Day: January 26, 2021

To be or not to be localized, that is the question

An analysis of advertising adaptations to the Swiss multilingual context

Christophe Nascimento Santos and Emmanuel Parriaux

In this article, we explored the subject of the multilingual adaptations made in advertising in the Swiss context.

The Matter:

The many ways multilingualism can be used in advertising have yet to be understood in their entirety. The fact companies reinvent advertising constantly and are very numerous makes it almost impossible to capture every single way multilingualism is used. But without considering the number of companies doing it, the mechanisms behind the use of multilingualism remain complicated in and of themselves due to the multiple forms they can take. Multilingual advertising takes several forms depending on the context: word for word translation from one language to another, colloquial language-mixing, professional uses of multilingualism to only mention a few. The study of the use of multilingualism concern languages considered both “foreign” and “national”. Companies are interested in this subject to make their advertising campaigns more effective. Scholars are also interested in this subject to study how advertising shapes our perception and influences our behavior despite having to pass through a language barrier. This makes it a very relevant and interesting subject, ripe for inquiry. In this blog entry, we will try to understand the ways compagnies like the Coca-Cola company structure themselves  in regards to multilingual discourse, and how they react to the demands of the market for multilingual advertising. We will take an interest in how identity is constructed through advertising in different media, through the article of Ingrid Pillar (2001) and others  and interest in how languages are perceived in the context of inter and intra-national exchanges. We will further focus our inquiry on countries where  multiple national languages coexist. We will focus especially on the situation in Switzerland, while taking into account relevant knowledge linked to studies explaining how advertisements from English-speaking (mostly U.S-based) companies try to gain more reach in non-English-speaking countries. We will also not discard studies of other countries sharing some similarities to the case of Switzerland like Québec. To this end, we will critically review the available literature on this topic

Theoretical Framework 

 In this entry, we will discuss the way advertising agencies in Switzerland handle the multilingual specificity of the country. The first concept we have to define is “multitext”, this concept regroups all the different characteristics of advertising, like the main text, the visual information and the interactions with the cultural context. “Quantitative” and “qualitative” research are two approaches to collect and to analyze data. Quantitative data represents a very broad gathering of non-complex information, it is chosen when the goal is to obtain a very representative result, with big sample sizes. Qualitative data represents a narrow gathering of complex information but a deep analysis of a answers. Sociolinguistics is the study of the effects of our society on the language we use, and how we use language in society. It is linked to the study of cultural norms and expectations. Semiotics is the study of the meaning we understand through signs. Social semiotics is the study of the meaning we create and understand socially through codes of conduct or of speech.

Literature review

Advertising is a special kind of media in that it is mostly unregulated. Where official communication is delimited by the state’s laws and informational medias’ goal like television and radio is to convey both information and enjoyment to their public, commercial advertising is only driven by one simple goal: selling products . This profit seeking goal is the only factor that will decide the fate of an advertisement campaign. Therefore, it is also the main element we shall look into when discussing the choices made by the advertisement agencies in a multilingual environment.

There seems to be a certain consensus in the linguistic scholar community on the idea that advertising, maybe more than some other forms of expression, is an important subject to study. Because it is either understood as a gateway to the way people represent themselves or as a building block of societal identity-making and norm-setting. Multilingualism in this context is often used to try to appeal to a certain social class. Piller (2001) in her article Identity constructions in multilingual advertising uses as an example a German ad for a company that sells German leather bags. The ad is addressed to middle to high-middle class businessmen and woman and embodies the presumed characteristics and values of this class (tradition, efficiency, valorization of high-status). On that specific bag, the name of the company is written in English rather than German which clashes with the rest of the ad  which is otherwise entirely in German. This adds the sense that knowing and using English in an international business environment is something of value and to be proud of. In that sense, it constructs or reinforces the perceived and lived identity of its consumers while the company only seeks to sell a product. This shows how the use of languages perceived as non-native is a tool used in advertising to build or/and appeal to certain social groups and communities through the consumer images. Multilingualism here meets its corporate side again. 

It is sometimes better for companies to try and break into a new linguistic market environment than to try to expand its consumer base in its country of origin. This creates a need for those companies to translate their offers in a new language. A consideration we have to make concerning this need for a translation is the different kinds of agencies that exist and whether or not all agencies deal with this issue in a similar way. In his article “La traduction dans les agences de publicité”[1], Philippe Emond (1976) distinguishes three different scales of advertising agencies. First, we have the bigger ones that he calls the “commercial agencies”. These represent the leaders on the market, the biggest companies, and especially the ones whose marketplace is the largest, often trespassing national and linguistic borders. For this reason, they are the kind of agencies that are often confronted with multilingualism and have to decide to create, or not, translations. Another big characteristic is that they possess a varied activity sector and that their audience is wide. The second type is called “industrial agencies”, as they represent agencies that operate in a more specific market. They are often specialized in a single domain, as pharmaceuticals for example, and sell their products not to individuals but to companies. Therefore, their public range is narrowed to an audience of specialists. They communicate with people who have a clear budget, have researched all the competitors, know what they specifically want, and are not as easy to convince as a more general audience. The discourse these industrial agencies use is then more technical and informational. The different characteristics of the products have to be visible and the content is more important than the form, where the commercial agencies often prefer the form. In this specialist discourse, where providing clear information is key, the use of translators is more common. The last category is called the “promotional agencies”. They are the smaller agencies which work on very specific projects like the organization of a supermarket for example. Our work will only marginally consider this kind of ads as their use of translation is very limited

The way in which commercial agencies deal with the multilingual aspect of their audience has largely changed over time. We already see in the article of Emond (1976), that a particular strategy was starting to gain traction: creating smaller “daughter enterprises” that are focused on relaying the campaigns from the main company in their specific linguistic territory, a subsection in France or the whole French-speaking world for example. This strategy is mainly used nowadays for major agencies, but the smaller ones still use translators directly from the main company. This change corroborates the evolution of advertisement translations. Since the early days of mass advertising  in the 1950s, the campaigns focused on the product and its characteristics. But they slowly tended to shift this focus towards the effect the advertising had on the consumer and marginalize the factual information. As Guidère (2009) says it: “the translator’s interest shifted from the “source” to the “target” (personal translation). Therefore, the translation did not stop itself from the simple translation of the words in the ad but continued to the localization of the whole campaign to the audience’s culture, what Guidère (2009) calls the “multitext”. For example, a campaign in India will feature people of Indian ethnicity, but the same ad will change its characters for European looking people when imported in Europe.

            The Swiss context displays special characteristics relative to its very own “multitext” as every singular place has its own. To understand better Switzerland and the use of multilingualism in multinational compagnies we looked at examples of attempts by compagnies to reach out to countries with multiple national languages. Doing so, we’ve seen that the use of French by English-based agencies in Quebec, is made to profit on the desire for independence of the Quebecois.  In this case, the linguistic question is very political and debated. This requires further examination: Through a sociolinguistic and social semiotic lens, Elizabeth Martin (2011) studies the attempt by American fortune 500 companies to appeal to a French-speaking audience on the internet. With the support of both quantitative and qualitative data she noted that the most successful attempts were those that attempted more than a mere, raw, word-for-word translation of the English website (which was not effective, especially in Quebec) and instead tried to connect more closely to the audience of those countries through efforts to connect their brand to culturally relevant events. (Hockey players at the Olympics for Canada to take one example) and limited their use of English to marketable slogans or suppressed it entirely based on how resistant the populations were to the use of English. This showed how advertising connected deeply with both the concept of identity and cultural norms and how important it was not to adopt a “One size fits all” approach. Yet, the study highlighted nonetheless that many companies still followed a blind front-cost-cutting standardized approach that does not fulfill their goals in the long run. This study highlighted both the successes and failures of companies and suggested localization was a preferable alternative to export one’s product.

 In Switzerland, multilingualism, even though very present, is not very debated and the political tensions between linguistic communities are quite light. Grin and Korth (2005) outlined that the Swiss were “overwhelmingly in favor of developing access to English for all children in the education system” But this favor put the other national languages in a peculiar situation: “Should [the national languages] be given more or less importance than English, or should they be on par?” Maybe this lack of resistance to English has created the lack of a need to create culturally relevant advertising for the different Swiss populations and heavy reliance on a word-for-word kind of translation. This causes problems especially when we know of the relative conservatism that swiss advertising agencies possess in Switzerland. Its effects are definitely visible. As an example, the translations from German to French, (almost never the other way around), are only made on the simple text and not on the whole multitext. Advertisements made by Germanophones will often play on traditional values like family and feature personalities only known in the Swiss-Germanic part of Switzerland and they will not be adapted at all to sociopolitical values and identities more common on the other side of the Rösti Graben.

Conclusion:

As we have seen, advertising is an industry guided by monetary demands. Yet it shapes people’s behaviors as consumers and as member of classes because of its setting of norms. We build our consumer identities partly in response to it. We have explored how marketing agencies are built and the different strategies they use to manage the transmission of their information to us depending on their needs and to which social class they are marketing their products for. We examined how companies tried to break the language barrier and how they attempted to cater to different linguistic communities. Sometimes they did so with great success through a localized understanding of the cultural and linguistic territory. Other times it was a great failure through standardized cold and lifeless, “one size fits all” procedures. Methods based on word for word translation to approach communities who sometimes feel invaded by a product they resent as out of place or as “not belonging” just work significantly less. We then focused on the case of Switzerland where it seems to us that companies have done a pitiful job of connecting with the rich multilingual potential of the multilingual country and transmit advertisements that feel out-of-touch with the perspective of many Swiss citizens. There is a lot left to learn on the subject and more research is needed. The studies we approached often noticed the lack of representation of certain communities on the global scene where the advertising they received was always very generic and sometimes not even translated. It is therefore difficult for us to learn about what is happening in those communities and we think in the future, as those markets develop and awareness of their presence on the global scene grows, inquiry on how global marketing will make its way, or perhaps fail to make its way, in a localized manner will be very interesting to look at.

Bibliography 

AMOS, W. 2020. English in French Commercial Advertising: Simultaneity, bivalency, and language boundaries in Journal of Sociolinguistics, 24 (1), 55-74. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12386

BOIVINEAU, R. 1972. Que pense-t-on de l’adaptation publicitaire en Belgique et en Suisse? In Meta, 17 (1), 47–51. DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/002098ar

EMOND, P. 1976. La traduction dans les agences de publicité in Meta, 21 (1), 81–86. DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/002708ar

FORUM,  Le grand débat (vidéo) – Les pubs suisses sont-elles vraiment si nulles ? RTS Info, 11.12.2020, 18h31-18h50. Available at : Forum (vidéo) – Le grand débat (vidéo) – Les pubs suisses sont-elles vraiment si nulles? – Play RTS

GRIN, F., KORTH, B. 2005. On the reciprocal influence of language politics and language education: The case of English in Switzerland. Lang Policy 4, 67–85. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-004-6565-3

GUIDERE, M. 2009. De la traduction publicitaire à la communication multilingue in Meta, 54 (3), 417–430, p.420. DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/038306ar

MARTIN, E. 2011. Multilingualism and Web advertising: addressing French-speaking consumers in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 32 (3), 265-284.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2011.560671

PILLER, I. 2001. Identity construction in multilingual advertising in Language in society, Vol.30 (2), p.153-186. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404501002019

Family language policies: how is the language transmitted through generation of immigrants ?

Aleksandra Jankovic, Tryphène Kileki

In this blog entry, we will discuss different possibilities of heritage language transmission, from the first generation to the second. We will especially concentrate on the factors on which language transmission depends and the parents’ motives for the transmission or non-transmission of the language.

Key words: family, bilingualism, generation, immigration

3 generation family
Three generation of a family
“3 generation family” by OURAWESOMEPLANET: PHILS #1 FOOD AND TRAVEL BLOG is licensed with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

Introduction

As second-generation migrants we both have learned our heritage languages, but this is not the case for every migrant child. It depends on many factors, such as family relationships or parents’ effort, whether the child will learn the heritage language or not. Language has an important role for communication, understanding and relationships between different generations within a family. It is also important for identity. According to Spolsky (2012), the relationship that the second-generation migrants have with the heritage language is strongly linked with emotions and identity.

In this blog entry, we will discuss different possibilities of heritage language transmission, from the first generation to the second. We will especially concentrate on the factors, on which the language transmission depends and the parents’ motives for the transmission or non-transmission of the language. For this purpose, we will explore various types of family language policy in the UK. 

Wilson (2020) reports that, according to the latest report of the office for National Statistics, 34% of the children born in the UK have at least one parent from another country, which means that many children are in contact with another language other than English at home. This does not mean that they do not know English, quite the contrary. According to Bloch and Hirsch (2017), in the UK, 92.3% of the national population speak English as their main language. Only 0.3% of the national population do not speak English at all. However, Bloch and Hirsch (2017) assert that the political discourse of the state about language plays a negative role in the heritage language transmission. They add that politicians promote “integrationism” that forces people to learn English in order to gain citizenship. Foreign languages are negatively portrayed by the government and are linked to the image of the “outsider”. Spolsky also highlights that “state-controlled education commonly sets up a conflict between heritage languages and the national standard language” (2012: 4).

Generalities and basic information

Before getting to the heart of the matter, certain concepts need to be clarified in order to avoid confusion. 

  • Heritage languages (HL) are “ethnic minority languages”. They are spoken within a migrant community in a foreign country, where another dominant language is spoken. (Montrul 2011).
  • By native language, we mean the language that the parents spoke in the foreign country before coming to the UK.
  • First generation migrants are people who were born in a foreign country and then came to the UK. People from this generation master their native language. Some of them can also speak English.
  • Second generation migrants are children who were born in the UK, from parents that come from another country. They “present the most variability in bilingual ability.” (Montrul 2011). They are also the most analyzed group.
  • Language shift happens when a community starts to replace their own native language with another language. 
  • Family language policy (FLP) is when a family explicitly plans which language they will use between the family members. 

Many studies about the transmission of the heritage language in migrant families in the UK were conducted. For our review, we will be focusing on six research papers. All these studies assert that the acquisition of the heritage language  happens mainly at home, within the family. Children learn the language from their parents. Thus, migrant parents play a significant role in the transmission of their native language to their children, who were born in the UK. Miekisz, Haman, Łuniewska, Kuś, O’Toole & Katsos  (2017) argue that the exposure of children to a bilingual environment (e.g bilingual day care setting) can also have a positive impact. But not every migrant child acquires their parents’ native language, and some of them can only speak English. It can also happen that children understand the family heritage language but cannot speak it or cannot speak it fluently. Another possible outcome of FLP are the bilingual second-generation migrants, who understand and can speak their HL fluently as well as English as the dominant language.. Some people learn the heritage language when they are children but once they grow up and do not live with their parents anymore, they tend to forget their language and speak English only. A lot of variations in the acquisition of the heritage language by the second generation are possible; all the studies agree on this point. There are no universal patterns, as it changes from family to family : hence the importance of FLP as a new field of research. 

The studies that we selected are trying to find out and understand the factors that play a role in the transmission of the heritage language and also to grasp the parent’s motives for the transmission or non-transmission of the language. Several factors can impact the transmission of the language and they vary from one family to another. We will attempt to provide some examples from the six articles in order to explain the impact of different factors on the acquisition of the heritage language. These factors can be linked to personal factors like the family situation (divorced parents, contact with other members of the family), national identity (how the speaker perceives him- or herself), to integration or even to discrimination (fear of being different). But politics can also play a role in the acquisition of the heritage language (e.g. speaking Kurdish in Turkey is forbidden, so when people emigrate, they tend not to speak this language to their children).

Literature review

According to Canagarajah’s study (2008), the Sri Lankan Tamil migrants experienced a language shift toward English and they tend to lose their native language more than other migrant communities. He interviewed different Tamil families from Sri Lanka in order to understand their behavior concerning language transmission and the reasons for the lack of transmission of the Tamil language. He found out that the reasons are not the same in every family. But he argues that English colonialism has played a significant role in the loss of the Tamil language within migrant families. English was introduced in Sri Lanka around 1780 by British colonizers and it has been perceived as a superior language since then. He explains that, in Sri Lanka, people see English as a prestigious language. They think that it is very important to learn English. People who do not know English think that they will be considered as ignorants and simple-minded. Canagarajah explains that, as a consequence, when Tamil people come to the UK (or another English speaking country), they are so preoccupied with learning English that they tend to neglect their native language. The parents’ fluency in English can also impact the transmission of the language in different ways. Canagarajah explains that some Tamil parents who do not speak English rely on their children’s help for interactions outside the home (e.g for administration). They also count on their children to teach them English and most of them learn English via their children. For these reasons, parents tend to encourage their children to learn and use the English language more than their heritage language. This can lead to a loss or a non-acquisition of the heritage language by the children. However, it is also possible that parents that lack fluency in English talk with their children in their native language only, consequently the child will acquire the heritage language and will be fluent in it. Among migrants in the UK, there are also refugees, who had to flee their home country. Bloch and Hirsch (2017) have interviewed second generation migrants, whose parents have fled their home country.  They attempted to analyse how and whether the transmission from the first to the second generation happens and they also analyse the context in which it happens. They have found out that most of the second generation refugees children have indeed acquired proficiency in their heritage language. However, Bloch and Hirsch have noticed that the use of the heritage language was limited to the home and the family context.

They argue that “politics of language use and the policies that exclude languages other than English create an environment where heritage languages are not valued” (Blosch and Hirsch 2016). A Sri Lankan Tamil person interviewed in this study explained that when she was with her classmates and her mother called her on the phone, she used to reply in English, even if her mother talked in Tamil. She justifies this by saying that she did not want to be different from her classmates.

Blosch and Hirsch explain that other participants also felt that way and that they sometimes experienced racism from their classmates. But they also assert that this is because children assimilated school policies about language. They give the example of a girl who spoke only Tamil when she started school. Her teacher was worried about this and she advised the girl’s parents to speak English only at home, in order to improve her English. Consequently, the parents decided to also speak in English with their younger children. Furthermore, two Kurdish girls explain that, when they spoke Kurdish in their classroom, their teacher forced them to only speak English.

The case of French second-generation migrants in the UK differs from the others because of several reasons. The principal reason is the high prestige of the language in the UK. As a matter of fact, French is part of the British curriculum, which means that the second-generation migrants have an advantage in speaking French at home. In Wilson’s study (2020), a group of children from three families were interviewed to understand the FLP through their eyes. It is true that the parent’s choice about what language they will talk to their children has a great impact, but there is not a lot of research taking into account what the children feel about it and how they perceive that language policy in action Wilson’s case studies are children that have one french parent and one British one and the three families have different FLP in regards to the HL (French). 

In the first family (A), the children (9 and 16 years old) “use English exclusively with their father, whereas French is the only language of interaction with their mother, in all circumstances” (Wilson, 2020). This is due to the french mother’s strict language policy, ignoring her children when they are addressing her in English. The reason behind such a strong insistence on her children speaking French is said to help them be more proficient. The effect of this FLP on the children is that they both define themselves as half English and half French. However, the girl expressed resentment towards her mother who ignores her when she speaks in English, when the big brother is more resigned. Overall they say they are grateful to be able to connect with their French relatives.

This is a self-portrait that Ella (older sister in family B) did. The notes address the difference of proficiency in the languages she speaks. There is also information about the situation when she uses her languages. Interestingly, her mouth and heart (skills and emotional connection) are both in two colors.
DOI: https://doi.10.1080/01434632.2019.1595633

In the second family (B), the French mother translanguages often but addresses her children (11 and 13 years old) mostly in French. She “qualifies her approach to the transmission of the minority language as ‘relaxed’” (Wilson, 2020). She is conscious that her children’s French could be better but also that they have an advantage in school because of their level in French. The attitude of the children towards the language is not the same even if they had the same education.
Her brother sees himself as English, on the contrary. Both siblings recognize their lack of skills in French but the sister has taken the initiative of improving her French whereas her brother does not do the same

The third family (C) have a strict French-only policy. It means that in their home and outside, the family only communicate in French. The father is French and the mother has a really high level in French. The application of the only-French rule makes the parents (especially the father) have a “immediate and systematic” (Wilson, 2020) negative response whenever the children (6 and 4 years old) speak in English or mix it with French. Wilson argues that this leads to a problem of communication since the children are stopped in their attempt to say something. In other words, the strong reaction of the parents makes the form of what the child is saying more important than the content. The children in this family are still young but the older brother already said that he will not speak to his children in French because “it takes too much time” in his words. He also expresses negative feelings related to the ignorance of his father when he tries to speak in English.

In conclusion, this study has revealed the feelings that the children have during the moment the FLP that their parents choose is in action. The feelings are mixed and often differ between the children of the same family. The future of the French into the children’s lives is not known yet, but there is already a tendency that can predict whether or not they will keep speaking in French.

Conclusion

In order to conclude, we can say that this is not possible to make certain predictions about language transmission. According to Wilson “different FLPs may produce similar results, while similar language management methods may lead to different reactions among children” (2020). What can be seen are tendencies about how the different language policies that the parents decide to have in their home will affect their children. There are a multitude of factors that determine if at the end of the day the second-generation migrants will have the relationship with the Heritage Language that the parents wanted them to have. One of the major factors is that all humans are different and even in the same home the reactions can be different. 

As second-generation migrants, we did not feel any particular pressure to speak French only, in our environment (French-speaking Switzerland). There is no shame about speaking another language. Thus, we can say that our environment is maybe more “multilingual friendly” than the UK. In addition to all the factors linked to the family, politics also can impact the transmission of the language. It would be interesting to compare the swiss and the british political environment and to compare the impact that they have on the transmission of the heritage language in migrant families in future studies.

Bibliography

Bloch, A. and S. Hirsch. 2017. “Second generation” refugees and multilingualism: identity, race and language transmission. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (14). pp. 2444-2462. Available at: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/623131/3/Bloch_and_Hirsch_ERS_2016_author_accepted_.pdf Accessed on: 15/12/2020

Canagarajah, A. Suresh. 2008. Language Shift and the Family: Questions from the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora. Journal of Sociolinguistics, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 143–176. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2008.00361.x Accessed on: 15/12/2020

Montrul, S. (2011) INTRODUCTION: The Linguistic Competence of Heritage Speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33, no. 2: 155-61. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/44485999. Accessed on: 23/12/2020

Miękisz A., E. Haman, M. Łuniewska, K. Kuś, C. O’Toole & N. Katsos. 2017. The impact of a first-generation immigrant environment on the heritage language: productive vocabularies of Polish toddlers living in the UK and Ireland, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 20:2, 183-200, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2016.1179259. Accessed on: 15/12/2020 

Spolsky, B. 2012. Family Language Policy – the Critical Domain. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 3–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2011.638072 Accessed on: 15/12/2020

Wilson S. 2020. Family language policy through the eyes of bilingual children: the case of French heritage speakers in the UK, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41:2, 121-139, DOI: https://doi.10.1080/01434632.2019.1595633. Accessed on: 15/12/2020

Multilingualism in Swiss advertisements: where Swiss chocolate meets English tea

By Ludovick Flachat and Asia Thommen

Short description:  In this blog entry, we investigate the reasons behind and the locations in which the swiss advertisement industry employs English as a lingua franca.  

Keywords: Multilingualism, Advertisement, Switzerland, English, Lingua Franca.

Introduction

Multilingualism is one of the most typical characteristics of Switzerland. According to Patricia Ronan (2016), since 1938, there are four national official languages in the country: German, French, Italian and Romansh. Although its linguistic variety is one of Switzerland’s key characteristic, it remains one of the main issues within the country. Indeed, managing these languages is not an easy task even if the territoriality principle is in place, making each canton responsible for the designation of an official language. Therefore, out of the 26 cantons, 17 have German as their official language, 4 have designated French only and 1 opted for Italian. There are also 3 German and French bilingual cantons (Bern, Valais and Fribourg) and 1 German, Italian and Romansh trilingual canton (Graubünden).

Nevertheless, it is still hard for every Swiss resident to understand and be understood everywhere in the federation. Furthermore, it raises the question of which language(s) to teach the younger generations. Consequently, English as a lingua franca is used as an answer to fill the gaps. Its use in Switzerland kept on increasing from post-World War II onwards, becoming the main language of 4.4% of the Swiss population (Ronan, 2016: 16). English as a lingua franca is especially used in work environments such as the army, universities or advertising. The language is thus considered as neither a second nor a foreign language, but its status lies somewhere in between (Cheshire, 1994). Hence, it is expected that English is also used in Swiss advertisements.

In this blog entry, we will investigate the use of English in Swiss advertising based on academic papers and Swiss ads that we collected on the internet (Autumn 2020). We will apply the theories in the literature to our country’s advertising system, exploring why Swiss-based companies use English for its advertising and in what ways it is doing so. In particular, we will study phenomena such as “language contact” which consists of the interaction of two or more languages found in the same material, leading to a transfer of linguistic features and style.

Figure 1 – Arnold Zwicky’s blog. 2021. A Swiss thread. Arnold Zwicky, twenty-fourth of January. Available at: https://arnoldzwicky.org/2018/06/19/a-swiss-thread/. Accessed on: 24/01/2021.

The one above is an obvious case of language contact in Switzerland. We chose this example of advertisement because it illustrates perfectly the complexity induced by the Swiss’ spectrum of languages. The manufactory is based in Zurich, in the Swiss German part of Switzerland, which explains why the main title is in German. However, it is translated in three other languages. One of them is French, another official idiom of Switzerland. The other two are Spanish and English, two of the most spoken languages in the world. This choice was probably made in order to expand the audience of the advertisement to a more international level.

The first part of the blog entry will provide some theoretical context in order to explain why English is part of Swiss society and therefore the advertising system. In the following section we will highlight how the language is used in Swiss advertisement and the fundamental reasons for the choice of English in the Swiss advertisement system by also giving some examples. Finally, we will conclude our blog entry by illustrating the limitations and the possible further directions for research.

Theoretical Framework

The advertising world is in a continual expansion, becoming more influential and thus receiving an increasing budget. This development hence induces a modification of its codes and values such as the birth of “super brands” (Piller 2003: 176) in the 1990s. Super brands are trademarks that take their value from their symbolic charge created by the ways in which they are advertised more than the product itself or the service they provide. Brands such as Nike or Calvin Klein play with these codes and the “conceptual value-added”. The value added is the additional feature or economic value which a company adds to their product before offering it to the customers. In order to make their brand successful internationally thanks to globalization, advertisers have created a “brand pidgin” (Piller, 2003: 176) which consists of logos and the use of slogans. These tools lead to a global understanding and recognition of one’s brand.

Interestingly, one way of doing so is by language contact, which increases the use of English in non-English-speaking countries. Moreover, English is globally considered as the language of modernization and technology (Piller, 2003: 175). Its spread is facilitated by the extensive use of the language in global communications (80% of the total), but also by the internet marketing. Switzerland is also affected by this phenomenon in many ways, including the use of English as a marketing strategy. In fact, the Swiss population, being multilingual, often uses English as a foreign language. This implies that Switzerland is a part of Kachru’s “expanding circles”. Kachru’s model defines three different categories of users of English (Bhatia, 2012: 571). First, the “inner circle” (UK, USA etc.) which is composed of the countries that have English as L1 and created the norms which then spread to the other circles. The second is the “outer circle” (Singapore, India etc.) thus the circle of people who learned English as a second language because of their background as an English colony. At last, the “expanding circle”, which consists of most English speakers worldwide, in which English does not have a governmental status but is generally studied as a foreign language. It is a circle which is dependent on the norms created by the Inner circle. Most of swiss speakers learn English as a foreign language which makes them a part of the last group.

As we have seen before, multilingualism in Switzerland is its strength in terms of tourism trade and international relations, but also a debate within the country. Though it is true that in Switzerland, English could be seen as a foreign language, it is also often used to fill the lack of knowledge of the other official languages, thus accepting the role of an internal lingua franca. Cheshire even defines it as a “‘neutral’ second language for all the Swiss language groups” (1994: 453). English can thus be considered as a lingua franca that can be the bridge between all parts of Switzerland without favouring one of the four official languages.

Previous studies and examples

In her research, Ingrid Piller discusses the use of English in advertising, comparing it to the use of other foreign languages. Usually, the use of an additional language, different from the national language, is related to ethno-cultural stereotypes as it is the case of English within British class in continental Europe. However, as Piller underlines, in the case of English, focusing on the ethno-cultural stereotypes is irrelevant considering its overuse in many areas. Thereby, English is more associated with social stereotypes such as prestige, modernity or progress. As we can see in the next few examples, the use of English in advertising is happening alongside the three Swiss official languages (German, French and Italian). In our blog we decided not to include an example of the Romansh-English contact as the language is dying and finding a multilingual advertisement would be too difficult.

Figure 2 – Rolex. 2020. Home page Sky-Dweller Presentation. Rolex, Twelfth of December. Available at: https://www.rolex.com/fr. Accessed on: 12/12/2020.

As this first example highlights, English is used to emphasize the prestige of this Swiss luxurious watch. This is a Swiss ad on the Rolex’s website. The website chosen is mainly in French, but as you can see the marketing team decided to name the product with an English name: “sky-dweller”. English product naming is the most favourite and easily accessible process in multilingual advertising (Bhatia, 2012: 579). Additionally, it often happens that a product’s name and advertisement are an expression of the company’s origins. For instance, Coca Cola is an American brand which has decided to keep their slogan “taste the feeling” in English in all countries including Switzerland. Bhatia (2012: 580) also explains that English can occur in many structural domains such as slogan and product name but also company name or logo, labelling and packaging, pricing, main body, headers and sub headers. 

Figure 3 – Swatch. 2020. Swatch Home Page Big Bold Presentation. Swatch, Twelfth of December. Available at: https://www.swatch.com/de-ch/homepage?gclid=CjwKCAiAlNf-BRB_EiwA2osbxdP87GBAl87WGj8TH_GlEaHooryf04dHxpjepQDJdZNDM-bDLlqTKRoCCTIQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds.
Accessed on: 12/12/2020.

In this second example above (see Figure 3), we can see an ad from the Swiss company “Swatch”, which sells watches and bracelets. Here the advertisement on their website is in German but uses English to name their product (BIG BOLD) but also for their slogan: “Time is what you make of it”. The website is also available in French, where the slogan still includes English. English slogans usually are sentence-like and not just one-word structures and the Swatch’s ad is a perfect example. As for the example of the Rolex watch, this is another case of English product naming, considered as the simplest process in multilingual advertising (Bhatia, 2012: 579).

Figure 4 – Lindt. 2020. Home page Lindt. Swatch, Thirteenth of December. Available at: https://www.lindt.it/. Accessed on: 13/12/2020.

In this third example we can see that the description of the website, thus the main body, is in Italian, but the header is in English. This is probably done in order to reach a wider audience, and to suggest to the reader that the page can be translated to other languages. Moreover, as in the Rolex watch advertisement, English could be used to emphasize the luxury and modernity of the brand. As for the last examples, English is thus used to exalt the level of internationality and modernity of the product in order to attract the receiver of the advertisement to buy the Swiss product.

The three given examples are from swiss brands on their swiss websites in the three official languages. It is interesting to notice that this phenomenon appears in all of the three official languages of Switzerland. Indeed, one language could be more likely to use English. For instance, we suppose that a minority language such as Italian could perhaps increase the use of English in the publicity world or even in the canton altogether, in order to make sure that the advertisements and information are understandable by all Swiss visitors. Ultimately, all parts of Switzerland use English in their marketing strategies.

As we saw with these examples, English is an extensively used language within Switzerland, and it does not seem like it is only used to show a level of internationality which could attract tourists, but also for other interesting reasons. In 1994, Jenny Cheshire wrote an interesting paper in which she talks about advertisements in Switzerland. The year of this article could be seen as a complication, but we consider that her conclusions are still relevant for the case of Swiss advertisement nowadays.

Firstly, she states that the use of English in Swiss ads could be seen as a convenience for the advertiser who can use the same commercial in the four different linguistic regions without having to change its text. Secondly, Cheshire develops an intriguing point on how the Swiss use English as “a way of transcending a problematic national identity, in order to allow them (the Swiss) to construct a self-image that is consistent with the favourable image that they present to tourists” (Cheshire, 467). Swiss advertisers thus use(d) English in their ads in order to connect with international tourists and construct a more favourable image of the land for travellers coming from all over the world. Finally, a more practical point must be considered. Switzerland has a total number of four national languages and at least eight different German-speaking dialects (varieties of Schwytzerdüsch). Therefore, we could say that there is not one single language that could serve as a national symbol of the Swiss identity. Furthermore, three of the four official languages are also the languages of the neighbouring countries, an aspect which diminishes the concept of Swiss national language.

What we still consider as a controversy is whether, from a more ethical point of view, it is in Switzerland’s best interests to use a foreign language and not one of its own national languages. Maybe using more multilingual advertisement in the four official languages would encourage Swiss residents to learn or at least remember some of the other Swiss languages. In fact, Swiss pupils have to learn a second national language at an early stage of life. This reveals the importance for the swiss residents to learn other national languages, in order to have broader work and educational opportunities. Nevertheless, a study led by the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education[1] revealed that only twelve of the twenty-six Swiss cantons learn a second national language before learning English. The fourteen remaining cantons provide an English education before the second national language. What is interesting to notice is that the fourteen cantons in which English is taught before a second national language are mainly the Swiss-German cantons: Uri, Obwalden, Nidwalden, Lucerne, Zug, Schwyz, Glarus, St. Gallen, Aargau, Appenzell Innerrhoden, Zurich, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Thurgau and Schaffhausen. In fact, the matter of language education is a regional decision. But the fact that for the Swiss German region it is more important to learn English very early in the education implies that English is used more than in the Swiss French or Swiss Italian region. This hypothesis is confirmed by a study lead by the federal office of statistics (De Flaugergues, 2016), in which it is established that generally the English language is used more in the Swiss German regions than in the other Swiss regions.

Conclusion

The case of Switzerland is thus very interesting in terms of multilingualism. It already has four national languages of its own, but as we can see from the examples of advertising above, English is often used as a solution to reach the most extensive audience possible. It must be kept in mind that it is the federation of Switzerland which is multilingual, not the population. This means that not all of the Swiss residents are able to communicate in a national language, i.e. without using a lingua franca to understand each other (which in most cases is English). The issue of communication can also be found in the context of advertisement, a reason why English might be so extensively used in the world of publicity. As said before, another reason for using English is because it is considered as the language of modernization and technology (Piller, 2003: 175), characteristics which can help the selling of a product. Finally, as Cheshire (1994) states, the reasons which lead Switzerland to use English in the advertising system are multiple and can be summarized in three main points. The convenience for the advertiser who does not have to translate the announcement for different linguistic regions, the creation of an alternative and tourist-friendly identity and finally a more practical point, the fact that Switzerland cannot be represented by a single language. Considering all of these issues we personally find that the use of English in Swiss advertisement can be considered comprehensible. Because of the multilingual peculiarity of Switzerland, English provides a fundamental contribution to the comprehension of advertisements and we perceive the use of the language as a necessity.

According to what we have learned with this research we would find it interesting to consider the case of English in more official matters as in the communication from the Swiss government. This would allow us to comprehend the importance and the policies used while managing English as a lingua franca in a country which is already multilingual.

Definition of concepts

Foreign languages: language which is not indigenous and used as a vernacular in a given country.  

Lingua franca: language used in order to communicate between two individuals which do not share the same native language.

Monolingual: when the language repertoire of an individual or an entity is composed of only one language

Multilingualism: when the language repertoire of an individual or an entity is composed of more than one language.

Multilingual advertisement:  advertisement which uses more than one language.

Official language(s): usually the language (or languages) used by the government, hence the language(s) which has a legal status in a particular country/territory.

References

Bhatia, T. K., and W.C. Ritchie. 2012. Bilingualism and Multilingualism in the Global Media and Advertising. In T. K. Bhatia and W. C. Ritchie (ed.), The Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism. Blackwell Publishing, 563–597.

Cheshire, J. 1994. English as a Cultural Symbol: English as a Cultural Symbol: The Case of Advertisement in French-Speaking Switzerland. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 15.6, 450-469. 

De Flaugergues, A. 2016. Pratiche linguistiche in Svizzera : Primi risultati dell’Indagine sulla lingua, la religione e la cultura 2014. Statistica della Svizzera. Available at: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/it/home/statistiche/cataloghi-banche-dati.assetdetail.1000181.html. Accessed on: 22.12.2020

Demont-Heinrich, C. 2005. Language and National Identity in the Era of Globalization: The Case of English in Switzerland. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 29.1, 66–84.

Piller, I. 2001. Identity constructions in multilingual advertising. Language in Society, 30.2, 153–186.

Piller, I. 2003. Advertising in a Site of Language Contact. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23, 170-183.

Ronan, P. 2016. Perspectives on English in Switzerland. Cahiers de l‘ILSL 48, 9-26.

Vettorel, P. and V. Franceschi. 2019. English and other languages in Italian advertising. World Englishes, 38.3, 417‑434.

Images:

Figure 1: Arnold Zwicky’s blog. 2021. A Swiss thread. Arnold Zwicky, twenty-fourth of January. Available at: https://arnoldzwicky.org/2018/06/19/a-swiss-thread/. Accessed on: 24/01/2021.

Figure 2: Rolex. 2020. Home page Sky-Dweller Presentation. Rolex, Twelfth of December. Available at: https://www.rolex.com/fr. Accessed on: 12/12/2020.

Figure 3: Swatch. 2020. Swatch Home Page Big Bold Presentation. Swatch, Twelfth of December. Available at: https://www.swatch.com/de-ch/homepage?gclid=CjwKCAiAlNf-BRB_EiwA2osbxdP87GBAl87WGj8TH_GlEaHooryf04dHxpjepQDJdZNDM-bDLlqTKRoCCTIQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds. Accessed on: 12/12/2020.

Figure 4: Lindt. 2020. Home page Lindt. Swatch, Thirteenth of December. Available at: https://www.lindt.it/. Accessed on: 13/12/2020.

Quadrilingual Switzerland – a model for multilingual education?

Marine Fiora, Katharina Schwarck

Content

In this blog post, we will investigate multilingual education in the plurilingual country of Switzerland, what its policies and programmes are, and how and why they are implemented. 

Keywords: bilingual education, Switzerland, territoriality, monolingual ideology, multilingualism


Figure 1: Ⓒ Ben White

Switzerland is officially a quadrilingual country (Meune 2010) where the national languages are German, French, Italian and Romansh although many other minority languages are spoken as is the case with English, which is becoming increasingly important. Since Switzerland is a federation, the sovereign cantons define their official language (Paternostro 2016; Zimmermann 2019), according to the main language spoken by their inhabitants: this is called the principle of territoriality. It is customary to have only one official language in each different region. Switzerland is therefore, rather than a quadrilingual country, a mosaic of monolingual regions where the principle of territoriality creates a well-defined separation between the languages (Grin and Schwob 2002). The language borders are visible in the Figure 2 illustrates. However, the majority of Swiss people are far from quadrilingual. The notion of language borders is important for the understanding of the topic of multilingual education because it highlights the difference between societal bilingualism and personal bilingualism.  Indeed, a country can be bilingual while the citizens are not necessarily (Grin and Schwob 2002). Of the 26 Swiss cantons, only three are officially bilingual (i.e. Valais/Wallis, Fribourg/Freiburg, Berne/Bern) and only one is trilingual (i.e. Graubünden/Grigioni/Grischun) (Grin and Schwob 2002). In order to improve understanding between language areas, it is obligatory for children to be taught a second national language at school. It is necessary to understand the language policies and their implementation in different cantons in order to maintain national cohesion in the country.


Figure 2: “Map Languages CH” © Marco Zanoli. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Multilingualism is a language ability which includes the use of several languages in our repertoires. However, in our current neo-liberal period, this faculty can be a great asset, whether cultural or economic. Having multiple language repertoires gives access to prestige languages and facilitates communication between people with different mother tongues. Moreover, with English becoming even more important and global throughout the years, learning it as foreign language has become increasingly common and almost required in order to use it as a lingua franca.

One way of learning a foreign language is bilingual education. As García (2009) explains, bilingual education is a mode of education in which the language studied is used as a means of communication and not as the target of study as is the case in traditional language classes. The aim of this approach is to immerse students in a different culture, language and way of thinking, enabling them to obtain intercultural skills. This method is called immersion teaching and has been practised all over the world since the 1960s to varying degrees. According to Lys and Gieruc (2005), the first study experiment of this type of teaching was conducted in bilingual Canada, where parents of English-speaking students had demanded a more effective type of French teaching, in order to improve their children’s socio-economic chances. Following this demand, an experimental programme was set up to verify the effectiveness of this type of learning. During these first immersion experiences, parents were concerned that learning another language could have cognitive repercussions on their children. The results of this evaluation were very positive and led Canadian political authorities to promote this type of teaching throughout the country. Shortly after Canada, many other countries moved to develop education in foreign languages, as for instance countries in Europe. This type of language teaching seems to be becoming more widespread in order to develop students’ socio-economic chances and intercultural communication (Lys and Gieruc 2005).  Another way of learning a foreign language is Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) which allows the learning of a language in non-linguistic focused courses. This means that some classes will be taught in the target language without being a grammar or vocabulary course. When not all classes are taught in the target language, but also in the pupils’ regional language, this structure is also called a dual immersion programme.

These modes of learning can be particularly useful and interesting in a multilingual country like Switzerland, where federalism allows Swiss cantons to choose their school curricula and how they approach language learning (Grin and Schwob 2002). In fact, Switzerland has always worked with the goal to promote the cohesion of its cantons. From the 1970s onwards, the study of a second national language in primary school was added to the study of the pupils’ native language (Paternostro, 2016). This raises the question of the implementation of bi/multilingual education in public schools in the Swiss cantons and the differences between them.

The Swiss Federation has been accepting several kinds of bilingual school courses since 1995 (Elmiger 2008), allowing the cantons to build up their own programme and promoting exchanges between the different language areas (Meune 2010). One notices that in regions of contact between two languages, bilingual programmes develop more naturally, and there are more possibilities for educating children which take into account their particular language situation when they are, for example, speakers of a national minority language. Evidently, measures and programmes are not restricted to native speakers of a national language, but do also extend to students’ whose parents’ might be migrants and whose home language might not be official Swiss. In officially monolingual regions the creation of a bilingual programme depends on the school and it aims to improve students’ skills and socio-economic chances (Elmiger 2008). Nevertheless, not all cantons have regulations on the design of bilingual courses in the secondary level, especially in smaller cantons or in those where only one or a few schools offer a bilingual curriculum. Where these programmes do exist, they are not always equally detailed. 

In 2008, the cantons of Geneva and Zurich – the biggest and most international cantons – Berne/Bern and Fribourg/Freiburg, and monolingual Aargau and Vaud had developed detailed specifications for their bilingual programmes, often in order to promote them (Elmiger 2008). Typically, bilingual programmes exist sporadically in German-speaking Switzerland while in Vaud’s gymnases (the Swiss equivalent of High School), in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, such programmes are available to everybody in state schools. The bilingual programmes usually last three or four years and begin in the ninth or tenth year (ages 14 to 16) in the German-speaking part and in the tenth or eleventh year (15 to 17) in the French-speaking part (Elmiger 2008). Most programmes are based on high school students (ages 15 to 19) taking part in classes in the immersion language at their home school and a host school, where the target language is spoken (at least 600 classes in total for the whole programme). In other schools the immersion only takes place in a host school of the target language. According to Elmiger (2008), in 2008, about 10% of all Gymnasium/gymnase students in Switzerland completed a bilingual school course, 40% of all Gymnasien/gymnases offered bilingual education, and the number has not stopped growing since. The most frequently taught immersive subjects are History and Mathematics although the range of subjects found in the individual programmes is very broad (Elmiger 2008). The most immersive teaching takes place during the penultimate or the last year before the Matura or maturité. The total number of bilingual lessons varies: while some schools seem to teach fewer than the 600 periods prescribed by the canton, others even exceed the target substantially as some schools plan up to 1400 immersion lessons (Elmiger 2008). Since Switzerland’s cantons are sovereign regarding school policies, the decision regarding bilingual education is different in each of them. 

To illustrate this, the French-speakers in Berne/Bern are a minority and are traditionally present in the Jura bernois. Meune (2010) shows a major distinction in this canton compared to the others. Indeed, the Bernese Constitution precisely associates either German or French with a given district based on territoriality. In the exceptional case of Bienne/Biel, every inhabitant can choose their own administrative language as well as the main language taught at school.

Meune (2010) highlights that in the city of Fribourg, the two languages are co-official but that it is very complicated to have a perfect balance between them at all levels. Fribourg is a French speaking town with a minority of German speakers who are entitled to administrative services and schooling in German. Moreover, the canton of Fribourg/Freiburg offers bilingual courses in its university and in several of its schools of tertiary education. The University of Fribourg, for instance, is fully bilingual and allows students to take courses in Fribourg as well as at the monolingual universities of Neuchâtel (Francophone) and Bern (Germanophone), allowing all curricula to be bilingual. The Fribourg School of education, for its part, provides administration and teaching in both German and French and encourages second language immersion for students, with the idea that all future teachers should have bilingual skills.

8303755738_8a41fe98e9.jpg

Figure 3: Sign at Fribourg/Freiburg Train Station “Quelque chose a changé, en notre…” © centvues. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Valais/Wallis was the first canton to declare itself bilingual, but it offers a much clearer linguistic separation than Berne/Bern and Fribourg/Freiburg (Meune 2010). In their study, Grin and Schwob (2002) compared two Valaisan/Walliser CLIL programmes: one which began in kindergarten and another that began in third grade. In both examples, part of the classes were given in the target language by a native speaker. The programmes have shown that pupils in their fourth year of primary school who have followed the bilingual path from kindergarten onwards had almost the same understanding in the target language as native speakers (10-20 percentage points less). They also highlight that bilingual education does not only give better results from the students but also much more enthusiasm towards foreign language acquisition (20% more satisfaction). The canton also offers the opportunity for each municipality to create a bilingual structure under certain conditions (Canton du Valais 2006). At Gymnasium/gymnase level – called collège and Kollegium respectively in Valais/Wallis – the canton offers bilingual German-French education in the Kollegium/collège of Brig and Sion, a bilingual English-French education in the collège of Saint-Maurice and a German-English education in the Kollegium of Brig. In this way, we can also observe an emergence of the importance of English, both in the German and on the French-speaking part. Furthermore, the school of education has two sites, one francophone, one germanophone. There, students start their studies in their native language but over the course of their diploma need to spend at least two semesters immersed in the other language on the other site (Brohy 2008).

Ticino is the only Italian-speaking canton in Switzerland. This canton has the particularity of making the learning of two other national languages at school as well as English compulsory. Since a change of policy where the students can choose the languages which they want to learn and French passes from compulsory to optional in upper secondary, we notice a decrease in the learning of French (-12% less students) (Paternostro, 2016). This can be explained by the prevalence of German in Switzerland. Indeed, many people in Ticino believe that German must be acquired in order to have a secure future (Zimmermann 2019).

The trilingual canton of Graubünden/Grigioni/Grischun – in which inhabitants speak German, Italian, and Romansh – highly promotes the two minority languages, Italian and Romansh, in order to keep them alive. Therefore, Italian- or Romansh-speaking students are encouraged in their use of their native language at school and the presence of these languages in schools is reinforced. The canton also offers courses partly in the students’ native languages, partly in a second national language, as well as it offers immersive phases for both.

In the year 2000, the monolingual canton of Vaud introduced le modèle mixte – the mixed model – of their maturité bilingue. This consists not only in a first year of schooling in a regular class, with pre-registration for a maturité bilingue but also in a period of language exchange in a German-speaking region. During this period, the students follow the classes of a host gymnase for either 10 to 12 weeks at the end of their first year, or for the entirety of their second year. Then the student is required to be part of a bilingual class in the second or third year, where subjects such as Mathematics and History are taught in German, if possible. Students also attend regular German classes. Following the introduction of this programme, various financial and organisational support measures were taken to help students and families. The greatest problem, however, was finding instructors who have the right qualification to teach a subject in German. (Lys and Gieruc 2005)

In Elmiger’s (2008) survey, the schools were asked why they offer a bilingual Matura course and the most important reason for bilingual high school education was parent or student demand, which is particularly high in bilingual cities, but also in German- and French-speaking Switzerland. The second important point was the opportunity for the school to distinguish itself through a bilingual education programme. This second reason is much more visible in the Gymnasien in German-speaking Switzerland while in the gymnases in French-speaking Switzerland this is far less the case (Elmiger 2008).

Thus, bi- and multilingual education is more widespread at secondary levels (Elmiger 2006) even though there are also bilingual curricula at kindergarten and primary school level, which are more common in private schools (Grin and Schwob 2002); in primary schools, some subjects are taught in the target language (Elmiger 2006). However, schools often depend on the availability of suitable teachers. Counterintuitively, bilingual cities present a great shortage in suitable teaching staff. Elmiger (2008) presumes that this reflects the strict cantonal requirements for teachers in order to allow the highest quality of teaching. Indeed, the teachers must have a university degree in the target language or equivalent (Grin and Schwob, 2002). 

Meune (2010) examined the individual bilingualism of the officially bilingual cantons and found the following percentages: 39.2% of the French-speaking inhabitants of Fribourg/Freiburg consider themselves bilingual compared to 72.9% of the German-speaking citizens. In the canton of Bern, this percentage is similar in proportions: 58.8% of German-speakers are bilingual compared to 52.1% of French-speakers. The bilingual canton with the lowest percentage of bilingualism is the canton of Valais/Wallis: 21% for French-speakers and 42.6% for German-speakers. This low percentage among the Valaisans/Walliser can be explained by a much clearer language boundary. In fact, the famous Röstigraben divides the canton into two very distinct parts and the semi-cantons function as juxtaposing parts (Meune 2010).

This blog investigates the provision of bilingual education in Switzerland by comparing the demographic differences between the cantons and their school curricula. It can therefore be asserted that Switzerland, although multilingual, has a monolingual ideology (Zimmermann 2019; Zimmermann and Häfliger 2019). The majority of regions have one official language and the majority of Swiss speakers are fluent in only one national language. Cantons are sovereign regarding their education policies, supporting their creation of school curricula according to their needs. Nevertheless, cantons’ sovereignty also implies that some can make less effort to make the population multilingual. Globally, bilingual education has a growing demand, as parents and pupils believe it to grow one’s socio-economic chances. The schools also use it to differentiate themselves and the biggest impediment to bilingual classes is teachers’ availability. Most bilingual education in Switzerland consists of an immersion period in a different linguistic territory and content courses in the target language in the home school at Gymnasium/gymnase. However, universities as well as other schools at a tertiary level offer bilingual curricula, either through agreements with other universities, or exchange programmes with other associated sites, especially for teacher trainees. The results of bilingual education are outstanding: not only do the pupils achieve better academic outcomes, but they also manifest more enthusiasm for education overall.

Can Switzerland be considered as a model for multilingual education? Switzerland has the difficulty of needing to handle several languages while also having to ensure that linguistic minorities speaking a national or a migrant language are represented. Furthermore, the principle of territoriality can be both a disadvantage, because it does not allow language mixing easily, and a strength, as it gives way to cantonal freedom to shape schooling according to the population’s needs and differences. If education policies were federal and “one-size-fits-all”, the schooling system would suit the people concerned far less. Therefore, we believe that Swiss education is always adapting itself to the community’s needs, which can be considered as the most important factor when looking for a model for multilingual education. We therefore believe that the growing demand of bilingual education in Switzerland shows the importance of acquiring a second language in the eyes of the population. Many of the current programmes are optional but promoted. Despite their optional nature, their popularity is continually increasing among students. Although secondary and tertiary school programmes seem to be successful, one could implement even more bi-/multilingual programmes at a young age, especially in bilingual regions, in order to facilitate language acquisition and allow earlier interaction between different speakers. Moreover, it is important to mention the rise in popularity of English. English was taken up as a subject in schools because parents and students saw the need for English economically. Schools quickly adopted the learning of English into their curricula (Stotz 2006). Some German-speaking cantons, such as Zurich, have even decided to teach English to children from the first year of primary school (ages 6 to 7). English is thus taught before French. Therefore, Stotz (2006) wonders how Swiss education will look like in a few years: with more and more students requiring English before any national language, national languages might soon not be considered worth learning anymore. 

A limitation of this paper is that most of the extensive data on this subject is over a decade old and offers only a glimpse into the current situation. We assume that many policies and programmes have changed and grown and that more and more schools have adopted the approach of a multilingual education. In addition, the place of English as a potential lingua franca may also have evolved and be more significant than described. It could therefore be interesting to investigate the learning of English to the detriment of the national languages and its increasing presence in Switzerland.

References:

Brohy, C. 2008. “Und dann fliesst es wie ein Fluss…“: l’enseignement bilingue au niveau tertiaire en Suisse. Synergies: pays germanophones. 1, 51-66.

Elmiger, D. 2006. Deux langues à l’école primaire: un défi pour l’école romande, avec la collaboration de Marie-Nicole Bossart. Neuchâtel: Institut de recherche et de documentation pédagogique.

Elmiger, D. 2008. Die zweisprachige Maturität in der Schweiz: die variantenreiche Umsetzung einer bildungspolitischen Innovation. Schriftenreihe SBF.

García, O. 2009. Bilingual education in the 21st century: a global perspective. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 

Grin, F. and Schwob, I. 2002. Bilingual Education and Linguistic Governance: The Swiss experience. Intercultural Education, 13:4, 409-426.

Lys, I. and Gieruc G. 2005. Etude de la maturité bilingue dans le canton de Vaud: Enjeux, outils d’évaluation et niveaux de compétence. Lausanne: Unité de recherche pour le pilotage des systèmes pédagogiques. 1-176.

Meune, M. 2010. La mosaïque suisse: les représentations de la territorialité et du plurilinguisme dans les cantons bilingues. Politique et Sociétés 29.1, 115–143. 

Paternostro, R. 2016. Enseigner les langues dans des contextes plurilingues: réflexions socio-didactiques sur le français en Suisse italienne. Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française. DOI: https://doi.10.1051/shsconf/20162707012

Stotz, D. 2006. Breaching the Peace: Struggles around Multilingualism in Switzerland. Language Policy. https://doi.10.1007/s10993-006-9025-4

Zimmermann, M. 2019. Prophesying success in the higher education system of multilingual Switzerland. Multilingua2020; 39.3, 299–320

Zimmermann, M. and Häfliger, A. 2019. Between the plurilingual paradigm and monolingual ideologies in the compulsory education system of multilingual Switzerland. Sección Monográfica. Lenguaje y Textos, 49, 55-66

Websites:

Canton du Valais, Kanton Wallis. 2006. Concept cantonal de l’enseignement des langues pour la pré-scolarité et la scolarité obligatoire. Département de l’éducation, de la culture et du sport, service de l’enseignement, Department für Erziehung, Kultur und Sport, Dienstelle für Unterrichtswesen. Available at: https://www.vs.ch/documents/212242/1231591/Concept+cantonal+de+l%27enseignement+des+langues.pdf/c8928ad0-678f-42f6-977c-43e1e4a1d07e. Accessed on: 13.12.2020.

Canton du Valais/Kanton Wallis. 2016. Le collège: la porte ouverte à toutes les professions du niveau supérieur. Available at: https://www.colleges-valaisans.ch/data/documents/Colleges-Valaisans/brochure_maturite_gymnasiale.pdf. Accessed on: 13.12.2020.

Etat de Fribourg/Staat Freiburg. 2020. Bilinguisme dans les écoles du secondaire supérieur et échanges linguistiques. Available at: https://www.fr.ch/formation-et-ecoles/ecoles-secondaires-superieures/bilinguisme-dans-les-ecoles-du-secondaire-superieur-et-echanges-linguistiques. Accessed on: 13.12.2020.

Illustrations:

Figure 1: White B. 2017. Ben White Photography. Available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/qDY9ahp0Mto. Accessed on: 20.12.2020.

Figure 2:  Zanoli, M. 2006. Map Languages CH. Available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Accessed on: 20.12.2020.

Figure 3: centvues. 2012. Quelque chose a changé, en notre… Available at: https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/ce8d781e-d05b-4598-b7e3-5b4acfc80c0c. Accessed on: 22.12.2020.

Figure 4: Serge1958. 2020. Switzerland trilingual and bilingual. Available at https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/94de9b9d-1e99-4f20-b5fa-8d1663ab4622. Accessed on: 22.12.2020.

Further Resources:

Elmiger D. 2020. Inventar des zweisprachigen Unterrichts in der Schweiz / Inventaire de l’enseignement bilingue en Suisse. Université de Genève.

Gohard-Radenkovic A. 2013. Radiographie de l’immersion dans l’enseignement supérieur en Suisse et à l’Université de Fribourg: les pré-requis nécessaires. French immersion at the University level. Vol. 6, 3-19

Langfocus. 2016. Languages of Switzerland – A Polyglot Paradise? Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p8GgX_hWyA. Accessed on: 20.12.2020

Le Pape Racine C., & Ross K. (2015). Code-Switching als Kommunikationsstrategie im reziprok-immersiven Unterricht an der Filière bilingue (FiBi) in Biel/Bienne (Schweiz) und didaktische Empfehlungen. Journal of Elementary Education, 8(1/2), 93-112.

Schoch, B. 2007. Lernen von den Eidgenossen? Die Schweiz – Vorbild oder Sonderfall? Osteuropa, 57, 27-46

The impact of English as a second language in the construction of youth identity in Europe

By Doni Ebongue & Rebeca Negash

Classroom
Image free of copyright: www.flickr.com

In this blog entry, we will investigate, from a sociolinguistic perspective, the impact that English as a second language has in the construction of the identity of high schoolers aged between thirteen and eighteen years old in Europe. We will consider the main techniques that adolescents use to create and model their linguistic repertoire, such as code-switching and language mixing. In addition, we will observe that the creation of their multilingual identity is influenced by many sources like CMC and CMD, globalization, academical success, music or video games.

Keywords: multilingualism, Europe, youth language, code-switching, language identity, repertoire, CMC

Introduction

While the Statista Research Department stated that in 2019 English was the most spoken language in the world either spoken natively or as a second language (Statista Research Department, Nov 27, 2020), there are still more non-native speakers of English in the world than native ones (Leppänen and Peuronen 2012). Therefore, this language is present everywhere: in social media, in advertisements, at schools, at work, etc. It has become such an important language that most academic institutions have included the learning of English as a mandatory subject. Considering that young people construct their personal and social identity during their teenage years, one might wonder what impact the learning of English has from a social perspective, on the creation and development of their multilingual identity and from a linguistical perspective, on the formation of their personal repertoire. Therefore, through a social approach to multilingualism some key concepts will be defined in order to open a discussion on the effect the practice of English as a second language in Europe has and its role in the multilingual identity performances of adolescents aged between 13 to 18 years old. 

While the Statista Research Department stated that in 2019 English was the most spoken language in the world either spoken natively or as a second language (Statista Research Department, Nov 27, 2020), there are still more non-native speakers of English in the world than native ones (Leppänen and Peuronen 2012). Therefore, this language is present everywhere: in social media, in advertisements, at schools, at work, etc. It has become such an important language that most academic institutions have included the learning of English as a mandatory subject. Considering that young people construct their personal and social identity during their teenage years, one might wonder what impact the learning of English has from a social perspective, on the creation and development of their multilingual identity and from a linguistical perspective, on the formation of their personal repertoire. Therefore, through a social approach to multilingualism some key concepts will be defined in order to open a discussion on the effect the practice of English as a second language in Europe has and its role in the multilingual identity performances of adolescents aged between 13 to 18 years old. 

Theoretical framework

As we will focus on the effect that English has in the construction of young people’s multilingual identity in Europe, we will try to determine whether there are any differences between the English variety that European teens use at home and the one they use in a formal educational context. For example, Grau (2009) makes a distinction between those two speeches by saying “that the use of English in young people’s free time can differ immensely from the English used in school” (Grau, 2009: 161).  In order to do so, we will need to clarify a few important concepts that will be developed later in this paper

First, it is important to define the notion of “repertoire”, which is to be opposed to the notion of “language” as a bounded system. The notion of language is to be considered as a conventional, standardized communication system that humans use orally (speaking) or manually (writing) to interact with each other. According to Bristowe, Oostendorp & Anthonissen, the notion of repertoire can be characterized as follows:  somebody’s repertoire represents every resource that this person uses in order to communicate.

The notion of code-switching needs to be also developed, as this concept represents one of the most important features of young people’s use of different languages. Code-switching is realized by using features of more than one language in the same conversation (Deumert 2011). An example of code-switching from French to English would be an expression like “Je ne suis pas dans un bon mood tonight”. The basis language is French and some words were changed by English ones, possibly because this new expression sounds better in the speaker’s opinion. Another feature used by multilingual people is the notion of language mixing which differs from code-switching. While code-switching replaces a few words of the basis language by words of a different language, language mixing represents the actual use of a foreign language instead of the basis language. For example, in a class about American literature in Germany, the usage of English would be considered as language mixing since students would be speaking only in English, a foreign language, with each other instead of German, their mother tongue.Finally, it is important to define which sources have the more influence on young people’s multilingualism. According to Grau (2009), there are three main factors that have a crucial effect on European youth’s contact with English: “the media, personal networks (friends and family), and intercultural contacts through travelling” (Grau, 2009: 163). As mentioned above, there can be a big difference between the English spoken at home or with friends and the one spoken at school, or “school English” as Grau (2009) describes it (which is a translation of the German word Schulenglisch). Following Leppänen and Peuronen’s work, we will differentiate the notions of CMC (computer-mediated communication) and CMD (computer-mediated discourse). While CMC refers “to interaction that occurs via computer-mediated formats”, CMD “refers to all the different kinds of interpersonal communication carried out on the Internet” (Leppänen and Peuronen 2012). The difference between those two concepts is rather simple, as it is very similar to the notions of “repertoire” versus “language” explained before, where CMC represents the language, and CMD is the repertoire.

Literature review

In this section, we will take a look on previous research regarding the effect of English on youth in Europe and its impact on the construction of their multilingual identity. The studies have been categorized in three themes: language & identity, context choice of English and influence of English in the construction of youth language.

Language & Identity

Exploration is a term that well defines the adolescence period. Indeed, it is a time where boys and girls try, adapt, accept and reject many norms in order to construct their identity. Among their areas of experimentation, they also investigate the limitlessness of language. Through language, young people, in particular, try to express their identity. As a matter of fact, linguistic variation which is “the coexistence of several ways to express a message with the same referential context” (Nortier 2018: 5) is commonly used by teenagers. From this definition, it is understandable that the choice of a linguistic form is never neutral. It is a reflective process that depends on one’s own repertoire, on the identity he or she wants to be associated with and the identity he or she identifies with. Since identity is formed by the self and the others, language can be perceived as an “act of identity” (LePage and Tabouret-Keller 1985 and Auer 2005, as quoted in Nortier 2018: 6). For instance, a same variant can be used differently depending on the context and on what the speaker wants to share about himself or herself. In order to show belonging to a certain group, teenagers are innovative in terms of language. More than other generations, they borrow words from other languages, mix them with their own mother tongue, create new words, adapt the linguistic rules of a standard language, etc. As they investigate the many possibilities that a standard language has to offer and they create their personal repertoire, they succeed in creating their own identity and thus, differentiate themselves from other people and groups. Moore’s study of two groups of high school girls focuses on the distinctive usage of the same variant to create their own repertoire and thus, demarcate themselves from the other group (Moore 2004). Thus, through what Nortier names languaging, youths construct their repertoires from various sources (Nortier 2018: 6). In her paper about young people in multilingual area, Nortier also mentions the term enregisterment which was developed by Agha to determine the “process by which a linguistic repertoire comes to be associated with particular social practices and with the people who engage in such practices” (Agha 2003, as quoted in Nortier 2018: 7). As the interest in youth language is increasing and its vocabulary is more and more developed, it is safe to say that language plays an important role in the creation of personal and social identity.

Context choice of English

Since youth is “a flexible and contestable social category that can be variously reproduced in different social and cultural contexts” (Leppänen 2007: 151), looking at their language practices is one approach to understanding the construction of their identity. From this point of view, their language choice is seen as a social and cultural linguistic “act of identity”. Consciously or unconsciously, every action is the result of a choice. Thus, the use of a specific language or certain linguistic features is also a choice made by the speaker. Among the reasons that might support this decision are the context of speech and the topic discussed. Young people, like other generations, often use English even though it might not be their mother tongue. It can be used as a lingua franca, that is a shared medium of communication between speakers of different languages, in alternation with their primary language, in code-switching as defined earlier or simply in the borrowing of some words. Leppänen and Peuronen (2012) noted that, in the case of CMC, the recourse to another language had multiple effects. English, for example, could be used in the creation of a communicative style of its own, for stylistic or narrative purposes, for clarification, or even help in “the negotiation of identity and communality” (Leppänen and Peuronen 2012: 388). In conclusion, English is linked to a sociolinguistic change, since it has an impact on most youth’s repertoire but also to a social and cultural one, as it also has an influence on the construction of their identity.

Influence of English in the construction of youth language

While English is essentially learned at school, teenagers also developed this language outside of this institution through other English resources, such as TV, internet, music, etc. Additionally, English appears in CMC and young people interact with it. Nevertheless, it seems that teachers do not consider their speaking or writing skills to have improved since schools are expecting a monolingual standard variety of English that those resources do not provide. However, as teenagers are anyway exposed to non-academic English in various contexts, they use it to innovate and model their own repertoire. Therefore, English takes an important role not only in schooling but also in the pupils’ free time.

As CMC is increasingly more present in people’s life, linguists have been interested in its impact on youth language. While in CMC multiple languages can interact with each other, some language features are revised and/or adapted to the CMC context which render difficult to fully acquire a language. Nevertheless, Stæhr and Madsen (2015) have pointed out that, in a few cases, CMC can also help youth to stick to and master a standard language. Indeed, in a research on adolescents in Copenhagen, they realized that teenagers increasingly used more monolingual, standard linguistic practices in their hip-hop productions on YouTube. The reason for their monolingual rap is due to the influence of their local rap mentor, the “hegemonic language ideological beliefs linking linguistics standard and correctness to intelligence”, their consideration for their audience and their ambitions to be a successful musician. What is interesting here is that rap and the resources around it (mentors, videos, songs, etc.) are being used to master a language. Indeed, the adolescents claim that if they want to be listened to they need to rap and speak in standard English. Their message is more powerful if their grammar is correct, thus they associate rap with formal education. While this study showed the advantage of CMC on mastering a language, this is not usually the case.

Thus, even though the type of English youth encounter outside of the academic institution does not significantly improve their speaking or writing skills as teachers would like to, it still plays an important role in the development of the individual. Depending on the kind of English resources and varieties teenagers want to interact with, thus in selecting a certain variety (standard vs. non-standard), they unconsciously shape their identity around it. As Berns and de Bot state (2005) “different language and media environments shape different kinds of English proficiency” (Berns and de Bot 2005, as quoted in Maike 2009: 171).

Discussion

As seen in previous studies, the practice of English in Europe has an effect on youth and plays a role in the construction of their multilingual identity. Indeed, according to Grau (2009) “A number of research reports focusing on youth cultures have emphasised the important role of English for young Europeans” (Grau 2009, 161). Teenagers give English learning a really meaningful importance and tend to speak a more formal, more standardized English in an academic context, while in their free time their English would be more vernacular, more popular. As mentioned earlier, the standard monolingual English expected at school would here represent the concept of “language-mixing”, whereas the “free-time English” would be more prone to code-switching, using English words to replace others of the basis language in a sentence. In his analysis of young people in Denmark, Preisler (1999) “even suggests the terms “English from above” for the English that teenagers use in the institutionalised setting of language classes at school, versus “English from below” for the English they use in their spare time” (Preisler 1999, as quoted in Grau 2009, 161). Of course, in their free time, teenagers in non-English speaking contexts are confronted to this language mostly through CMC. For instance, in video games where English is usually the main language used by the players, or through what is called “language SMS” in French (texting language) where the use of code-switching is high. Also, we can see that the English languages in general (either General American English, British English or other varieties) have a huge impact on youth language with the success of American movies in particular, series and music. Hip-hop for example, which is originally associated to American lower-classes, represents one of the most popular music genres listened to by teenagers and therefore constitutes a rich source of exposure to English for young people. As Leppänen reports in her analysis of Finnish teenagers, “In, for example, subcultural activities and lifestyle communities centred around some shared interest (e.g. musical style) or activity (e.g. skateboarding) English functions as an additional language, mixing and alternating with Finnish” (Leppänen, 2007: 149).

Also, the use of English for young European L2 speakers is associated to one’s own creation of a personal identity, and induces a feeling of belonging in a specific youth culture. Leppänen claims that “In the younger generations this positive allegiance with the West has shown, for example, in their willingness to study Western foreign languages, particularly English” (Leppänen, 2007: 150). With the rise of globalisation and internationalisation in the economic department as well as social interactions becoming worldwide with the invention of Internet in the 20th century, younger generations seem to have a closer relation toward English for various reasons, such as social interactions with people from different countries as well as academic success, since English became the main language used in international exchange, global economy, and therefore allow students to travel and sometimes establish themselves abroad. The English language has also become a marker of appurtenance to a certain culture, for:

“in many other European countries the choice and use of English is also increasingly a key aspect of youth language. Importantly, it has been claimed by a number of researchers that there is often an association between belonging to the youth culture and using English, either along with or mixed with the native language”

(Leppänen, 2007: 151)

All across Europe, English has now become a main language in the areas mentioned earlier and its spreading across Europe shows how young people develop their speech and widen their repertoires as they give more and more importance to English. 

Limitations

It is impossible to determine one fixed repertoire, or one fixed CMD (especially in a media approach) for language is ever-changing, and so is one’s repertoire. The Internet, for example, used to be governed by English. But with time, other languages have started to gain in usage on the web, such as Cantonese and Spanish. With the growth of internationalisation and globalisation, the access to information in one’s home language is much frequent than in the preceding century. Additionally, considering the fact that new generations are more and more present on the Internet, this allows small communities to appear and therefore add new features to people’s repertoire. Also, if we focus once again on Europe, there are mostly L2 speaking countries regarding English, and within the borders of a country not everybody possesses the same level of English, even for younger generations. The preview studies therefore used to focus on a specific group of people, people with a certain level of English available for their repertoire. The level of education is also crucial when analysing young people’s speech in English. While it was not an issue for research concerning secondary education, in higher education teens would have a better proficiency in English than others, which would indubitably have an effect on the resources they have and will use.

Possible future directions

New studies could analyse the evolution of the differentiation between “school English” and “outside school English”. As defined earlier, the interactions that teenagers entertain with the media, their friends and family and with travel has had a deep influence on their repertoires. However, considering once again the notion of “repertoire” as ever-changing, future research might notice any new feature in the following generations.

References

  • Bristowe, Anthea and Marcelyn, Oostendorp and Christine, Anthonissen. 2014. Language and youth identity in a multilingual setting: A multimodal repertoire approach. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 32:2, 229-245.
  • Faas, Daniel. 2007. Youth, Europe and the Nation: The Political Knowledge, Interests and Identities of the New Generation of European Youth. Journal of Youth Studies 10:2, 161-181.
  • Hoffmann, C. 2000. The Spread of English and the Growth of Multilingualism with English in Europe. In J. Cenoz, & U. Jessner (Eds.), English in Europe: The Acquisition of a Third Language. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1-21.
  • Kerswill, Paul. 2013. Identity, ethnicity and place: the construction of youth language in London. In Auer, Peter, Hilpert, Martin, Stukenbrock, Anja and Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt (Eds.), Space in language and linguistics. linguae and litterae. Walter de Gruyter, 128-164. 
  • Leppänen, Sirpa and Saija, Peuronen. 2012. Multilingualism on the Internet. In Marilyn Martin-Jones, Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese (Eds.), Handbook of Multilingualism. London: Routledge, 384-402.
  • Leppänen, Sirpa. 2007. Youth Language in Media Contexts: Insights into the Functions of English in Finland. World Englishes 26: 2, 149-169.
  • Maike Grau. 2009. Worlds apart? English in German youth cultures and in educational settings. World Englishes 28:2, 160-174.
  • Moore, Emma. 2004. Sociolinguistic Style: A Multidimensional Resource for Shared Identity Creation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 49:3-4, 375-396.
  • Nortier, Jacomine. 2018. Language and Identity Practices among Multilingual Western European Youths. Language and Linguistics Compass 12:5.
  • Stæhr, Andreas and Lian Malai Madsen. 2015. Standard language in urban rap: Social media, linguistic practice and ethnographic context. Language & Communication 40, 67-81.

International Education: What makes a Language Prestigious?

Valentina Mikhina & Nadia Bauer

This blog entry investigates processes of valorisation of languages in private international schools. The reviewed studies will shed light on the construction of social prestige of certain languages in this context.

Keywords: Multilingualism ⎯ International Education ⎯ Elite Education ⎯ Multinational Companies ⎯ Social Prestige

If you live in the region of Lausanne, you are probably aware that a lot of multinational companies (MNCs) have their headquarters in and around the city, such as Nestlé, Philip Morris or Tetra Pak. These MNCs welcome a lot of expats from all around the world who come to Switzerland with their families. Philip Morris, for instance, apparently has an agreement that guarantees a place in the ISL (International School of Lausanne) for each expat child. This choice of an international education by expatriate parents do not only occur in Switzerland. A lot of expatriate families, and an increasing number of local families, also send their children to International Schools around the world. But what does exactly an ‘international’ education mean and what are the linguistic implications behind this label? Unfortunately, there are not many studies that investigate this social reality in regard to language.

Main entrance of Philip Morris International’s headquarters. Photo taken by Valentina Mikhina.

The aim of this blog entry is to explore the social processes that establish hierarchies between languages in International Schools in Europe. What are the languages taught in International Schools? What languages are, in such contexts of prestige, chosen and favoured as vehicular languages and how do they justify the ‘international’ dimension of such an education? In order to investigate this, we will review a range of relevant literature that has been written on this subject. This will allow us to unveil processes of valorisation or de-valorisation of languages with their social implications.

International education

In the past, the international education system was only available for diplomats’ families who wanted to provide an international education to their children due to their frequent mobility. Throughout the 1990s bilingual education grew in popularity. Europe has become a place where the need for foreign language learning has been present especially in the countries such as Sweden, Finland, Spain and Switzerland. It initially focused on elite bilingualism and bilingual education programmes. The demand for bilingual education has risen after Sweden’s entry into the European Community (de Mejìa 2002).  

In the 21st century, the sector of International Schools has greatly flourished. There are over 850 International Schools all over the world (de Mejìa 2002). Most of the schools are bilingual. Moreover, the majority of International Schools offer not only a day student education but a boarding school education as well. International Schools can be classified as monolingual, bilingual or multilingual. In some, there are students of plenty nationalities in International Schools, but there is only one official language in the school. Other International Schools who offer a “bilingual education have dual pack programme” (de Mejìa 2002) which becomes popular in multilingual societies. Education thus becomes considered as international.

Photo by Christine Roy on Unsplash.com

The number of International Schools is continuing to grow because of the globalisation processes and related mobility. However, it is commonly thought that International Schools are more qualified, especially in terms of language learning, than state schools. Hence, the international education is now defined as fulfilling the need for multilingual societies in which speakers communicate in three or more languages. These facts explain the success of English-medium schools and International diplomas that are recognised worldwide. However, our society is still not conscious enough of the topic of International Schools because the research was not narrowed down.

International Schools provide the elite status of a country as well as economic growth. They are well-known for their extremely high fees. The most prestigious International Schools are located in multilingual countries such as Switzerland and also in the United Kingdom. International Schools market themselves as offering a lot of opportunities in the future. They are considered to be elite schools that give their pupils prestige. A prestige that can have an impact for accessing into different universities and getting a job later on due to the multilingual and worldwide network communication. This is the main reason why parents choose International Schools for their children. According to de Mejìa (2002), students who are native speakers of vehicular languages can show an interest in learning other languages.

The proficiency in two or more languages is becoming more useful in international communication, especially in business schools as well as in MNCs.

Difficulties of cross-cultural communication are thus presented as a challenge, an appreciation of the relatively of cultural practices is seen as an opportunity for successful business entreprises in multinational companies. Linguistic diversity and multiculturalism are recognised as advantages in today’s business ethos rather than as threats to company or national loyalty (De Mejìa 2002:69).

The English language as Business Lingua Franca

A study of the linguistic landscape was presented recently by Kankaanranta (2015), which distinguished the English language as Business Lingua Franca (BELF), a language which is used for business communication between people who do not share a native language in Multinational Companies’ specifically in the domains of marketing, finances, accounting and management. The study has shown that the increase of the MNCs in the late 90s provoked the development of BELF as a result of increased globalization of the companies. During the 21st century, as business platforms emerged online as forms of social media BELF reinforced English as a main language in the global business.

The use of English ‘has become everyday practice in MNCs, and it has been investigated in three disciplines applied linguistics, international management and corporate communication’ (Kankaanranta 2015:14). Despite this emphasis on communicating in English, individuals still use their respective mother tongue and foreign languages to best navigate and express themselves in multilingual environments. Multicultural competence is created as a result of effective navigation of complicated communicative situations with a variety of cultures and languages involved. BELF prioritises being understood by the other party more than achieving grammatical correctness. It became more important to have a better pronunciation as well as being capable of implying effective paraphrasing skills. Hence, efficient communication is at the core of the global business environment to best achieve the goals and growth of the organisation.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.com

Learning languages: a Swedish case

Another study by of Jonson (2013) discussed in an International School in Sweden involved interviews with six students residing in a Swedish boarding school. This study examines the personal experience of learning new languages, identities as well as both academic and social discriminatory practices in the school. The focus was on teachers’ practices in regard to multilingual adolescents. The Swedish International School employs a bilingual education system using English and Swedish. The school environment’s multilingualism is attributed to the diverse nationalities of its students, which contribute to the school’s social identity. In the interviews, some students identified as bilingual while others considered themselves multilingual. The school has thus adapted an integrated bilingual method of education. Moreover, most of the students feel comfortable with switching languages.

Students are aware of the regulations and norms of their International School. In class they should avoid translanguaging (mixing and switching languages) in formal conversations even though they feel much more comfortable with code switching (‘the use of more than one language in the course of a single communicative episode’ according to Heller 1998) when they are amongst their friends and family. The study shows that, linguistically speaking, the use of the translanguaging does not aid to create distinct separations between the languages during conversations. The result of mixing different languages is a vivid linguistic repertoire.

However, it is important to learn languages by having everyday practice. Consequently, it is important to create specific learning plans, notably to learn through everyday practice during real conversations. The study further proved that students should learn to separate the linguistic repertoire to understand the nuances of both languages and use them to benefit their future employment opportunities. An additional interesting point is that despite the bilingual education, English is usually a dominant choice of students in some aspects as in the education and social life. For example, many students prefer to read novels in English rather than Swedish. This is also apparent in their online social life Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) where their texts can greatly improve the international nature of the school.

Prestigious languages in Catalonian International Schools

Sunyol also examined in her PhD thesis the use of prestige languages, especially English, in International Schools, however with a focus on their role within the educational system. She studied two International Schools in Catalonia, Spain. Her ethnographic study concluded that becoming international for these schools was a way of maintaining themselves after the 2008 crisis (2019:284). After the crisis, being an international became a characteristic of elites. Internationalisation now provides an instrument for class reproduction for the upper classes, as well as a tool for the middle classes to be able to circulate freely around the world in educational and working domains. The role that languages play in these processes of elitisation is capital.

Sunyol remarked that the introduction of English as a language of teaching in these schools allowed them to label themselves as ‘international’. Furthermore, English also allowed the schools to present themselves as distinctive from state education, differentiating themselves in regard to the skills provided and therefore justifying their price. Language practices in such schools are therefore hierarchised and strict policies regulate them. It is believed that having an excellent oral English is key to be successful in the labour market and that it maximises opportunities (2019:286). If this language ideology (i.e., myths and beliefs on what language is, how it works and how it is used) and similar policies also operate in the Swedish International school that Jonson (2013) studied, they could explain why students choose English over Swedish in certain situations.

In International Schools in Catalonia, due to the belief that a good English helps on the job market, the language practices of the students are severely framed to resemble those of global multilingual elites. In one of the schools, this mean having the students speak with a British accent. In another school this involves ‘passing as a native’ (Sunyol 2019:286). The idea behind these policies is to turn the students into efficient neoliberal workers (i.e., workers that will be successful in the current globalised economy) thanks to their linguistic skills.

Codó and Sunyol (2019) focused on how languages are valorised in one of those private schools in Catalonia. This time, they investigated the valorisation of Mandarin Chinese within the school programme. They concluded that, just like English, Mandarin is promoted for economic reasons. It is used by the school to distinguish itself from state schools, similarly to English (Sunyol 2019:285), but also to make a difference in the market of private schools (Codó and Sunyol 2019:441). The Mandarin programme therefore allows the school to attract more clients (i.e., parents willing to pay for an expensive education) and make more profit. Codó and Sunyol observed that this desire to stay ahead of other International Schools is relevant to a context in which elite education must constantly work on itself to secure and justify its position. The uniqueness of this Mandarin programme allows the school to perform its elitism and to defend it (Codó and Suyol 2019:441).

Photo by Pocky Lee on Unsplash.com

 The Mandarin programme is also used to promote the internationality of the school on a symbolic level, praising the benefits of the pupils’ open-mindedness it encourages. The other justifications given are the cognitive advantages of learning Mandarin from a young age brings (Codó and Sunyol 2019:444). But despite all of these justifications, the Mandarin programme is mostly motivated by economic aspects. The students who carry on with it after the age of twelve (after which it becomes optional), do so not because of interest for the country and culture. They continue it because they want to stay ahead of sudden socio-economic changes that would propel China as the world’s most powerful country (Codó and Sunyol 2019:448). In the school, Chinese Mandarin therefore has an economic value. First, it serves to promote the school on the education market, and second, it is supposed to help future jobseekers. This last value, however, according to Codó and Sunyol cannot be proved, as well as the open-mindedness and culture-awareness value, which is only symbolic (2019:449). Sunyol, in her thesis, also highlights this believed symbolic value of English as a means to promote intercultural competence. She also claims that this belief cannot not be ascertained. The predominant motivation behind the teaching of English is still the economic value it brings to the schools and the students (Sunyol 2019:287).

Why choose an International School in Switzerland?

In Switzerland, Beretta conducted a study on what motivates parents to place their children in International Schools. She studied a bilingual English-Italian International School in Ticino. Similarly to Sunyol (2019) and Codó and Sunyol (2019), she underlined the importance of the economic and symbolic worth of languages. Italian for instance, is not seen as having an economic value, but only a symbolic one as well as being useful for everyday communication in Ticino. It is therefore only valued by local families or families that intend to stay for a long time in Ticino. German is also esteemed by families who intend to settle in Switzerland, since it is considered to be an economic resource ‘within national borders’ (Beretta 2019:55). Foreign mobile families do not consider these two languages useful and see them as a waste of time and energy.

Photo by Ivan Shilov on Unsplash.com

The acquisition of English, on the other hand, is highly praised. It is associated with social prestige and believed to be the most necessary tool for communication in our globalised world. Its mastery is supposed to reward the students with a direct access to prestigious academic, professional and social spheres all around the world (Beretta 2019:55). Sunyol made similar observations in her study concerning the advantage English is supposed to provide to future jobseekers (2019:286). Together with Codó, they linked the assets of Mandarin Chinese (as taught in a private school in Catalonia) to the same belief (2019:448). Prestigious languages, especially English, are therefore considered to provide a substantial economic capital (i.e., value) to their speakers. Beretta precises that these languages however have to be of an ‘excellent level’ (2019:54). As mentioned above, Sunyol observed that students in one of the international schools she studied have to speak an English that allows them to ‘pass as a native’ (2019:285). This could be linked to the monolingual standard Swedish international students are subject to according to Jonson (2013). Their language practices are therefore also constrained, but in a slightly different way.

Something that neither Codó nor Sunyol observed, but that Beretta witnessed in Ticino, is that parents think that English will also provide their children with American culture models, such as ‘neoliberal skills of interaction, participation, problem-solving and risk-taking’ (2019:54). These skills, similarly to languages, are also considered useful in the job market.

The linguistic ideologies present in the school that Beretta studied are therefore mostly profit discourses on the usefulness of the of languages in the market. For the parents there also is a symbolic motivation which is the search of an international community that will raise the child’s awareness of cultural differences, which is however not elaborated upon. The ideologies (i.e., systems of ideas and beliefs) that motivate the parents are therefore neoliberal ideas (i.e., ideas related to the form of liberalism advocating for a free, self-regulating market and workers that governs the global market nowadays) that consider prestigious languages as central for competitiveness and distinction in the job market (2019:55). English is of great importance to them.

Thus, international education presents itself as a mechanism through which to engage in the ‘fierce global competition imposed by neoliberal rationalities’ (Sunyol 2019:287) for dominant social groups. De Mejía (2002) also underlines how International Schools are built to provide social prestige and easy access to high-status jobs to their pupils. Therefore, such mechanisms inform us on how power is produced and reproduced to create social inequalities. Language being central to social differences, it plays a consistent role in such practices, justifying processes of class formation (Sunyol 2019:289).

To bear in mind: the power of prestigious languages

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash.com

The mechanisms that establish hierarchies between languages in International Schools are closely linked to economic ideologies. Kankanraanta (2015) for instance analysed the growing number of MNCs in relation to the emergence of English as BELF and explained why its emergence allowed to develop international businesses faster. The languages chosen in International Schools are therefore taught because of their believed usefulness and value in the job market. Sunyol (2019), Codó and Sunyol (2019) and Beretta (2019) concluded that languages are mostly promoted and hierarchised in relation to the economic capital they represent. Obviously, because of its role as BELF, English is considered to be key in order to success on the global labour market. It therefore a winner in International Schools as a means of communication between the students (Jonson 2013) and as a vehicular language for teaching. It serves to promote both the school on the education market and to provide its students with elite linguistic repertoires. These repertoires are supposed to help their pupils as future jobseekers. The teaching of Mandarin follows the same logic. It is used to promote the special skills the school sells. It is also supposed to provide its students with a future-hypothetical elite language.

All of the schools mentioned in this entry also promote the languages they teach as ways to open children to different cultures, however, without any proof of it being efficient. Thus, prestige languages are what allows schools to label themselves as ‘international’. Internationality is therefore not about ‘a peaceful world fraternalism’ (Sunyol 2019:287), but rather a means for the elite to secure its privileged position, a means in which languages play an important role.

References

Beretta, L., 2019. Language and mobilities in a private international school in Ticino. MA Thesis, Université de Lausanne.

Codó E. & Sunyol A., 2019. ‘A plus for our students’: The construction of Mandarin Chinese as an elite language in an international school in Barcelona. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development., 40.5, 436-452.

De Mejìa, A., 2002. Power Prestige and Bilingualism: International perspectives on elite Bilingual Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Jonson C., 2013. Translanguaging and multilingual literacies: Diary-based case studies of adolescents in an international school. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 224, 85-117.

Kankaanranta A., Louhiala-Salminen L & Karhunen P, 2015. English in Multinational Companies: Implications for Teaching “English” at an International Business School. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca. 4.1, 125-148.

Sunyol Garcia-Moreno, A, 2019. Multilingualism, elitism and ideologies of globalism in international schools in Catalonia: An ethnographic study. Doctoral dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Further resources

Bunnell, T., Fertig M. and James C., 2016. What is international about international Schools? An institutional legitimacy perspective. Oxford Review of Education. 42.4, 408-423.

Hayden, M., Levy, J., & Thompson, J., 2016. The SAGE handbook of research in international education (Second ed.). Los Angeles: SAGE.

How Does Social Media Influence our Use of Languages on the Internet?

By Céleste Leu and Nadia Abdi Mohamoud

KEYWORDS: Multilingualism, Social Media, Language choice, Code-switching, Abbreviation

“Social Media Koppelingen” by ATLAS Social Media is marked with CC PDM 1.0

In this blog entry, we investigate multilingualism in computer-mediated communication, and more specifically, the use of languages on social media.

In our multilingual society, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become prevalent and its further development led to social media 2.0, which are currently a key medium for the spread of multilingualism on the Internet. The term CMC is defined by Leppänen and Peuronen (2012: 384) as “any communicative action that takes place through the use of networked computers” and thus involves several forms of discourse whether asynchronous (e-mail, Facebook wall, forum, YouTube comments) or synchronous (real-time chat, instant messaging, video calls). In the early days of the Internet, English was the dominant language and a vast “majority of websites and Internet users were English-speaking” (Leppänen and Peuronen, 2012: 385). Being the invention of English-speaking scientists, the Internet was designed to compute only in Roman alphabets (Leppänen and Peuronen, 2012: 385). Nowadays, Internet users are offered a wide range of writing systems which has led to the increased use of other languages. Consequently, language choice among Internet users has been the object of many studies but few researched written language shift (i.e., online code-switching) (Lee, 2017: 41). In this context, social media are a promising case to study written language shifts. Social media are defined as “websites and applications which enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking” (Social media, n. (2016)). Subsequently, social media websites such as YouTube, Twitter or Facebook draw “users from different cultures and language backgrounds [who] are generating and sharing content” (Eleta and Golbeck, 2014: 1). In the studies reviewed below, the impact and influence of social media websites on the use of any second language by bilingual and multilingual speakers for monolingual speakers and the spread multilingual practices (i.e., code-switching or abbreviation from other languages) will be discussed.  

Multilingualism in CMC

Multilingualism in CMC and especially the impact of social media websites and apps on the use of a second language by multilingual users are important because nowadays, more and more people from around the world use the internet and communicate with total strangers who might not have the same mother tongue. Furthermore, “the media contribute to the experience of linguistic diversity” (Danet and Herring 2007) and hence help the spread of multilingual practices – in other words, how we use different languages and go from one to the other. Indeed, the internet and especially social media – such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. – allow us to express ourselves and talk with anyone in any language. By using several languages, Internet users tend to employ a special instrument of communication which is called “code-switching” (henceforth CS). It is defined by John Gumperz as “juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems” (1982, cited in Lee, 2017: 39). It is commonly used by multilingual people and often appears on the World Wide Web and social media. Another common practice is the abbreviation, like “WTF”, “LOL”, “tbh”, “brb”, which you certainly have already used as well! To attempt to answer our research question – What is the impact and influence of social media websites on the use of any second language by bilingual and multilingual speakers for monolingual speakers and the spread multilingual practices (i.e., code-switching or abbreviation from other languages) – we divided the reviewed academic studies in three themes which are bilingual and multilingual users, multilingual practices (abbreviation/code-switching) and social network websites (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube). We will develop these themes in the following sections with evidence from different studies in sociolinguistics.

Tell me how many languages you speak; I’ll tell you how to behave on the Internet

The Internet englobes different interlocutors who all have different language repertoires. Monolingual, bilingual and multilingual users frequently interact together and each draws on large and various linguistic resources. Hence, researchers have an interest in the use of languages on the internet and especially on social media to “examine […] the strategic use of multilingualism on Twitter” (Kim et al. 2014: 2) for example. The internet is a worldwide phenomenon and people from (almost) every country have the possibility to access this system, as a result “the Internet has had a profound effect on communication around the globe” (Paolillo 2007:1). Furthermore, “the media contribute to the experience of linguistic diversity: television, radio, literature, popular film, and digital media may be consumed from foreign sources” (ibid: 6). 

Although people from many different countries might add up to a wide range of languages available, sadly languages are not all represented in the same way on the web. Indeed, “groups with more socio-economic power have a crucial impact on the spread of particular languages” (Kim, et al. 2014: 2) and thus there are languages that are seen more frequently than others. According to Paolillo, “[t]he best available data for the Internet represent only 11 languages, all of which have speakers numbering in the tens or hundreds of millions, and all of which are national languages of presently or historically powerful nations.” (Paolillo 2007: 2). For example, English is highly visible and largely used by a lot of different people on the Internet. There are multiple reasons behind this. 

Firstly, the internet was first developed in English in the United states and thus, “the sheer concentration of [Internet] resources in North America [and northern Europe] mean[s] more use of English than any other language on the Internet.” (Paolillo 2007: 13). Moreover, “[these] two regions […] turn out to be among the least linguistically diverse regions” and their linguistic diversity is smaller compared to other regions (ibid;17). In addition to that, one research by Kim et al. showed that – in the case of Twitter – languages spoken by people who are monolingual (for example, an only English-speaking user) are more used than the languages used by bilingual or trilingual people:

“It has been shown that a single monolingual speaker of a particular language may hold the key to the survival of the language in the bilingual community, as the bilingual speakers try to accommodate the monolingual speaker ” (Kim et al. 2014: 2)

Because of that the monolingual language stays on top as its speakers cannot speak another language. Hence, “the proportion of English users in the network [Twitter] constitutes a key influencing factor in the frequency of English use by the multilingual subject.”  (Eleta & Goldbeck 2014;8) because L2 English speakers (who are bilingual or multilingual; English being their second language) tend to try to “accommodate” monolingual speakers – who are in a lot of cases native English speakers – and act as “bridges” – allowing people who speak different L1 languages (L1 meaning your first language) to see the same content as their L2 language is English –  for monolingual groups (Kim et al. 2014; 4). 

Consequently, “English is used as a lingua franca on Twitter” (ibid) and people who speak two languages, including English, will prefer to tweet in English so that the vast majority can understand them.  If they have a lot of followers who do not speak their L1, they’ll be tweeting in English. These are the reasons why English is so widespread on the internet and social media. 

Multilingual practices

Language choice

Language alternation and other multilingual practices such as code-switching and abbreviation from other languages are the focus of several studies. Currently, most Internet users and thus social media users are non-native speakers of English; the language is a resource among their L1 which they draw on for several purposes (Leppänen and Peuronen, 2012: 388). In fact, social media sites are spheres where multilingualism blossoms and language choice heavily depends on the linguistic resources available and on the context (Lee, 2017: 16- 23). Carmen Lee (2017: 23) noted that language choice indeed depends on the “linguistic resources available to online participants”, but also on the users’ use and preferences when communicating with others. For example, in a predominantly English website or discussion, multilingual users tended to choose English to match other users (Eleta and Golbeck, 2014: 431). Influenced by the large number of English users, L2 users will draw on a specific linguistic resource: English.

Code-switching à la carte

One multilingual practice which occurs in social media sites is code-switching (CS). Nur Syazwani Halim and Marlyna Maros (2014) looked into CS and its functions among Facebook users. Examining Facebook interaction and especially status updates, they attempt to reconcile oral CS and written CS. Malay-English users’ occurrences showed that CS had 11 main functions, following the Androutsopoulos’ categorisation (Androutsopoulos 2013b: 681, as quoted in Lee 2017: 50; 51): switching for quotation; for addresses specification; for reiteration, etc. Some Facebook features such as tagging another user led to CS (1) :

(1) has headache preparing timetable for the 1st time ~~ tima kaseyy la kpd [thanks to] Ophelyatie Zin atas tunjuk ajar yg diberikan [for your assistance] 🙂 (Halim and Maros, 2014: 130)

A Malay-English user proceed from Malay to English to direct a message to a specific person with a tag. CS allows users to enrich their Facebook interaction and communicate more effectively. Halim and Maros (2014, 129-132) highlight CS’s functions on Facebook. CS is used to preserve the accuracy of a message, to direct a message to one of many recipients, to repeat a message with the intent to make it understandable, to clarify, emphasis or check a message. Moreover, the switch from one language to another also occurs when a user wants to start a new topic in a specific language (2) :

(2) Crafter’s rule: Kalau tengah banyak idea jangan berhenti [Don’t stop if you’re flooded with ideas].   (Halim and Maros, 2014: 130)                                                                                         

Finally, CS is also used when a specific language can convey more effectively a user’s emotions than the other or if expressions are not translatable or existent in the other language.

How Are You or How Are U? 

Another multilingual practice which often occurs in CMC are abbreviations. They are used in an informal setting where the writers are not paying attention to their language proficiency (Halim and Maros, 2014: 128). On social networking sites such as Twitter, abbreviations are preferred to respect the maximum length of a post, to show informality, closeness or anonymity (Dabrowska, 2018: 235). Similarly, Halim and Maros (2014: 133) highlighted that abbreviations are a response to the “principle of economy” which rules blog or blogging type websites. Marta Dabrowska (2018: 247) analyses the type of abbreviation used by participants and their functions. She highlighted the use of abbreviations by both native English speakers and Indian speakers. Among nine different categories, sound-word substation (“u” for “you”), rebus writing (“bcoz”) or number-word substation (“2 wear”) are illustrated by Dabrowska and are well known abbreviations in online discourse. Although there is a large type of abbreviations, they appear occasionally (Dabrowska, 2018: 248). Moreover, their frequency varies in function of social media websites. YouTube and Twitter are the media platforms with the most abbreviations (with YouTube ranking first). Dabrowska (2018) rationalizes her results by highlighting that these two social media have greater anonymity than Facebook. A user’s image is less at stake on anonymous accounts than on Facebook-private accounts. The users do not feel to the need to use proper spelling and grammar because no one will judge them for an approximate writing. Nonetheless, in Facebook status updates, abbreviations still flourish due to the function of the feature: “convey one’s feelings and thoughts” (Halim and Maros,2014: 128).

Social network websites

Twitter is described as a micro-blogging site which “spread information across languages and countries” (Eleta and Golbeck, 2014: 424). It has a format which limits every post to 140 characters. Users share posts with other users (Eleta and Golbeck, 2014: 425). Twitter allows three types of posts: public post; public post reposted (retweet); and a reply to a post. In a multilingual network such as Twitter, the multilingual audience is encouraged to use English as a lingua franca due to the common belief that English is the language of the Internet (Kim et al., 2014: 243; Eleta and Golbeck, 2014: 425). On these type of social networking websites, many of the users are multilingual and navigate between language groups. These users write in at least two languages and thus form bridges between monolingual communities because they translated and spread information between communities (Eleta and Golbeck, 2014: 425). Multilingual users alternate between languages in a form of reaction to the composition of a group (Eleta and Golbeck, 2014: 431). If a multilingual user stumbles upon a monolingual group, they will use the language of the group; if the user stumbles upon a bilingual group, they will use the dominant language. Dabrowska notes (2018: 242) that users’ identities are known but does not impact on the use of abbreviations. Users frequently have a fan-idol relationship, and thus do not maintain a close connection (ibid). On Twitter, users prefer two types of abbreviations: sound-wording substitution (“u” for “you”) and rebus writing (“bcoz”) (2018: 249). Furthermore, Multilingualism is also seen through hashtags, Lee highlights that Twitter posts frequently are in one language and the hashtags in another language (2017: 51-52). This kind of code-switching involving hashtags can be the subject of further studies. Likewise, the choice of language can be a tool to attract a specific type of followers (2014: 431), and thus increase popularity. Lastly, Twitter’s design forces multilingual users to choose one language among their linguistic resources because the platform do not offer a translation feature if several languages are used in one tweet (Eleta and Golbeck, 2014: 431).

Facebook is another social platform which allows a computer-mediated communication. With its microblogging concept which includes asynchronous messaging such as status updates, users can post short messages (Halim and Maros,2014:127). The social media offers an informal setting on which abbreviations, acronyms, spelling mistakes arise. The use of English among users (in this case Malay-English users) is once again supported by the popular belief that the Internet’s language is English (Halim and Maros,2014:128). Halim and Macros also reveal that English is used to enhance the Facebook experience by facilitating the communication (2014:133). Moreover, Facebook’s main purpose is “to maintain contacts with others, create a positive social image… and exchange news.” (Dabrowska, 2018: 239). As a result, Dabrowska notes that compared to other social media, Facebook shows a lower level of multilingual practices. Users know each other’s identities and wish to protect their image (Dabrowska, 2018: 241), and for this reason refrain themselves from using any form of multilingualism (abbreviations from other languages, for example) that might be affect their real-life image.

YouTube, last but not least, shows the higher use of non-standard language such as abbreviations (Dabrowska, 2018: 241). This result highlights that the platform’s users frequently use nicknames to hide their identity and thus are more prone to using non-standard language (2018: 241).

All in all, these studies have shed light on the multilingual practices on social media 2.0. However, studies on the multilingual practices are still limited, and for example, more the use of code-switching in social media would be a great addition (Lee, 2017: 44).

At the end of the day, English is still the LANGUAGE

In essence, the impact of social media websites on the use of English is a historical result. Since it was created in the United States and the first available sites and scripts were in English, it is believed to be the Internet’s language. Moreover, it is a socio-economically dominant language and thus it imposes itself to the Internet users, including the fact that English speakers tend to be monolingual. Accordingly, multilingual people use English on the internet to adjust to those who are monolingual, mainly on predominantly English websites, making it a lingua franca. They also opt for English in the hope that they could attract more followers if using the dominant language of the Internet. But the Internet is still highly multilingual because there are a lot of different people from different countries using their L1, making code-switching a popular multilingual practice. Social media also pushes people to use language in a certain way, for example making abbreviations popular because of word limits or code-switching for international purposes as it could reach more people who speak different languages (as with the same hashtags but in different languages). All in all, we can say that social media has a big impact on the use of English, especially for non-native speakers, and on the spread of multilingual practices. What is more, English has been a popular language for many years now, with a fairly easy grammar and taught at school, the language had already spread with ease around the world, without the help of social media, and became a lingua franca.

Our research was limited by the fact that social media is still a very recent phenomenon and is growing more and more every day, which makes it difficult to track every occurrence. For instance, a number of websites are unknown to plenty of people but popular in countries where English is not the dominant language. Likewise, an imbalance in studies is shown among social media. Twitter, for example, is the subject of an important of number of studies whereas multilingualism on YouTube is less studied. In fact, multilingual practices vary from one social media to another, and thus a more balanced set of data could lead to different observations. Furthermore, we cannot know if social media have helped specific speakers become more multilingual, simply because they sometimes are in contact with content in other languages or if they were already multilingual. It would be interesting, for further studies, to analyse more in depth the question of multilingual practices, looking thoroughly at who is using which kind of code-switching, on which social media and search why it changes from user to user (e.g. in terms of gender, social class) or from language group to language group. 

References

Dabrowska, M. (2018). Abbreviated English – A Typical Feature Of Online Communication?  Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, vol 135. issue 4. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/20834624SL.18.022.9316. Accessed on: 12/12/20.

Danet, B. and  Herring S. (2007.) The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eleta, I. and Golbeck, J. (2014). Multilingual use of Twitter: Social networks at the language frontier. Computers in Human Behavior, vol.41. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.05.005 . Accessed on:12/12/20.

Halim, N.S. and Maros, M. (2014). The Functions of Code-switching in Facebook Interactions. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol.118. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.02.017. Accessed on:12/12/20.

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Kim, S.,Oh, A.,Weber, I. and Wei, L. (2014). Sociolinguistic Analysis of Twitter in Multilingual Societies. Proceedings of the 25th ACM conference on Hypertext and social media.  Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2631775.2631824. Accessed on: 12/12/20.

Lee, C. (2017) Multilingualism Online. New York: Routledge.

Leppänen, S. and Peuronen, S. (2012). Multilingualism on the Internet. In A. Blackledge, A. Creese, M. Martin-Jones (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism. New York: Routledge, p.398-416.

Paolillo, J. (2007). How Much Multilingualism?: Language Diversity on the Internet. In The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online.: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from  https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195304794.001.0001/acprof-9780195304794-chapter-18. Accessed on: 07/12/20.

Social media, n. (2016). The Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press. Available at:  https://crypto.unil.ch/view/Entry/,DanaInfo=www.oed.com,SSL+183739?redirectedFrom=social+media#eid272386371. Accessed on: 12/12/2020.