The University and the World Out There

Egon Schiele, Stein on the Danube, 1913 

 

A reflection on the class and text “From Unwanted to So-Called Expertise:

Ideologizing Sociolinguistics in Mainstream Media” by Jürgen Jaspers.

Written 21 April 2016

For the visit of Jürgen Jaspers the professors decided on a set-up whereby he would start the class by talking about his own trajectory, as tried and tested at the Mondorf conference. Some of the academics who have been asked to talk about themselves at such length in front of our class have reflected on it as saying it was somewhat unprecedented and weird for them (I would use the word onwennig in Dutch). Yet I think it is a great idea, as we are all about to launch into our post-academic or continuation-academic careers, and it helps greatly to know what choices led people to where they are. Moreover, it is interesting to see how their interests develop over time. 

The first question he tried to answer about his trajectory that I find interesting to discuss here, is: Why did he take the decision to stay in academia? He said that about ten years ago he had decided he wanted to get out of the university world. He undertook some steps to get extra education (theatre teacher training) so as to be able to find non-academic work, but then found that in doing so he was still thinking about the same academic questions. He ended up realising it wasn’t so bad in academia after all, though I didn’t fully get why he came to that conclusion – maybe he just found out the theatre world was just as bad. 

I’ve also been thinking that I want to move out of academia. I have been in some form of education or another since I was 3 or even before that in the crèche. Increasingly it starts to feel problematic – there seems to be a big gap between the university and the people not in university; there is a lot of internal competition in the university which is not per se promoting a thorough approach to science; academics are often in insecure jobs with a lot of stress; and it’s all to write studies that are hardly read by the rest of the world. (-> Jaspers said that with all of our class reading his papers, his readership was suddenly ten times as big). 

I am starting to see that the university is a system to reproduce privilege, with or at the cost of the individual researchers who are just dedicated to their topic. This is partially a linguistic point: through teaching the students the correct language and formats to write their academic texts in, certain forms of knowledge are empowered: if you write it like this it has status, it has to be taken serious. Yet as always it is a selective process, of inclusion and exclusion: the texts not written like that are not seen as valid knowledge. About this Jaspers himself said a nice quotable quote, “If we don’t produce failed students we don’t recognize the ones who are successful”. In other words, by defining conditions for success you are automatically setting up a process of inclusion and exclusion. He said another thing, while talking about how sociolinguists are seen as hippies who don’t believe in norms, namely that he does believe in “some” norms but he just wants ones that aren’t exclusive. I was wondering about that (maybe I should have asked on but I felt I’d already said a lot) – do non-exclusive norms actually exist? What is his understanding of “norms”? Because maybe it is in the basis of a “norm” that it creates a division of people who do and who do not act accordingly. Either way, it feels like it’s time for me to step out of the university and find out if everything in the world reproduces privilege, or if there are ways to stop reproducing it. 

In his text about the challenges of communication between academics and journalists, Jaspers is thinking about how an academic, as an expert on a particular issue, can take agency over the discourse on their topic and get the story “out there”, the way they think about it. Firstly, it demonstrates the gap between what the people at the university are doing and the way the outside world perceives them – or in fact the way the academics perceive the “outside world”. In this case, the “outside world” believes that Standard Dutch should be taught at schools and that youths on the street are speaking a new language out of respect for foreign newcomers. Jaspers’ story actually contradicts my point in the previous paragraph in that sense, that the journalists and the people writing letters to the newspaper and whoever else reacted are not in fact taking his text as the authority that he wants it to be. They think of him as a hippie, he says, an arrogant Antwerpenaar in an ivory tower without a shred of sense of reality. The privilege reproduction of the university is apparently not carrying over into his statements actually being taken as more valid knowledge than lay sociolinguistics. This could be an issue of the discipline itself. 

The question of how you can change a discourse as an individual is one that I think is very important. Of course every time you say something that challenges the status quo, you are changing the discourse in a small way: that opinion, that way of viewing things has now been uttered and is in that sense “existent”; there is not nobody who thinks that. But it is not micro-changes we are after: the question is how one individual point of view can be spread and become more of a mainstream view (rather than that of hippies in an ivory tower).

I asked Jaspers what he thought was the best way to promote one’s view or how to take agency over the discourse. He said the most important thing is to seek a basis of other people who agree. A micro-scale change can gather momentum, ever more people join and eventually the dominant system topples in favour of the new idea (In this aspect his ideas were clearly influenced by Blommaert and chaos theory, I thought). His example of how that works in practice, that he gave later, was that instead of talking to the journalist one-on-one, after which they publish an article (the academic is taken into the world of the press) it could be better to invite the journalist to the academic conference, where under the enjoyment of some Pain de Surprise and nice free wine, the journalist is taken into the world of academics: the whole research team is there and they all think the same way, so that the academic’s weird ivory tower assertions are suddenly the normal situation and the journalist is the outlier. 

Professor Budach also suggested ways of toppling the system: she said that rather than talk to journalists or try to lobby politicians about new approaches to sociolinguistics, she had found it more rewarding to talk directly to the teachers, who are right at the place of implementation of the language policies. When they are convinced by new ideas, they can bring them directly into practice. When politicians are convinced by new ideas (when and if), they still have to elbow their way through the hedge of opposition and checks and balances before a shred of the original idea can find its way into policy, which then still has to be communicated with those who are to implement it – exactly – the teachers – presumably already tired of so many attempts to regulate their behaviour from the top. 

In summary, this article and class led me to ponder the reproduction of privilege, the exclusionary nature of norms, the perpetuation of discourse, and ways of toppling it and replacing it with one’s own perspective. I think that’s a quare lot for two pages and will therefore leave it at this.

Evaluation of the languages in the Master

Now that I have finished the Master (Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts), and the experience has already started greying out in my mind, it seems like the right time - or the last possible time at least - to write a blog post I had been intending to write, evaluating how I experienced it. Particularly I would like to evaluate some of the practical elements of how the multilingualism so proudly announced in the Master's name and on its website, actually plays out in and around the classroom and the student residences.

Entrance requirements
The Master is trilingual in English, French and German, and when I applied it was specified that you have to have C1 level English and B2 in at least one of the other two languages. Classes are taught in one or more of the three languages, and most of the staff is at least bilingual as well. It was also stated, however, that the degree is not a language learning course, although it included some language classes in the programme.

One of the first points to make here is about those specific language requirements. Because of the way English proficiency is obligatory, but aside from that you can choose either French or German, English is already effectively the lingua franca before the course has even started; through this requirement it is assured that English will be the language everyone has in common.

Teaching multilingually
The way that the classes worked is they were mostly taught in two out of the three languages, usually either French and English or German and English. There were also some ambitious teachers who taught in all three. I think the teachers were explicitly encouraged to make their classes multilingual. The actual balance between the languages differed per class, depending mainly on the teacher's choice of strategy but also on the students' input.

There were for instance teachers who tried switching between the languages while lecturing (the ones really dedicated to the multilingual ideal); teachers who mostly lectured in english but who presented case studies in other languages, with or without paraphrase; and teachers who mostly taught in French or in German but who might occasionally switch to English to accommodate student questions. Often the first class of a course would be more multilingual than the last one, as the teacher realises some of the students cannot follow the class well because their German or French comprehension skills are lacking, or because the students keep asking questions and discussing in English, so that the teacher starts to accommodate. That said I also had classes where students would make a genuine effort to make contributions in the class language, sometimes going so far as to speak it amongst ourselves. I had a few classmates and friends with whom I'd speak German, even though it was neither of our first language - I'm thinking of girls from Romania, Slovakia and China respectively (hi!).

I generally tried to pick classes in all three of the languages every semester, so choosing classes not just based on what I found most interesting, but also making sure I'd have at least a bit of French input. My French comprehension really isn't at an academic level though, as I found out while sitting through lecture after lecture in fast French. I eventually zone out, however hard I am trying to pay attention. If I do my best I will get a sense of what the teacher is saying, but I can't follow the specifics unless they talk slowly and give me some time to let it sink in or look up some words after every line. Powerpoints can help, but they can be distracting too, as you are trying to translate the info on the slides while also trying to follow what the teacher is saying. Somehow, with some teamwork and some bluffing, I did manage to get alright grades for these classes, but I haven't retained very much of what they were actually talking about.

The course as a language learning environment
That brings me onto the next topic, namely that the course wasn't intended to be a language learning course, but rather a multilingual way to deliver a humanities research course. The experience of multilingualism was part of the experience the course directors aimed for us to have, but greater fluency wasn't one of the outcomes on which students were evaluated. Yet almost everyone who chose to do the course, did so hoping to improve their language skills. At the start of the course, some intensive language classes were offered at beginner and intermediate level. I took French intermediate, so my 3rd language of the three course languages. I think people generally chose to do these courses in the course language that they were weakest in. The course I did was fun and it helped me to figure out some French past tenses and the like. In two weeks you are not going to reach fluency and I don't think that was the hope of the course designers. I know that some other students got quite annoyed with their beginner language courses, either because they found German too hard or because they didn't get along with the teacher. The intensive language courses were fairly separate from the rest of the degree and were not explicitly followed up on in the rest of the courses, which might be a tip, to integrate them more through e.g. reflection on how much you can learn in this way, which methods seemed to be most productive and so on.
 
The way the assignments worked is you were allowed to write them in any of the languages that the teacher felt confident marking in - so normally the stated course languages, but I suppose if you had another language in common with the teacher you could write it in that. (I never tried this but I seem to recall that the Luxembourgish students wrote something in Luxembourgish.)

Now, writing an assignment for university is hard in any language. Mostly every sentence costs a lot of thought and effort. You need to make sure your argument makes perfect sense, your explanations are well-written and sensible, your sources are quoted in relevant ways. But there is a lot of time pressure and you're also working on a few other assignments. Little surprise, then, that students do not venture to write in languages that they aren't very confident in. My German is at a fairly high level - I used to talk to my boss in German, I can maintain a long and nuanced conversation, albeit with some wrong inflections, I know words like ausbilden and eintrichteren and I know you can call money Mäuse. But academic writing is absolutely a skill apart. The teachers are aware that it is, and the course does offer classes in academic writing in French, German and English. I took the German one and enjoyed it, but it was a bit intimidating that I was doing the same assignments as the native speakers who were in the class with me (why they didn't take the French class instead is beyond me).

I think that the course could have developed its facilities for the students to develop their languages more, importantly by explicitly rewarding students for writing an assignment in another language. I suggested this to the course coordinators and they felt it would be hard to enforce this - as it would mean differentiating between a German native speaker writing in German, and a Greek person writing in German; or even between a Greek person who has lived in Germany before and a Greek person who hasn't; the implementation would be either quite subjective, or very complicated.

Wereld! Hallo

Het plan is om een boek te schrijven over hoe normen veranderen op dezelfde manier als taal, en daarmee het inzicht definitief te populariseren dat taal en cultuur niet wezenlijk van elkaar verschillen maar eigenlijk gewoon hetzelfde zijn. Binnen de moderne taalkunde is dat geen wereldschokkend nieuws, denk ik, maar daarbuiten realiseert geen hond zich dat! Taal bestaat uit normen! Als u, mijn lezer, enkel de eerste bladzijde van dit boek leest, hoop ik dat in elk geval die boodschap door blijft knagen en zich stukje bij beetje in uw overige denkpatronen nestelt.

[Hier die kerngedachte]

Sinds ik op dit inzicht kwam heb ik er een boek over willen schrijven. Ik kwam op het idee terwijl ik bij mijn vriendin Siri thuis zat. Onder haar luid protest was ik haar aan het uitleggen hoe taalakademies werken. Ze zei dat ze niet luisterde en dat het haar niet interesseerde, maar ik bleef maar doorzaniken, net zo lang tot haar vriend thuiskwam en ik wegmoest zodat ze rustig konden zoenen en eten koken. Staand op straat besefte ik dat ik hier een boek over wilde schrijven: hoe rechtbanken en taalakademies dezelfde functie vervullen, de ene voor normen en de andere voor woordbetekenissen. Siri wilde mijn verhaal al niet horen, hoezo zit dan de wereld op dit boek te wachten? Wereld, ik heb er vertrouwen in dat jullie me volgen in deze duizelingwekkende ontdekkingsreis. Het wordt vernieuwend aan alle kanten. De boodschap noch haar vorm zijn ooit tevoren zo gezien. Enkel dat ze op papier geprint en gekaft gaat worden en wellicht in boekwinkels en bij praatjes aan de man/vrouw gebracht, wat toch vrij onvernieuwend is; misschien kan ik het op eetpapier schrijven met choco-pen en – daar met een geit op een vlot een boek promoten al gedaan is – het door ezelrijdende schoonmaaksters laten voorlezen in gevangenissen en op kinderfeestjes (de kinderen kunnen het eetpapier vervolgens in hun party-bags mee naar huis krijgen en daar de zwaardere theorie tijdens het avondeten aan hun ouders uitleggen.)

In Luxemburg betalen ze je dik. Ik kreeg op de dag dat ik aankwam meteen een baan en ik beëindig de studie ondanks veelvuldige uitstapjes naar het buitenland met een klein maar zeker spaarvermogen. Binnen Noordwest-Europa denk ik dat het contrast tussen Luxemburg en Noord-Ierland een van de grootst mogelijk vindbare is. Met wat hier het magere overschot is van een studentenloon, kan ik mezelf in Belfast denk ik maandenlang in leven houden.

Dit boek moet in het Nederlands. Als je zo lang in het buitenland woont wordt Nederlands iets vreemds, het is ver weg en een soort fascinerende herinnering. De verhouding tot de taal verandert zeker weten: nu is het iets wat ik kan en weet, wat ik met mijn vrienden niet kan delen (ter hunner treurnis toch vaak geprobeerd). Als ik iemand tegenkom die het ook spreekt is het een gelegenheid om zowel voor hen die het wel als die het niet verstaan mijn vloeiendheid tentoon te spreiden. Aldus ontstaat in een woonkamer in Belfast een doorwrochten filosofische onderzoeking in het Nederlands. Het moet niet alleen in het Nederlands, het moet ook in zeer toegankelijk publiek-wetenschappelijk Nederlands, is het idee – sterker nog, een soort plezierig persoonlijk relaas waarbij je de zogenaamd moeilijke theorie snapt zonder dat het enige moeite kost. Wie weet win ik tegelijkertijd een spinozabeker en een gouden griffel.
 
Dat brengt me op het volgende thema: wetenschappelijke objectiviteit. Mij is het helder dat wetenschap niet objectief kan zijn en beter ook niet kan doen alsof. Voor ik dat aan de hand van Kuhn en zijn paradigma's ga uitleggen, wat ik overigens helemaal nog niet gelezen heb, eerst een anecdote ter illustratie: [het contrast tussen de denkwijzen in de MAGEO en de MLCMMC.]

Zocker, Şeker, Azúcar. Sugar packets as evidence of a changing power balance.

Another thesis done! This is a link to the full thing.


Me with 4 of the copies on the train. Photographer: Gintarė

Abstracts (English, Nederlands, Español):
The position of a language in society is a type of discourse. Even the most banal artefacts with language choices on them are not just results of but participants in that discourse, and they can reinforce it, or challenge and transform it. In this thesis, sugar packets are presented as small samples or fossils of historical language power balances, which can be used to reconstruct shifts in those balances. As a form of ready-collected data, a number of online sugar packet catalogues are used, from which some key information is however missing such as manufacturing dates and finding places. The thesis' methodology is an attempt to utilize the potential of the data by investigating it through four different approaches. After a global overview of differences between the used catalogues, the scope is limited in two different ways. First, the focus is on one city, The Hague, for which the language choices on old and new sugar packets are compared. Next is a comparison of the packets released during the history of three different Dutch department stores. Finally, the study zooms in on a single sugar packet, to trace in detail its journey and the choices made during it. The data show a clear difference between “linguistic fetish” type use of foreign languages, whereby they are employed to call up positive connotations, and “instrumental” use, which is directly related to the companies' cross-border activities. Specifically this “instrumental” multilingualism occurs ever more often, as a result of the dynamics of franchising and foreign expansion during the period which is researched.

De machtspositie van een taal in de maatschappij is een diskoers. De taalkeuzes in of op welke tekst, uitspraak of onbeduidend object dan ook zijn niet alleen resultaten van dat diskoers, maar nemen erin deel, door het te herhalen en voort te zetten, of door het aan te passen en een nieuwe richting te geven. In deze scriptie worden suikerzakjes aangegrepen als kleine staaltjes of fossielen van historische taalbalansen, die kunnen worden gebruikt om de verschuivingen daarin te reconstrueren. Bij wijze van kant-en-klare data maakt de studie gebruik van een aantal door verzamelaars bijeen gebrachte online catalogi van suikerzakjes, waarin echter bepaalde cruciale informatie mist zoals wanneer de zakjes zijn gedrukt en waar ze zijn gevonden. De methodologie van de scriptie is een poging het potentieel van de data tot bloei te brengen met vier benaderingen in toenemende mate van detail. Na een overzicht van onderlinge verschillen tussen de catalogi volgen twee verschillende manieren om het bereik van de studie te beperken, eerst met een focus op suikerzakjes uit één stad, namelijk Den Haag, waarbij taalkeuzes op nieuwe en oude zakjes worden vergeleken, en vervolgens met een vergelijking van de suikerzakjes uitgebracht gedurende de geschiedenis van drie Nederlandse warenhuizen In de laatste analyse wordt de focus verscherpt op één enkel suikerzakje, om het door het zakje afgelegde pad te traceren en de daarbij gemaakte keuzes in hun context te plaatsen. Uit de data blijkt een onderscheid tussen „dwepend“ gebruik van vreemde talen – waarbij ze worden ingezet om positieve associaties op te roepen – en „instrumenteel“ gebruik, direct gerelateerd aan grensoverschrijdende economische activiteit van de bedrijven. Specifiek deze „instrumentele“ meertaligheid komt steeds meer voor als gevolg van het ontstaan van franchises en toenemende internationalisering van bedrijven tijdens het door het onderzoek beslagen tijdsbestek.

La posición de un idioma en la sociedad es un discurso. Cada texto, objeto o acto de habla, junto con las selecciónes de idioma que se encuentran en estos, incluso en los más triviales, no son solamente resultados de este discurso sino que también hacen parte de éste y pueden reforzarlo, rebatirlo y transformarlo. En esta tesis, los paquetes de azúcar se presentan como muestras o fósiles de equilibrios históricos de poder lingüístico, cuyos cambios pueden ser reconstruidos mediante el análisis de estos vestigios. Como “corpus prefabricado” se utilizan catálogos en línea de paquetes de azúcar, recopilados por coleccionistas. Sin embargo, faltan informaciónes tales como las fechas de producción o los lugares donde se hallaron los paquetes. La metodología de la tesis busca aprovechar el potencial de dichos paquetes desde cuatro enfoques de investigación diferentes. Se empieza presentando un panorama general de las diferencias entre los catálogos y entre los sistemas nacionales de distribución de azúcar. Luego, para limitar el alcance de los datos, se comparan las selecciones de idioma hechas, en primer lugar, en paquetes nuevos y antiguos de la ciudad de La Haya, y, en segundo lugar, en los paquetes creados a lo largo de la historia de tres almacenes neerlandeses. Por último, la investigación se enfoca en un único paquete para observar en detalle su recorrido y las decisiones tomadas en este proceso. Los resultados muestran una clara distinción entre el uso de idiomas extranjeros de dos maneras: como “fetiche lingüístico” y de forma “instrumental”. En la primera, los idiomas son usados para evocar asociaciones positivas, mientras que la segunda está directamente relacionada a las actividades transfronterizas de las empresas. Este tipo de plurilingüismo “instrumental” particular occure cada vez más seguido, como resultado de las dinámicas de creación de franquicias y de expanción internacional durante el periodo investigado.

ENQUANTO HÁ CAFÉ, HÁ ESPERANÇA: The landscape of multilingual sugar packets

The back and front of a packet collected in a Portuguese bakery in Esch-sur-Alzette (on the Place de la Resistance).

Since January 2006 I have been collecting sugar packets, a hobby which trickled down from a great aunt, which was not unusual in the Netherlands in the 1950s but is now far less common. Most of the packets come with cups of coffee, drank by me or by friends and family on holiday trips. There is a sense of excitement in walking past a terrace and seeing the coffee cup of someone who already left still sitting there, the packets untouched; sneaking by and letting them slide in my pocket. In the summer when I stay at my dad’s house I tally up what I have gathered the past year. I cut small slits in the sides of the packets, let the sugar run out, and arrange them in self-adhesive photo books, matching and categorizing. On the internet I have so far found three clubs for sugar packet collectors: one in the Netherlands, one in Portugal and one in Hungary. I haven’t traded much yet, but I have been given the collections of some people who were clearing out their attic, one of them counting thousands and alphabetized on place name. 

Initially one thing that fascinated me about the Dutch packets I collected, was that many of them only have the word “SUGAR” in English, pragmatic, in capitals. These packets are very different from those my great aunt collected in the 50s. On those, there is just Dutch – not a hint of German or French even in the holiday resorts. At that time it must have been cheaper to have personalized packets pressed, as every small cafeteria had their own. Now most cafés give out sugar packets from the brand of coffee they serve. 

On closer inspection, it is not just the Dutch packets that feature interesting language choices. There are McDonalds packets with Swedish and Finnish; packets that feature slogans in Italian; and obviously the Luxembourgish packets, each of which seems to interpret the language situation in Luxembourg differently. The packets I collected in the United States, the United Kingdom, and interestingly also South Africa are all exclusively in English. An interesting case on their own are the very multilingual packets, which feature four or more languages. Which languages do they combine, and why those? 

To an extent, language on sugar packets is not even really needed. If you get a small packet with your coffee that rustles when you shake it, you probably have an idea of what is in it. The function of the language is somewhat symbolic. Language choice serves an ideological function, even on something as small as a sugar packet, or maybe especially there. When designing the packet, the business is making predictions about what their customer will understand, and what connotations different languages will have to them. The business is presenting itself as allied to what the language choice represents. 

I believe the collection could be a very interesting corpus for a thesis on multilingualism and the economic and ideological motivations of language choice. It is a type of linguistic landscaping study: what languages are featured, in what order and prominence? Is everything translated or just a part? What types of businesses make which kinds of language choices? Yet because of the nature of the collection, there is potential for comparison across different countries and through different time periods, which would be harder to achieve in studies of language choice on shop signs and advertisements. A lot of sugar packets have been documented and dated precisely by collector collectives in the Netherlands and Portugal, and possibly elsewhere; this can be used to supplement and date my own sugar packets. 

For the literature review, I would search for texts on language choice in business-customer interaction. For the methodology it will be useful to review texts about linguistic landscaping, as well as texts about sugar packets, if available. I am curious to see if business-customer interaction has been specifically written about in linguistic landscaping studies before. Also, it might be fun to see if Bourdieu’s theories about the economy of linguistic exchanges applies here, or if he just meant that metaphorically. It would also be good to read up on the linguistic context of the countries from which I am analyzing packets.