal, many other broader social considerations may be sacrificed. As we know, ecological well-being has come under closer scrutiny, as unregulated production has led to environmental damage in what scholars now consider the new era of Anthropocene (Nixon 2014). Local knowledge traditions and cultures that are not congenial to western notions of industrial production have also faced endangerment, as all communities have been encouraged (implicitly) by the Washington Consensus to adopt dominant European traditions in their educational systems and social institutions (Aikman 2001). More importantly, less privileged languages have faced endangerment, as even local communities ignore them in the name of mastering those languages considered as possessing linguistic capital. In fact, it is difficult to disconnect languages from the knowledge and cultural traditions they represent. As linguists like Tove Skuttnab-Kangas (2002) have observed, the extinction of languages is implicated in the damages to environmental ecology. Aikman (2001) discusses the concerns of Harakmbut Indians in Peru that western notions of literacy sponsored by neoliberal agencies and the state might damage their way of life and ecology. Therefore, in collaboration with socially conscious non-governmental organizations, they creatively devise literacy instruction that accommodates orality and multimodality, to

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sustain their social practices and ways of life. The skilled migrants interviewed do not treat language as an instrument for achieving material progress only, but consider how language is embedded in ecological relations, calling for more holistic notions of human and material development. We can appreciate the need for such holistic considerations when we consider another difference in the ideologies motivating development. Scholars in the transdisciplinary orientation to resilience studies point out that organisms, institutions, or biological systems built on multiplex factors withstand stress or shock much better (Gunderson et al. 2010). Those built on monoplex roots, perhaps on the understanding that they are simple and efficient, do not withstand fluctuations and changes well. The neoliberal orientation to productivity is based on unitary and restrictive foundations, favoring standardization, efficiency, and control, despite valuing flexibility and diversity. Diversity is exploited for the interests of a homogeneous few! As we have seen in recent global economic crises, the neoliberal economy is extremely volatile, unstable, and fragile. The informants in my study lean towards accommodating the role of diverse languages, drawing from a broader range of local identities, and appreciating the value of more diverse cultural and knowledge traditions, in developing a more holistic and resilient model of progress. These differences in ideologies of development naturally influence the dispositions favored as valuable. To begin with, while neoliberal policies focus on the way individuals develop the capacity to engage in meaning-making and productivity through their acquisition of a repertoire of languages and skills, for my informants the competence to speak or act is distributed. It involves alignment with social networks, ecological affordances, and diverse semiotic resources. Besides, meanings and outcomes emerge between people and objects. They are not under the complete control of individuals. Meaning and social activity require true collaboration, give and take, negotiation, and compromise. What we hear from the informants is similar to the types of intersubjective meanings developed by multilinguals in contact situations, as demonstrated by Firth (1996) for example, which suggests how such alignment and distributed activity takes place. This openness to collaboration and negotiation also suggests that there is scope for agency and strategic activity. Informants attempt to leverage the available norms, social networks, and resources for the meanings and interests that are empowering for them and suit their ethical and social values. However, neoliberal agencies orchestrate the dispositions they inculcate to comply with their agendas and interests. Ironically, while neoliberalism professes flexibility and diversity, these dispositions are pressed into service for their limited material and profit-making interests. Any enterprising activity that goes beyond these interests might not be supported, as they might work against efficiency and capital accumulation. The discussion above shows that it is not English Only or multilingualism or translingualism that should be our main consideration in assessing the linguistic effects of neoliberal policies and agendas. The number and type of languages desired may vary according to different contexts and institutions. Neoliberalism may use one language, many languages, partial languages, or language practices for its purposes. What are more important are the underlying ideologies of

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communication and competence driven by neoliberal imperatives. Since profit making, efficiency, and instrumentality are important, there is a distinct ideology that informs neoliberal orientations towards language. I have demonstrated above how this ideology of material development, productivity, efficiency, and instrumentality, shape neoliberal uses of language. They differ from postcolonial ideologies of holistic development, strategic agency, and inclusive interests that favor voice and difference. Thus neoliberalism leads to a reductive form of communication motivated by instrumentality and efficiency, while the communicative practices favored by critical multilinguals and applied linguists lean towards an ecologically embedded, ideologically strategic, and socially situated translingualism. I summarize the differences emerging in the language ideologies as follows:

Orientation Objective Focus Mode Dispositions

Ideology

Neoliberal

Postcolonial

Glottodiversity Instrumentality Efficiency Product Individual Control Compliant Diversity Management Material development

Semiodiversity Voice Attunement Practice Distributed Alignment Strategic Difference Resilience Holistic development

6 Theoretical Implications While I have distinguished the ideologies motivating appropriation or resistance of translingual practices, it is important to acknowledge that there are genuine philosophical differences among the scholars involved in this debate. Though both parties share similar political objectives, there are differences in the way they orientate to power, critical ideologies, and social change. We need to deconstruct the assumptions relating to power between translingual scholars and their critics. Blommaert (2016) has pointed out some of these differences in his reply to Kubota recently. I identify other considerations below. When Kubota raises the fact that agencies and forces of monolingualism defeat the translingual orientation to creativity and resistance, she is treating power as overdetermined in favor of neoliberal institutions, with little possibility for resistance. At other times, she raises the possibility that neoliberal agencies may play off one side of the monolingual/translingual binary against the other for their advantage. That is, they may value monolingualism or elite forms of native speaker varieties

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against widespread multilingualism or vernaculars. The orientation of translingual scholars to power is different. They don’t adopt a deterministic orientation to power. As we saw in the data above, no institution or agency can surveil its subjects completely. There are hidden spaces or safe houses for generating criticality and resistance. Furthermore, if certain communities or institutions impose their favored languages against diversity, that is not the end of the story. The disempowered will respond to such counter strategies of the powerful and make spaces for alternate ideologies, social relations, and voices—as we saw in the narratives and views of the migrant professionals above. Kubota doesn’t consider such counter strategies for resistance as she is presumably treating power as an all-encompassing zero sum game. For her, the fact that neoliberal agencies might impose monolingualism or elite bilingualism means defeat for translingual scholarship or suppression of translingual practices. She doesn’t entertain the possibility that there could be sites and practices of everyday and ground-up resistance to counter neoliberal appropriation. For translingual scholars, power is ongoing. They are not expecting a totally democratic social or geopolitical order (where presumably translingualism will find inclusive spaces for everyone). They envision shifting configurations of power. Thus the dialectic of domination and resistance will be ongoing. Marginalized multilingual communities will continue to seek spaces for the preservation of their language practices, as they have done in relation to colonial histories. In theorizing along these practices, translingual scholars will attempt to construct progressively more inclusive discourses for everyone. Note that critical translingual discourses are already a response to the dominance of monolingualism from enlightenment onwards. This dialectic will continue, with the powerless hopefully striving for progressive changes towards more ethical and empowering practices. This dynamic orientation to power also makes us vigilant to appropriations of critical practices for dominating purposes. As we saw, neoliberal institutions may appropriate certain features of translingualism for their own ends. We shouldn’t be surprised if neoliberal agencies adopt broader notions of meaning, identity, and learning (as emerging from this study) for profit-making purposes. It is not surprising that industrial enterprises (such as British Petroleum after the Gulf Oil Spill) have begun to profess concern for environmental ecologies. However, professing something is different from practice. Furthermore, the notion of translingualism as a grounded practice—which is not defined primarily as a theory or product that lends itself to being essentialized or fully appropriated by others—actually keeps it vigilant to such appropriations. Translingualism is thus not an idea or theory that can be appropriated. It is a strategy. Its politics is one of constant repositioning, to seek vantage points for resistance against the designs of powerful agencies. Focusing on strategic positioning, translingual scholars and practitioners would look for vantage points that would demystify emergent ideologies and struggle for values and norms that are more empowering and inclusive. As we saw in the experiences and opinions of the informants in this study, multilinguals are savvy in understanding the ulterior motivations behind the changing and inconsistent ideologies of the agencies that employ them. Thus, translingual practice encourages

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communities and scholars to interrogate diverse ideologies as they come into expression at different spaces and times in order to identify resistant strategies and spaces. How do we respond to Kutbota’s argument that translingualism is the new hegemony, disempowering those who prefer limited repertoires. She states: “The free-market economy and neoliberal policies also regulate the academic activities of intellectuals, further proliferating the multi/plural turn as a favored intellectual trend” (2014: 15). As we saw earlier, she also labels this movement the “canon” or a “bandwagon” (2014: 6). This is a charge made even more forcefully by Pavlenko (forthcoming) in her scathing critique of the academic popularization of superdiversity. From this perspective, those who study and theorize translingual practices are treated as educated/academic elite who benefit from theories of diversity, when the disempowered are monolingual. Furthermore, scholarly translingualism is positioned against grassroots multilingualism or monolingualism in the frequent dichotomization of real world concerns and academic pursuits. Consider, for example, the advice that it is “necessary to resist the neoliberal academic culture that compels us to ignore social problems and instead celebrate plurality and hybridity for our own cause. Increased attention to places where real problems exist can make our professional activities more socially meaningful and transformative” (Kubota 2014: 18). How valid are these equations? To begin with, this reading of the political and academic status quo sounds too simplistic. Cognitive and monolingual orientations are arguably still powerful in policy and scholarly discourses, associated with genocidal effects on communities by Skuttnab-Kangas (2002). Multilingual scholars are actively seeking spaces in academic and policy discourses to theorize the practices of underprivileged multilingual communities. This is not to deny that there are possibilities for academics to become agents of neoliberalism and serve its agendas in their research and scholarship. However, rather than treating academics as being always opposed to the interests of ordinary people, we have to be open to the possibility of organic intellectuals, articulated by Gramsci (1982). Scholars can listen to the discourses and practices of the lay and disempowered, and facilitate theoretical paradigms that might resist dominant discourses. In fact, many critical applied linguists are migrant scholars themselves, demonstrating the resistant potential accompanying conditions of exile (see Said 1993). More importantly, in setting up diversity against monolingualism and monoculturalism, Kubota comes close to giving objective reality to the latter constructs in this binary. Her argument is based on a “tension between hybridity and rootedness” (2004: 9). She states: “When our intellectual engagement becomes entrenched in the popularity of the multi/plural turn, we may lose sight of the persistent demand for monolingualism and linguistic purism in various locations as well as Anglocentrism and English-only ideologies in many non-English—dominant neoliberal societies” (2004: 9). She further argues: “more explicit attention should be paid” to individuals and groups who might be stigmatized “due to . . . their monolingualism and monoculturalism” (17). Elsewhere she points to a “dilemma between authentication and postcolonial plurality”, sometimes the former is referred to as “fixed authentication” (10), for the disempowered. Here, monolingualism and

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monoculturalism seem to be treated as having a “fixed,” “authentic,” and “rooted” objective reality. As pointed out earlier, monolithic definitions of languages and culture are ideologies designed to empower some and disempower others. They don’t have an ontological status as a condition “out there” characterizing people or communities. The fluidity and mobility of semiotic resources is the basic material condition, out of which communication and social identities develop. Similarly, Kubota criticizes translingual scholars for promoting criticality and creativity in academic communication and publishing, when authors are expected to write in English Only or in one language at a time (i.e., monolingually)—(see Heng Hartse and Kubota 2014). This is a charge she repeats in her 2014 article. She faults translingual scholars for ignoring that in certain contexts of publishing and copyediting monolingual communication is desired or imposed. In such discussions, she is giving monolingualism validity, unwittingly reifying monolingualism and giving it ontological status. This is consistent with her tendency in other places to treat hybridity as a mix of two pre-existing essences, as we discussed earlier. What such statements suggest is that single languages or cultures are treated as the basic conditions out of which translingualism or hybridity evolves. However, translingual scholars hold that fluidity and mixedness are the basic conditions of semiotic life. All talk and texts contain diversity as they are made up of fluid semiotic resources. It is the power of monolingual language ideologies that makes us misrecognize them, perceive homogeneity in texts, and treat communication as impervious to change or variation. Though monolingualism and uniformity are enforced by gate keepers and the powerful, translingual scholars are optimistic that spaces can be found for variation in the mix of semiotic resources that constitute a text. That monolingual policies are still powerful and suppressive is true. However, they are only policies and ideologies. The diversity that always exists in practice enables multilingual communities to find spaces for voice, renegotiation, and resistance. We have to also consider the place of heritage languages and ethnic identities in translingual practice. Kubota is wary that “postcolonial hybridity that challenges such modernist definitions will undermine traditional indigeneity” (2014: 10). Based on this concern, Kubota perceives threats for the survival of heritage languages from translingual practices. She also comments on the difficulty of resolving heritage and diversity: “if all cultures are hybrid and in-between, a postcolonial critique conflicts with its original impetus to recreate a distinct agency and identity of the colonized” (6); and “hybridity disregards the significance of cultural nationalism or collective politics. It is necessary to remember that it was cultural nationalism, the separatist politics of identity and resistance, rather than hybridity that first prompted decolonization” (7). However, we have to redefine ethnicity and heritage language in the light of translingual practices. We cannot return to modernist notions of ownership, territoriality, and autonomy to define heritage languages. If in fact semiotic fluidity and cultural contact are the norm, how do we define heritage languages? Ethnicity and heritage language are not free of linguistic and cultural contact. Heritage language is already made of hybrid and fluid resources deriving from its contact with other languages and cultures (see Canagarajah 2008). What gives heritage language identity is the sedimentation over

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time and space, through histories of social practice and an empowering language ideology (see Canagarajah 2013c). All communities thus adopt ideologies (motivated by a strategic essentialism) that give identity to their hybrid semiotic resources to represent their solidarity and symbolize their groupness. This assembled nature of ethnicity and heritage language makes these constructs open to redefinition through ongoing further contact. They enable communities to be open to renewal of heritage and ethnicity while participating in change. It is well known that marginalized people may possess diverse identities and semiotic resources, but also perform situated identities (as my studies on heritage language in the diaspora life of Tamil migrants shows—Canagarajah 2013c). The constructed nature of ethnicity and heritage language should make social groups more tolerant and respectful of other people’s identities. It is notions of primordialism, purity, and separation that make communities impose their language or identity on others. From this perspective, ethnicity and heritage language are not threatened by translingual practices. They find an explanation and validity that is consistent with language and cultural contact in mobile and diverse social spaces. What Kubota perceives as a dilemma is a non-issue if we redefine heritage along a constructivist, not a foundationalist, language ideology. To conclude this section, there is a subtle rhetorical move behind scholarly debates of this nature that needs to be clarified. The binary of monolingualism/multilingualism, uniformity/diversity, theory/real world, and intellectuals/people, has become a tiring stereotype. These clichéd sets of binary are often invoked to counter any progressive discussion on the possibilities of resistance in theory and scholarship. They thus eventually serve disempowering and conservative ends. We have to move towards adopting a more dynamic orientation to these binaries and theorize negotiations and solidarities across divisions. We have to discover more subtle configurations beyond these binaries for effective social change and critical action. This is all the more important for applied linguists who share critical agendas and the interests of marginalized multilingual communities. We are faced with a choice: We can exploit these binaries to theorize the limitations of human agency and possibilities of change, articulating a politics of despair. Or we can identify practices and spaces that enable resistant possibilities and empowering discourses, as scholars and ordinary people renegotiate these binaries, towards a politics of hope. It is eventually a question of rhetoric. Do we want to discourse more on the collusive designs of the powerful or the resistant strategies of the subaltern in our research, theorization, and pedagogy?

7 Pedagogical Implications Kubota and Flores conclude by articulating advocacy efforts over pedagogical and textual practices that might make multilingualism more critical, as they are in fact sympathetic to multilingualism in education. Kubota recommends advocacy for institutional changes, as she perceives translingual scholarship as “moving further

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away from real-world problems. Concrete measures to resist academic neoliberalism will require the applied linguistics community to raise our concerns and begin to seek alternatives” (2014: 17). Flores also argues: “Advocates of plurilingualism who wish to challenge societal inequalities must also engage with an explicit and systematic critique of neoliberalism as an institutional force that produces such inequalities” (2013: 516). Though advocacy and institutional changes are certainly important, it is not necessary to set them up as an alternative to the pedagogical work of classroom teachers (see Giroux 2011). The classroom/social institution, or pedagogy/policy, binary is similar to the rhetorical moves identified earlier for their disempowering effect. Furthermore, it is important to point out that pedagogy is especially significant for resistance because neoliberalism’s modus operandi is developing compliant subjects. Arguably, what is “neo” about neoliberalism is its focus on dispositions for achieving its designs. To address the biopolitics informing neoliberalism, pedagogical sites are critical. Ignoring classrooms and the subjectivities constructed therein would unwittingly further the power of neoliberal agendas and governmentality. It is salutary that Flores goes on to recommend a pedagogical alternative, which he labels metaethnolinguistic subjectivity: A TESOL classroom that supports students in producing metaethnolinguistic subjectivities must work to expose the constructed nature and ideological assumptions of all language practices and provide opportunities for students to reappropriate plurilingualism in ways that resist neoliberalism’s corporatist agenda. The goal of this classroom is for students to become aware of how language can be consciously used to experiment with new subjectivities and produce new subject positions. The principal understanding that students are expected to gain is that they are in charge of how they use language and can consciously deviate from standardized rules and experiment with new ways of being (2013: 517).

Flores is right to consider the construction of “new subjectivities”, and there is more articulation needed on the pedagogies that would lead to better alternatives. Though his pedagogical proposal leads to a critical awareness of how languages and values work, we need to further theorize the desired subjectivities that can resist neoliberal subjectivities. Notions such as students “are in charge of how they use language” might unwittingly lead to the self-reliant ideology of individuality valued by human capital discourses. Furthermore, we have to ask what these “new subjectivities” are, and what it takes to “consciously deviate from standardized rules”. Other recent explorations of neoliberal influences on language learning and education have also critiqued the limitations and complicities, but not expounded on the pedagogical alternatives (see special issue edited by Shin and Park 2015; Block et al. 2012). As we discussed above, in global contact zones where heterogeneous norms and diverse grammars come into contact, traditional pedagogies that focus on grammar won’t work. There are simply too many languages and grammatical norms brought to these interactions by migrant and multilingual interlocutors that we have to move to alternative interactional practices to negotiate difference. Translingual scholars are focused on preparing students for communicative and normative unpredictability (Blommaert 2013; Canagarajah 2013a). When neoliberal discourses seek efficiency, control, and standardization of discourse, critical applied linguists develop

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“resourceful” students who can engage with such difference to achieve intelligibility in such diverse and unpredictable contexts (Pennycook 2012). Resourceful speakers engage with dominant norms (not “deviate from standard rules” by disregarding them), as there are limitations and dangers involved in flouting established norms and conventions. Students must be encouraged to renegotiate and reconfigure norms by adopting repositioning strategies. As terms such as resourcefulness are metaphors shared with neoliberalism, we have to clarify the differences. Translingual scholars have articulated resistant dispositions as they emerge from their social and pedagogical research (see Canagarajah 2013a: 173–192). To begin with, resourceful subjects don’t bring the enlightenment orientation to self-contained cognitive mastery of propositional knowledge (of grammar, discourses, values, and conventions). They bring strategic dispositions that allow them to collaborate with others in forms of distributed agency (with values such as solidarity, reciprocity, tolerance, patience, and willingness to negotiate). These dispositions enable them to align social networks, body, environmental ecologies, and diverse semiotic resources to achieve meaning and understanding. They are based on respecting the agency of diverse agents beyond the human to generate meaning, knowledge, and action. They bring a critical language awareness to understand how mobile semiotic resources are deployed strategically in situated interactions for voice and community interests in resistance to dominant ideologies and norms. Such awareness also ties semiotic resources to social action, appreciating the way even the smallest grammatical options are implicated in voice, epistemologies, ecology, and power at larger scales of consideration. Pedagogical approaches such as networking (Dingo 2013) in feminist literacy encourage students to relate textual and classroom practices to translocal structural conditions in their efforts towards voice. Thus they attempt to resolve the classroom/social or personal/structural dichotomy. As we can infer, such an orientation to disposition differs from that valued by neoliberal policies and agencies. This disposition requires more than cognitive control of form or resources, treating communication as an instrument to achieve communicative success. It is a kind of procedural knowledge (to contrast with product oriented propositional knowledge—see Byram 2008—of neoliberalism) that helps one treat communication as a form of critical practice. It is a habitus that accommodates the creative and generative workings of the body, as in the “co-operative dispositions” outlined above. It helps align one’s semiotic resources in the fullest context of interactions beyond the narrow bounds of language, individuality, or cognitive structures to consider each act of communication in expanding scales of society, culture, ideology, and environment. Such subjectivities go beyond the enlightenment/modernist individual laden with a cognitive mastery of utilitarian skills and norms. Note that the dispositions that Kubota (2013) identifies in the Japanese manufacturing companies are oriented towards efficiency, with the individual as the locus of this competence, and lacking structural engagement with power and inequality. One doesn’t have to consider the development of these translingual dispositions as strange or difficult. As we saw from the examples above on the communicative

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life of migrant professionals, those who are socialized in multilingual ecologies develop such a habitus in their everyday interactions. We have to consider how the communicative practices, language ideologies, and learning styles of multilinguals can be brought inside the classroom and formal learning contexts. Of course, such pedagogies will go counter to the dominant neoliberal expectations of accountability, productivity, and standardized testing. The translingual dispositions articulated above take time to develop. They are difficult to be taught or tested in a “one size fits all” pedagogical model. The creativity, criticality, strategies, and alignment are not under the control of individuals. They require collaboration, reciprocity, and distributed agency. There is however no excuse to shying away from the paradigm shift required for this mode of teaching and testing. There are examples of teachers, classrooms, and policy makers who are trying out alternatives in bold ways. Ecological, dialogical, language socialization, and practice-based models of instruction come close to implementing these insights (see Canagarajah 2014).

8 Conclusion To conclude, we have to be wary of our pedagogies, scholarship, and policies being appropriated by neoliberal agencies. The similarity in discourses is open to manipulation for profit-making and private interests. The fact that the dominant work relationships and production practices are modeled around neoliberal ideologies is another danger. In the name of functional literacy, many educational institutions and policies might unwittingly adopt the neoliberal expectations. Even harmless and well-meaning objectives, such as collaboration and creativity, might lead to pedagogies designed around the dominant discourses and relationships of neoliberalism. Consider, for example, Ben Rampton’s recent article titled “The next ten years in applied linguistics?” He discusses the entrepreneurial approach expected by British government from institutions of higher education, based on regional relevance to the multilingual and multicultural communities in civic spaces. Rampton argues that applied linguistics should respond to these imperatives. In passing, he mentions: “Civic spaces of this kind are also sites where the ongoing reappraisal of basic applied linguistic concepts associated with notions like ‘superdiversity’, ‘translanguaging’, ‘metrolingualism’ and so forth has a good deal to offer, helping non-specialists and ordinary people to make better sense of the sociolinguistic changes going on around them” (Rampton 2015: 5). There is a danger in this argument. In associating translanguaging and superdiversity with the entrepreneurial mission of higher education expected by the state, we might unwittingly let our critical academic work be appropriated by neoliberal ideologies. Hence the need for conversations and debates such as this, initiated in a timely manner by scholars such as Pavlenko, Kubota and Flores. We have to delineate the differences between language ideologies and practices so that the critical edge of the

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work applied linguists do will lead to more inclusive and ethical educational, social, and geopolitical relationships.

Appendix Table of Subjects and their Backgrounds

Location

No. of subjects 4

Origin countries of the subjects

Primary languages

Professional background

Kinds of data elicited

Ethiopia

Amharic

Interviews: 2 face-to-face, 1 phone, 1 email

Zimbabwe

Shona/ Ndebele and English English French Ghomálá’ Cameroonian Pidgin Kiswahili Kibena Kingoni Creole Kigogo Luganda Lukonzo

Dental school administrator, African studies global health professor, engineer, nurse Health care workers Teaching fellow and lecturer-1, teacher-1, educator-1, Educational psychologist-1

All email-interviews

3-teachers, 3-administrators/ teachers, 3-university professors Faculty in CEM, English, Politics, Chemistry, African studies, Info systems, Maths, Theatre and perform., Comp. science, Actuarial science, Law, Gender institute, Architecture

All face-to-face interviews

1

Seattle

2

Leeds/Sheffield

3

Bristol

4

Cameroon-1, Tanzania-2, Seychelles/ Uganda-1,

4

Madison

9

Uganda

5

Cape Town

13

13

Zambia, Malawi, Ghana, Nigeria, DRC, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda

Tumbuka Manuka Lala-Bisa Ibo Swahili/ French English English/ Nyanja Kidabida Shona Tonga Saamia/ Luganda



(continued)

[email protected]

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(continued) Location

No. of subjects

Primary languages

Professional background

Kinds of data elicited

Ghana

Twi

Lecturer Nurse (2), Statistician, Ph D student (2), Social Worker, Office Manager, Textile Chemist, Director of economic development organization, Hotel manager Professors: 8; Administrators: 2

Face-to-face Interview All face-to-face interviews

6

Sydney

7

York/Bradford

11

Zimbabwe, Kenya (2), Ghana, Malawi, Uganda, Burundi, Botswana, Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan

English French Arabic

8

Penn State University

10

South Africa, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya

Zulu, Krio, Yoruba, Swahili, Shona

Total

1

Origin countries of the subjects

65

Interviews: 8 face-to-face, 2 email

Interviews: Face-to-face: 57, Email: 7, phone: 1

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