 Gracias, buenas tardes. Good afternoon. If you can't read the screen, y no entienden español, you should move forward so you can see it. Es un honor participar en este Congreso de Multilingualism 2.0, Multilingual 2.0. It's an honor to participate. And I look forward to learning a lot in the next two days. En reconocimiento de nuestro tema y del lugar en que nos encontramos, yo voy a dar esta conferencia de manera bilingüe, en español y en inglés. Yo sé que mucha gente aquí entiende ambos idiomas, pero el texto en inglés aparecerá en la pantalla gracias a mi equipo técnico, aquí Laura, entienden. Y voy a pasar entre los dos idiomas para realmente entrar físicamente en el tema del bilingüe, del multilingüismo. And this is partly an experiment of mine in multicultural, in multilingual comprehension, multilingualism from the comprehension end. One of the things that fascinates me most about human language is the fact that our capacity to comprehend is infinitely greater than the capacity you have to produce in language. So I give classes in which you are not, it doesn't matter what language you speak, if you can understand English and Spanish well and read both, I don't care what language the speaking goes on in and that opens things up to a much larger multilingual community than you have if you stick to the speech end of requirement of multilingualism. Entonces este es un experimento en multilingüismo, la comunidad lingüística multilingüe desde la comprensión. Hoy recuerdo una ocasión 10 años atrás cuando fui invitada a participar en un congreso sobre bilingüismo en la Universidad de Harvard, organizado por Doris Summers. Nos impresionó mucho que el presidente de Harvard, que entonces era Larry Summers, el no mencionado Larry Summers, nos daría la bienvenida. Dijimos ay que por fin se está reconociendo la importancia de nuestro tema. Y así fue, pero no de la manera que anticipábamos. En vez de dar la breve bienvenida de 90 segundos, el presidente de Summers nos sorprendió con un sermón de 20 minutos. Diciendo lo siguiente, estoy seguro que ustedes llegan con las mejores intenciones del mundo, pero el tema que van a discutir así aquí carece de interés intelectual y además es una amenaza a la sociedad. Canalizando su avatar, Samuel Huntington, Summers nos dijo si ustedes salen con lo suyo de aquí a 20 años habrá dos Harvard en vez de uno, uno que habla español y el otro inglés. Y eso será el fin de la Universidad. Me acordé de ese incidente un poco extraño hace un par de semanas cuando Rick Santorum, cuando presenciamos la enorme metida de pata de Rick Santorum en Puerto Rico, se acuerdan que cuando a la pregunta inevitable, si apoyaba o no la estatalización de Puerto Rico, Santorum contestó, like every other state it must comply with this and every other federal law and that is that English should be the principal language. Como ustedes vieron el furor que siguió, Santorum a su turno estaba canalizando su mentor, Newt Gingrich, quien en el contract with America en 1996 habló del bilingüismo como una amenaza a la civilización americana. Cito estas anécdotas, no solo para acordarnos que Arizona no tiene el monopolio sobre la confrontación lingüística en este país, pero también para ejemplificar el tipo de agresividad gratuita, curiosa que puede disparar la idea del multilingüismo en el psiqui norteamericano. Sobre todo el hecho del español. En ambos casos, el de Larry Summers y el de Rick Santorum, la agresividad estaba uncalled for, no tenía motivo, nadie le pidió a Rick Santorum que hablara de la cuestión lingüística. Entonces uno se le acuerde una la pregunta que convocó ese tipo de agresividad, que duende llevó al presidente Summers abusar de su papel de presidente, que duende le llevó a Santorum a decir la única cosa que le garantizaba una derrota completa electoral en Puerto Rico, es interesante eso. El monolinguismo en Estados Unidos opera no como una política, sino como dogma o como doctrina, una creencia que no responde necesariamente a los hechos y no necesita responder a los hechos y esa actitud, esa ceguera, se resume en la famosa frase de mi título, atribuida siempre a un tejano apócrifo que habrá dicho, if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me. Es una burla y eso es muy importante, la burra capta vividamente el carácter dogmático del monolinguismo en estadounidense y su distancia de la realidad es irreal que el inglés le sirvió a Jesús, obviamente el inglés ni existía y eso es lo que llamo yo el punto ciego de la lengua, the language blind spot en Estados Unidos. El gramo de auto burla en esa frase, I think that she was good enough for Jesus, el gramo de auto burla allí me da un gramo de esperanza que pueda allí haber allí todavía una apertura hacia una conversación más honesta, acepta de la lengua en Estados Unidos, que evite toda la violencia epistémica y social que trae la doctrina del monolinguismo. En estos pocos minutos que van a ser como 45, quiero tocar en algunos de lo que veo yo como los puntos de presión o de tensión o de fricción alrededor del multilinguismo en Estados Unidos, los puntos de desencuentro entre imaginación y realidad, los puntos que producen la locura y la mala fe alrededor de la lengua, del multilinguismo. Extenderé mi visión hacia las Américas en su totalidad, tocaré y tocaré un poco en la zona fronteriza en que estamos ubicados ahora en la migración y la cuestión del colonialismo, del imperio y los contornos de la lingüística moderna. Algo que voy a decir no será nuevo para todos ustedes, pero espero que no todos. Larry Summers y Rick Santorum no desconocen el multilinguismo. Los abuelos maternos de Larry Summers fueron judíos romanos que emigraron de Europa alrededor de los años 20s, probablemente hablando romano y idish. El padre de Santorum fue italiano, emigró a Estados Unidos de Italia en 1930 a la edad de siete años. Ambos hombres entonces crecieron en familias que estaban viviendo una experiencia que produce multitudes en norteamericanos monolingües, la pérdida de lenguas, la interrupción de la transmisión de lenguas entre generaciones mayores y menores. A través de las generaciones, los Estados Unidos está lleno de familias en las cuales las generaciones mayores y menores no pueden conversar plenamente, donde no pueden desarrollar relaciones complejas los unos con nosotros y que sufren por ello. En un momento de triunfalismo hace unos años, Nathan Glaser dijo que las lenguas inmigrantes en Estados Unidos shriveled in the air of freedom, while they had apparently flourished under adversity in Europe, o sea, el multilinguismo está equivale a la adversidad. That es ese cuento triunfalista de aprender inglés y salir adelante, no es falso, pero lleva adentro la historia también de la pérdida lingüística, que la gente muchas veces recuerda con angustia, con tristeza, con rabia, a veces con envidia por los que pudieron tomar el camino bilingüe. En este punto de la pérdida de lenguas coinciden la experiencia de los pueblos indígenas en Estados Unidos y los grupos inmigrantes. El dolor de lengua, language pain, que es lo que yo he llegado a llamarlo, el dolor de lengua creo yo es una de las fuentes importantes de la locura alrededor del lenguaje en Estados Unidos, sobre todo por la manera en que lo silenciamos. Dije que Larry Summers estaba canalizando su colega, Samuel Huntington, pero fue claro, obviamente fue Teddy Roosevelt, el que consagró la doctrina monolinguista en Estados Unidos, dijo en 1919, tres días antes de morirse, dijo en una carta a la American Defense Society, we have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, and we have but room for one sole loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people, lengua y lealtad, es una conjugación poderosa, venenosa. Inglés dijo en un artículo famoso en el Kansas City Star, debe ser el único idioma que se enseña y se usa en las escuelas públicas en el país. Sigue en inglés lo digo. We should insist that if the immigrant comes here in good faith, en buena fe, becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed or birthplace or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American but something else also isn't an American at all. Es una postura bastante radical. El monolinguismo en inglés está codificado aquí como la manifestación externa de la lealtad. El bilinguismo multilinguismo se convierte en la manifestación externa de lealtades divididas que para ofreciando a Roosevelt no is no loyalty at all. Y esa lealtad monolingue es la condición del derecho a la igualdad sin ella sin ella la discriminación deja de ser un autraje. Roosevelt escribía en el contexto de una fase muy particular en la historia del multilinguismo en Estados Unidos. En 1890, 82% de los migrantes de Estados Unidos venían del norte de Europa y de occidente del Europa occidental. Entre 1900 y 1920 la demografía cambió 60% de la gente que llegaba llegaba de países del central y del sur de Europa de países más sureños traiendo una nueva ronda de diversidad y de extrañeza. Al mismo tiempo la Primera Guerra Mundial había convertido el alemán del segundo idioma más normalizado en este país en una amenaza interna. Por todos los Estados Unidos hubo intentos de prohibir la escolarización en alemán, las las misas religiosas, los libros de bibliotecas en alemán, los nombres de calles, los apellidos, el uso del alemán en los asuntos públicos o los espacios públicos y todo todo eso fueron hechos cotidianos en Estados Unidos antes de la guerra. En el Midwest y en Pennsylvania era común que los pueblos vivieran de manera bilingüe en alemán y inglés tal cual como hacemos ahora en español y en inglés. Como en el caso del español el alemán llegó a hacer una amenaza no porque estaba fuera de lugar en Estados Unidos, sino porque no estaba fuera de lugar. No era ya una lengua extranjera, aquí vivía, aquí se reproducía. Pero en 1918-19 por ejemplo el gobernador de Iowa publicó una proclamación Babel prohibiendo todo idioma extranjero de las escuelas públicas y los espacios públicos de Iowa y Nebraska prohibió toda instrucción en idiomas que no fueran el inglés. Esas propuestas encontraron también una vigorosa oposición como igual que hoy. Terminada la guerra, pleitos sobre derechos lingüísticos empezaron enseguida a llegar a las Cortes en Estados Unidos y en esos casos el multilingüismo normalmente ganaba. La Cortes Suprema por ejemplo invalidó la prohibición de Nebraska en 1923 y las comunidades en Texas ganaron el derecho de seguir educando a sus hijos en alemán y en inglés en sus escuelas públicas. Sin embargo obviamente el alemán nunca recuperó su estatus como el segundo idioma de la vida pública en Estados Unidos. Tampoco desapareció el ifen a pesar de Roosevelt. En el censo del año 2000 en este país, 26% de la población white non-Hispanic se declaró alemán americano. Me parece fascinante. El manifiesto monolinguista de Roosevelt responde en una manera perversa a una realidad fundamental de Estados Unidos. Los Estados Unidos construyen su economía importando mano de obra, saberes y sabidurías de otras partes del mundo. Lleva 400 años haciendo eso por toda una variedad de mecanismos, la esclavitud, el peonaje, las políticas de puerta abierta, los programas de braceros, programas de refugiados, visas y becas para estudiantes, sponsorships, programas de visas para especialistas o programas de entrenamiento y claro el enorme sistema de mano de obra indocumentada. La importación de gente y de sus capacidades es, me parece, el mecanismo por el cual Estados Unidos se construye como economía y como sociedad. Y es tan cierto hoy que hace 200 años. En los años 1870, 128,000 ciudadanos chinos emigraron a Estados Unidos y en 2010 fueron un millón y medio. Esta estrategia necesariamente establece el multilinguismo como una condición sistémica, constitutiva y permanente de la sociedad estadounidense. Cuando un grupo se establece, aprende inglés, se lingüe, se lingüe lingüe otra onda llega de otra parte introduciendo otro grupo de idiomas de religiones, etc. La ideología en la doctrina monolinguista trata ese hecho como un fenómeno puramente contigente, colateral, no como algo con relación a la cual el Estado tiene una responsabilidad. No lo ve como una característica sistemática y constitutiva de lo que es esta sociedad. Se ve como una cosa colateral que hay que eliminar. Ese desconocimiento me parece que es otra fuente muy importante de la mala fe de nuestro monolinguismo en este país. La teoria lingüística tampoco nos ha ayudado mucho para captar el multilinguismo. El ideal de lengua y ciudadanía que Roosevelt tenía en su mente fue, o quiero sugerir que fue, articulado en un dibujo muy famoso que apareció casi al mismo tiempo que su manifiesto monolinguista. En el texto fundador de la lingüística moderna, que también fue mencionado por mi colega anteriormente, en el texto fundacional de la lingüística moderna, el CUR de la Linguistique Generale de Fernando de Saussure que apareció en 1915. ¿Quieres poner la primera figura? Ahí está. Paso al inglés. This is Saussure's diagram of what he called in French, le circuit de la parole, the circuit of speech. The act of speech, he says, a parole of speaking assumes at least two individuals, deux individus, he says in French. Apparently no one talks to themselves in Saussure. I am the main counter example. In this picture, the way it works as he explains it, is this is A, this is B. Concepts reside in A's brain. They are associated with the linguistic signs or sound images, acoustic images, that serve to express them. A's brain transmits to A's speech organs the impulse correlating to that image. The sound waves emerge from A's mouth and they pass over to B's ear. And the circuit repeats itself in B's body in reverse order, transmitting the acoustic image from B's ear to B's brain where it is again re-associated with the concept. Let's ponder this drawing a little more. The two figures are an interesting combination of markings and absence of markings. They are identical in appearance. They are Caucasian. They are generically male, young. Their expressions are serious but calm. Their eyes are open. They are looking straight at each other suggesting equality of rank. They are unclothed, even hairless. They bear no marks of class, religion, place, livelihood. No surroundings define where they are. They have no bodies. Language operates identically and symmetrically between them. Only one language is in play in the situation and it is identically shared between them. You've probably guessed where I'm going with this. I want to suggest that Saussure's two individuals here are the figure of modern liberal democratic citizenship that Roosevelt was committed to. Fraternally bonded, rational, rights-bearing individual citizens, quite male, in exact equality as Roosevelt put it in his manifesto. Their visual identicalness here indexicalizes the relation of equivalence and equality in relation to each other and in relation to the language. Saussure models the circuit of speech as a symmetrical, reciprocal, and reversible exchange between equals in which equivalence implies equality and equity. The identicalness of the two visualizes the idea that A's chain of signification will be reproduced inversely but exactly identically in B's brain. Modern linguistics, it appears, was founded on the principles of liberalism. I want to juxtapose Saussure's drawing with another depiction of a speech situation that a drawing made exactly 300 years earlier in a work by an Andean indigenous writer from colonial Peru. This is from Guaman Foma de Ayala's book New Chronicle of Good Government and Justice, Nueva Colónica de Buen Gobierno y Justicia, a 1200 page work completed in 1615, it's actually, there are dates wrong up there, and discovered in the Royal Library of Copenhagen in the early 1900s. The book includes a ferocious critique of Spanish colonialism as it had unfolded in Peru in the Andes in the 16th century. The drawing here, this is one of 400 drawings in the book, it's titled Mala Confesión, Bad or Evil Confession. The caption reads, and it's up here in English, Mala Confesión que hacen los padres y curas de las doctrinas. Aporrea las indias preñadas y a las vejitas y a indias. Y a las dichas solteras no las quiere confesar de edad de 20 años, no se confiesa ni hay remedio de ella. The circuit of speech here is as follows. An unmarried indigenous woman who has been impregnated by a priest wishes to confess to gain absolution. The priest kicks her away, refusing to confess her sin, which is his. This, or so the text implies, keeps her sexually available to him and prevents her from spelling out his sin in her confession. From the standpoint of liberalism, Guaman Foma's drawing depicts everything Saussure sought to dispel. We see two individuals, again, joined in multifaceted relations of hierarchy, inequality, passion, and violence. They are differentiated by gender, by race, by culture, by age, by status, education, livelihood, emotional state. The drawing marks all of these differences on their bodies. An institutional setting is also present. The point of commonality that brings them together here is Catholicism, which is also the arbiter of their differences. The speech act involved confession is predicated on an asymmetry of power. One has the power to give or withhold absolution. The other has the power to ask or beg. There is no reciprocity or reversibility in this circuit de parole. There is despair, violence, lust, rape, and malafé, and multilingualism. The two are native speakers of different, wholly unrelated languages. The acoustic signals passing between them will not be identical. They will be marked by their social and historical differences. Three languages are in play, likely distributed as follows. The priest is a native speaker of Spanish and is literate in it as well as in Latin. He may have sufficient mastery of Quechua to preach and receive confession as the Spanish Church encouraged. The woman is a native speaker of Quechua, which was also the native language of the author, which is why his Spanish is so marked by not being a native speaker. She may know some Spanish or none, and she is not literate. Her access to the doctrines that bind her body and soul runs through the priest who does not administer them in her interest. But she also inhabits an Andean history, cosmology, ecology, and social world to which he has little access. Both probably understand more of each other's language than they could speak. Through the lens of liberalism, Guaman poem is drawing makes sense as a figure of the illiberal, of illiberal, non-secular, pre-modern absolutism in its multilingual racialized colonial form. And many of us here would immediately find it legible in that way. On the other hand, if time could be reversed, probably the first thing Guaman poem would say about Sosu's drawing is, it's not finished, it's utterly incomplete. The people have no bodies, few social markings, there's no settings. Without these things, A and B, in fact, can have no idea what, if anything, they can or should say to each other and how they will be understood by one another. What is going on below their necks? Is A holding a knife to B's chest? Are there arms around each other's waist? Such a picture, Guaman poem would probably say, of Sosu's picture, can tell us nothing at all about how language operates either in the world or in the brain. As it happens, that's pretty much what the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Phoenix Guattari said in the 1980s in their wholesale critique of modern linguistics. Interlocution, they said, is a site for the contest of forces, not the cooperative exchange of information. Flipping something, Larry Summers already looked at what you were thinking. The building brick, the building brick of language they say is not the predicated sentence, the assertion, but the slogan, the modorla, the word of command. The violence of interpolation, where each speaker puts the other speaker in the place they want them to locate them. In other words, the difference between the two drawings is to a great extent the difference between two conceptions of language. Notice, there is nothing dated about the social order that Guaman Foma is depicting in his drawing. The Catholic Church is in upheaval today over precisely the behavior that is depicted in 1615. Scholars of racism have shown how interpolation is the set, putting someone in their place, is the central mechanism for producing injury in language. That's our theory around hate speech. If you're one of nearly 3 million people living in a prison in America, you inhabit Guaman Foma's social paradigm more than socials. Keeping bodies and markings out of the picture, it seems, was Sosir's way of keeping hierarchy, difference, desire, the contest of forces out of the picture in order to naturalize those relations of equity and reciprocity that are his social ideal. Dulles and Guattari aspire to reveal the willful blindness, the language blind spot, that this requires. In other words, modern linguistics has had its own language blind spot and its own share of monolinguist mala fe. There lies part of the challenge for a critical multilingualism project. El factor principal que estaba omnipresente para Guaman Foma y completamente fuera de escena para Sosir fue obviamente el colonialismo. El legado del colonialismo y del imperio, la fuerza que ahora los críticos llamamos la colonialidad, es un factor absolutamente esencial para comprender la carga, el furor, la furia alrededor del multilingualismo en las Américas, aún hoy y sobre todo hoy y aquí también. Para barcar este tema vasto y complejo, quiero contar una historia que ocurrió que remite a Guaman Foma pero que hace eco con eventos que están ocurriendo también aquí y ahora. En abril de 2009 en Perú, una controversia estalló alrededor de una persona que es descendiente directa de la mujer en el dibujo de Guaman Foma. ¿Quieres pasar a la próxima? Ilaria Supa, miembro del Congreso peruano elegida. Supa es una líder política de larga trayectoria en el Perú, delegada frecuente a las Naciones Unidas, hablante nativa del Quechua y una persona que no ha tenido casi ninguna educación formal igual que el ex presidente de Brasil y el actual presidente de Bolivia. Es autodidacta en español, se alphabetizó por su propia cuenta. En abril de 2009, con Malicia abierta, un periódico de Lima publicó en primera plana los unos apuntes robados de la mesa de Ilaria Supa en el Congreso. Los apuntes estaban llenos de ortografía no estándar, de formas gramaticales típicas del español andino y de escritura no escolarizada. El editor del periódico Aldo Mariartici escribió una columna donde él también parece maniático, como que el duende de la lingüística también se apoderó de él. Voy a citarlo para que vean lo elaborado y lo apasionado y lo detallado está el retrato que pinta de Ilaria Supa a base de sus apuntes. Dice, pero no se puede pagar más de 20.000 soles al mes y darle tanto poder y responsabilidad a quienes no están mínimamente iluminados por las luces de la cultura. Pues aquí lo que se pone realmente en debate es si es sano para el país que pueda acceder al Congreso alguien con un nivel cultural tan bajo. Está hablando de su ortografía. De un nivel cultural tan bajo, su ortografía y gramática revelan serias carencias y sin aparente ánimo de elienda. Oh, so all the English isn't there. So he says, I need to know if it's healthy for the country that someone can reach Congress with such a low cultural level whose spelling and grammar reveal such serious deficiencies and an apparent lack, apparent absence of a desire for improvement. He does a detailed portrait of what a person is like who has this problem with her spelling and grammar. Es indiscutible de una persona con una instrucción tan, digamos, elemental siendo generosos, poco puede aportar en la elaboración de leyes, en la fiscalización de casos complejos, en la reflexión diaria de hacer donde debe ir la nave del Estado. Como yo, es como Santorum en Puerto Rico, es una cosa que se le fue la lengua. Una persona así posiblemente solo se va a limitar a repetir lugares comunes, a oponerse, a todo solo por oponerse, etc., etc. No lo voy a leer todo, pero es un retrato detalladísimo que él construye desde su imaginario lingüístico colonial. Concluye, por eso el voto debe ser voluntario y, además, debe haber requisitos extras para ser congresista con grado universitario. La crueldad y la agresión y la energía aquí revelan algo sobre la persistencia y la generatividad de la colonialidad hoy todavía en Perú y aquí también. La columna de Mariaty desató aún más calor pero no recibió la reacción que él esperaba. Los profesores de lingüística de la Universidad Católica de Lima lo condenaron como un acto de discriminación y violencia lingüística inaceptable en una sociedad democrática. Otro lingüista resignificó la historia. Veamos, la dijo, también como la huella de que algo extraordinario ha ocurrido. Se escribe español andino en el Congreso de la República, emancipación. Hilaria misma respondió con energía y generatividad propia en un discurso furibundo en el Congreso de la República, repudiando el maltrato que había recibido y ahí y por los medios criticó condenando la gente que no se da cuenta que somos una nación multicultural y plurilingüe y condenando la mala fe monolinguista. ¿Quién es pasar ahí a aparecer en la prensa popular? Señora Presidente, dice, la lengua que hablo es el Quechua, no es una lengua de perros. Estoy segura que si un gringo viniera a hablar en este Congreso lo aplaudirían por masticar el español. Mala fe, no, más mala fe. Eloja su cultura, señala que fue una falla del Estado el hecho de que ella no pudiera estudiar. Exige una política de alfabetización bilingüe en español y en Quechua. Exige reconocimiento de su capacidad de representar un sector importante de la sociedad peruana. Lo importante es que Supa hizo este discurso en el Congreso en Quechua. Y aquí va el primer parrafo. Así se publicó en los periódicos. Termina diciendo que de aquí en adelante hará sus intervenciones en el Congreso en Quechua y no en español. Y así hizo. Y por primera vez en la historia del Perú el idioma Quechua apareció en el Congreso como lengua de debate y lengua legislativa ¿Cuál significó que los congresistas bilingües fueron los privilegiados? Como aquí, los oyentes bilingües son los privilegiados. Y los monolingües, los congresistas monolingües que son priori aleatoriamente de la élite tuvieron que buscar intiapretes y los buscaron porque temían que ella hablara mal. They got interpreters because they were afraid she was speaking badly of them. Esta historia tiene una secuela que voy a contar al final pero aquí en este contexto quiero recordar los esfuerzos que estamos enfrentando aquí para imponer pruebas de inglés como condición de acceso a la electorabilidad aquí también con blanco de hispanoparlantes o sea la colonialidad también está en juego en nuestro país. El colonialismo produce un multilingüismo estructurado en relaciones de dominación y subjugación. Cuando aparecen los colonizadores la gente que encuentran se tornan indígenas no son indígenas antes de que lleguen los colonizadores o aborígenes los que estuvieron aquí antes donde el antes está definido por el colonizador que llega. En el marco colonial las lenguas indígenas llegan a ser la manifestación incontrovertible de su continuidad histórica como pueblos que se extienden en el tiempo a través del antes y el después de la colonialidad. Ceter colonialism the kind that took place in the Americas and in other places like South Africa produces societies that are multilingual force fields of conflict collaboration entanglement, coercion assimilation, resistance proximity and distance in which multiple social orders coming from multiple genealogies coexist graft onto one another with new institutions and orders layered on top of and interacting with and grafted onto things that were there before. It would be difficult to exaggerate the complexity of the entanglement that empire and colonialism have brought about in the United States and the heat that their friction has generated particularly in this part of the country, in the southwest here what is now the border was already a border before Europeans came here it was the Franca Norte of the Aztec empire that was based in central Mexico it was the outer zone of its trade roots it was inhabited by tribes they saw as untamed Chichimeca. Under Spanish settler colonialism this became a war zone between settlers and Indians and after 1848 Anglo-American expansion layered over and grafted on to all of that drawing a border which for many people had very little reality at all and which for others operated as the defense line on the north against Anglo encroachment towards the south the result says Nicole Guidati Hernandez in a recent article was a war-based cross-border economy. The phrase resonates today in the recent article in the recent edition social text Guidati Hernandez reconstructs the 1871 camp that massacre which took place 70 miles away from here mapping trying to capture this complexity mapping the interactions involved between men, women between Mexicans, Tuxonenses Anglos, indigenous people that resulted in the massacre of 108 Aravaipa Apache Indians who had just surrendered after years of warfare against invading settlers. That war-based cross-border economy all its entanglements is still inhabits this space today and is booming in fact with the militarization now of the border from the north. Spanish in the southwest and all over the United States then inhabits multiple narratives as a language of the colonizer in relation to indigenous languages the language of the colonized in relation to English a language that belongs here inhabits this landscape is deeply in it and a language that arrives every day from other places in the migrant stream. In that frontier war zone this frontier war zone undocumented migrants have become the Apaches, the insurrected untamed, mobile, uncedentary forces to be eliminated at all costs. Three lines of empire converge here along with two colonial regimes with all their baggage. Interim of endless figure rates of migration in both directions as labor markets wax and wane and the layering in of snowbirds, white migrants looking for sunshine and golf. A lot of frictions producing a lot of heat and a lot of golf, which is about water. We are indebted above all to the scholars of Mexican-American studies and Native American studies including many at this university for producing the knowledge we need to grasp those the frictions, the heat, and the long histories here. When U.S. society gets grounded in its own reality, in its own history, that's when we'll become a little less crazy around language. I said there was a sequel to the story of Ilaria Supa and it is this. Ilaria Supa had the idea to rethink her promise of not using Spanish in the U.S. Congress, because she realized that she needed Spanish to forge the political alliances she needed to move forward in her legislative projects. She returned to Spanish then, but I say not as the imperial language, but as the Franco language of her politics, as the Franco language. Where there is language, there will always be Franco languages. The second languages that allow communication through the linguistic differences. Where there is the imperial language, the language of the dominant power will quickly stop belonging to the imperial power. As the English time of belonging to England or the United States and as the Spanish quickly stopped belonging to Spain. The imperial languages become the Franco languages of the dominates in the codes for which they demand justice or impact the fall of the empire. Franco languages are the means for which ideas travel to distant worlds. Spanish, for example, has been the critical factor in the possibility of the Pan-Indigenous movement in Latin America or today is the shared code that allows the indigenous groups to converge, to act, to form a movement. Valorizing the multilingualism also means defending meaning, obviously, defending the indigenous nations like Peru, defending the rights of minority languages, access to justice and law in any language. The demand for education and growth in a mother tongue also includes a multilingualist project including access to the Franco languages. Not like the path to assimilation or the loss of mother tongue but as a path of access to the civic power, to the connection and to the political alliance. And that is another challenge, I think, for our multilingualism and critical project. Thank you very much. Questions, English, Spanish, Contagious. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Excellent. I would like to ask you a question but maybe give you an additional example because in this region prior to 1767 we had a huge movement or group of organizations called the Jesuit missionaries who represented a very odd institution in the sense that many of them were actually German speakers and they made the greatest efforts to learn the native languages and they created dictionaries they made the greatest efforts to breach in the native language and so forth. There were lots of reasons why the Jesuits were later expelled but I think one of the reasons was really that they worked extremely hard at multilingualism. German speakers using Spanish as lingua franca using local population in our native languages. I suppose there were a lot of jealousy and anger and fear on their part and so they were all expelled. Yes, that was true all over Latin America. Yes, exactly. The Jesuits were expelled everywhere. They were one of the most famous cases in Paraguay where they had actually created utopian communities that were autonomous from the Spanish crown but the Jesuits were they became a huge political threat precisely because of these projects of forming autonomous indigenous speaking communities. I wanted to ask you about your phrase language pain that you used near the beginning and to say something more about what you meant by that. Why in the case of somebody like Larry Summers pain and not for example baby shame I'll tell you what I because you're right, language shame is another thing and there was a part of this lecture that had to be deleted because it was too long that was about that and working with Gustavo Bereski in Matt's book Mother Tongue Tide in which he talks about what it means to not be a fluent speaker of your mother tongue and he said there's nothing more disabling in Spanish. Language pain, you know where I first came to this concept was actually through a linguist named Patricia Pat Nichols who taught at San Jose State and she was teaching sociolinguistics and she did a study with her students San Jose is an extraordinarily linguistically and ethnically diverse part of the country and she had students write language histories for themselves in which they went back to see how far back they were in your family until you hit someone who was not a native speaker of English and that was all she wanted to know was the generational thing. What surprised her completely was the stories the students came back with when they had gone to their grandparents or their parents or the people or their relatives and asked about this the stories of loss suddenly came out and the students had never heard this and they began to hear this tremendous amount of regret not from everybody there's lots of people who feel like thank God I got rid of this language that nobody speaks but the stories of language loss and it was particular about the difficulty of communication between grandparents and grandchildren that kept coming up in these Pat Nichols this was just something that surprised her and came out and that's when she began to study that it was her work that first took me to the idea of language pain it's not that everybody who every family where there's a language loss has to be diagnosed as having a psychic pathology because of it that would be we read much crazier nation than we are now if that were true but I do think there's a lot of unprocessed grief and sadness and things that comes up from time to time when you ask people about it so that's what I meant by language pain it's hard it's a whole other thing that people will tell you about from their childhoods and particularly school experiences that kind of thing but I thank you for making the distinction very valuable Claire I want to go back to your notion of lingua franca because of course this is the topic how do you envisage transforming not only Spanish in this particular case as a lingua franca as a mediating language but a lot of the foreign languages that we teach we might also consider teaching them as lingua franca I'm thinking of French I mean they're the big languages the European languages are already sort of lingua franca they are however very much more than English marked culturally historically etc so how do you envisage teaching those languages as lingua franca does that mean depriving them of their cultural historicity making them into this kind of mediating code I mean how should we think of this I think it involves teaching them in their multiplicity I don't know a single French class actually maybe they exist I hope they exist where you learn what Quebec French sounds like what African Frenches sound like it would be teaching them in the multiplicity which is what enables them to operate as lingua franca lingua franca's work because of that that infinite elasticity of comprehension lingua franca can be franca because you can speak you know American English and comprehend the English spoken by someone who speaks it completely different from you where every single vowel is different right and it's that so lingua franca can be franca can be because of that elasticity of comprehension so that you are able to understand the language in when it is spoken in forms that are extremely diverse different from one another that to me is the one of the reasons why if I were refounding linguistic theory that distinction between that elasticity of comprehension in comparison with the narrow the speech that distinction would be the central axis of my foundational linguistic theory if I were starting to scratch so that's what I think is if you want to teach the lingua franca English is a lingua franca teach as many English as you can so that you people then grasp the incredible diversity of it and at the same time the comprehensibility so that would be my opinion I don't know how that would look in the drawing I have to figure that out I need a graphic hi Mary it's great to have you here and I recognize my training in your presentation so Miranda has me in her past along with a lot of other people but I mean and parts of the parts that jump out as oh I learned the way I think somewhere is your discussion of the ways that both political ideologies liberalism shape the ideologies about language and the practices of languages are structured by capitalist dynamics so I'm curious what the implications are on both of those dimensions for the vision you articulated the end of the kinds of political practices of alliance using the francus is there a kind of economic vision implied as well in that you know I don't think so but did you see one or here I'm trying to figure out what I think I need you to say what you had what came to mind well I mean I think a little piece of it is that I'm thinking about the relation what are the structures of relationship I mean if if so source vision is of these completely abstract liberal subjects except that they're not really abstract they're really quite particular what are the what are the subjects who build alliances what kind of political vision subjects who build alliances under Lingua Franca which still implies you know hierarchies or differences or something that I see which is saying and I think that I don't think there's an answer to that question but I think that whenever whenever people from disparate positions or places usually come together under Lingua Franca one of the things that happens is for example with the indigenous movement in Latin America it's really quite very quite elaborated practices have been developed so that Spanish becomes Lingua Franca every group also to a meeting must bring performance everyone has to bring performance as a group and everyone has to bring dress so Sufa is there in her dress everyone has to bring dress there's a set of customs and practices developed around the marking of differences in the context of the sameness so I think this is where thinking about language separate from the physical is really in that context is just completely weird because the whole thing the expressive practice is very much interpenetrated with language, with performance things like practice for eating so I guess that's where I would go with that it's a very stimulating question thank you cannot just talking a bit about Teddy Roosevelt the quote that you showed a little while later he uses the phrase America should not become a polyglot boarding house it fits very well into your analysis because it means that multilingualism is poverty equates it with poverty it's a boarding house like you don't really live here you're not a property owner you're temporarily that's great and then of course in 1919 he wrote the winning of the west six volume work where he sees the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the west as a continuation of the German expulsion of the Romans from Germania this is all one big Nordic triumph do you know I saw that dropped in research in the 1980s when I actually started researching the writings of Augusto Pinocce when he was dictator of Chile and I started writing an essay called the complete works of Augusto Pinocce and he wrote because Pinocce wrote a textbook for a military school called Geopolitics and I found this book and it was written in the 60s right but it was a textbook for military schools in Chile and that was the that was the project that Chile was an extension of the Prussian empire it was anyway that it traveled the Paranime also if it's okay just one other observation the program that you map out it's already there in Nebrija's grammar in his preface where he tells Isabella the Romans conquered everything and they had good grammar so here's a grammar for you so you can go on and conquer and it's really interesting yes it seems this is something about empires that really intrigues me that it seems like when an empire is formed when a state is about to become imperial it tries to unify itself internally homogenize itself internally so Nebrija's grammar and he's the one who says famously that grammar is the greatest instrument of empire in 1492 and that's when he writes the first formal grammar of Spanish to and so there's a strange connection the same with Teddy Roosevelt he was presiding over the transition of the US into becoming an imperial power which really 1898 and so the internal homogenizing seems partly that seems like another dimension of it the other examples is France where the first French formal grammar is called the Port Royal Grammar what's the name of the first French study founded in the United States Port Royal Montreal so it's an interesting kind of phenomenon that I don't quite understand but it just seems to be there yes and then what Michael said this morning is it wasn't the case that everybody in the country speaks it I mean Castilian was not spoken by a very small number of Spaniards in 1492 right so it's something about the codification that is part of the imaginary that you have to set up it's really a kind of interesting that too a French grammar yeah I didn't say that thing it's being said we have these microphones because this is being streamed somewhere I guess yeah I did okay good absolutely brilliant analysis and I just enjoyed it so much but I want to maybe push a little harder follow-up on Claire's question about what it takes to turn an imperial language into a language of wider into a lingua franca and since you mentioned the example of Castilian and the limited circulation of it initially in the peninsula I wanted to think about the Spanish case where yes you have I mean contemporary Spain so you have recognition of the autonomies and the autonomous languages but Spain is still relentlessly centrally monolingual you still have a group that identifies itself monolingually as the owners of the Spanish language regardless of their they kind of fell into an imperial nostalgia and they went on this campaign to create this international campaign to make 1492 a celebration of the Spanish empire and the theme was el encuentro de dos culturas the encounter of two cultures this in Latin America became a hilarious joke there were all these t-shirts you've probably seen them spitting on a conquistador it says el encuentro de dos culturas but more important it was that it was that campaign in 1491 where Spain tried to reclaim the empire that's what galvanized the indigenous movement and in 1991 the first encounter of indigenous group from all over South America happened in Quito and they produced a declaration called tradición de Quito in Spanish and it was the first time they came together and it was the reaction against the the new imperial gesture that galvanized that thing so it was really interesting what I say about just the way the force field has a lot of generative power all these centuries later I saw a hand back there and I hand up here earlier where's that Micah? I was so intrigued by your joke in your title I think this was good enough for Jesus I teach in a very small college and the bible belt and well in my neighborhood in my regular community people say that kind of stuff all the time in the seminary where I teach people say well if Latin was good enough for Jesus then I must study Latin and we must say the mass in Latin and I say son scholars are almost unanimous that he didn't speak Latin and I say but he heard Latin during his lifetime at least so maybe he knew it I guess I'm wondering about some of the pedagogical implications or some of your thoughts on that kind of stuff for language education, multilingualism and different kind of educational settings and where do you think we're headed? I'm just wondering about any thoughts that you might have and pedagogy and ignorance on issues of language and language education and multilingualism where we're maybe headed with where do we start in a very monolingual society where any kind of language that's seen as other is probably seen as oh this is Jesus's language or something there's just tremendous ignorance and I wonder what your thoughts are well in the particular religious question if you can bring yourself to I got really interested in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ in the linguistics of it because it's this film about the death of Jesus and there's no English in it at all right and it's made in Latin and Aramaic and Hebrew and it's interesting to watch it because there are two people in the film who are multilingual and the one who speaks everybody's language to them is Jesus he's the multilingual guy and the result is when he's crucified in the film the sign above his cross is in three languages it's in Hebrew Latin it's in all the languages right so there's a whole really interesting linguistic thing going on there about Christianity and the originary languages you know I think with pedagogically Chilean John Mornacher here they were here and I remember when they invited us once to participate in a college composition summer institute that they ran in Wyoming and we were asked to give a talk about multiculturalism this was a long time ago and that was the big debate and I remember we had a group of students in our class this was Renato Rosando and myself and we were kind of like they were all Anglo-Americans and we thought oh gosh how are we going to start with multiculturalism and the people who lived in Laramie Wyoming said you know we can't there's nothing we can do here with multiculturalism because it's all the same here right well on the main street in Laramie Wyoming there was a Spanish language video store that Laramie was full of multilingualism it was full of Spanish speakers it was full of but it was like the problem is not that it's not there it's that you are trained not to see it you're trained not to hear it and in our group of students that were all Anglo-Americans we went around and asked people their stories and what we later we said we watched the dissolution of the white synthesis everybody had a story people were from families who moved to Russia after World War II people who'd grown up in Mexico and came back people who'd been Quakers and missionaries there was this vast diversity heterogeneity within the group and so I think in the US one of the things in the classroom here that you do is you find you find the diversity in the classroom you get people to find their own story go back and try and get the synthesis to dissolve and then you have something to work with that's people's own historical experience one of the things that Pat Nichols found in her research that was so interesting and it's so obvious when you think about it but if you ask yourself what is the ethnic group that has been speaking English the longest in the United States it's African-Americans that's who's been that has had England because of the whole condition under which African-American society was founded in the United States out of a lingua franca so that I guess pedagogically that's sort of my idea starting with what's around you there are there are very most communities in the United States now have immigrant populations of some kind in them and that so people are not in quite the same kind of bubbles that we think we see a bubble and then you just have to find where it's got a leak in it unfortunately we are running out of time we have one more section go before we break for the evening please help me thank Mary-Louise Pratt for her talk today before I forget as well we also like to thank Dr. Michael Hocus for his talk who we both would like to thank together because the conversation that's ensuing now is taking stock of their arguments taking stocks of their thoughts so that we can provide some kind of intellectual roadmap or plot line that we can perhaps trace the rest of the symposium so the goal today of course if you want to go ahead thanks now that we have you here we would like what we would like to do is to open the floor for discussion and to see if you would like to discuss or put on table some of the issues that might have arisen during the the talks or where you see the conversation going from here and so on and so forth and one of the things that we are going to ask you to do is when you speak maybe to kindly introduce yourselves so that we know whom we are addressing since it is going to be an audience addressing each other but first let's ask our speakers if there is anything else I'm sure you are tired but if there is anything else you may want to add to or you may want to begin with such a plan no thank you and that is why you are all here so again we are not asking questions to someone anymore we are asking it to each other I'm taking a big risk here speaking after these great great speakers one thing that I missed in Professor Hoekwist's talk one thing that fascinated me was the assumption that the truth of language would somehow filter through and have an effect and bring reason into debates on language and you confess to not being a public intellectual and I suspect there is a misconnect there that some other kind of reasoning has to be in play now in Europe language debates as far as I can see in the way you presented it here and in the Americas for Professor Brett's talk we do have a claim to linguistic rights language rights often based on territoriality on occupation of a certain space over time so it's not an abstract argument about the nature of language it's a matter of who's been here the longest and this as you pointed out is being used to construct multilingualism to defend the European languages and not provide language services to immigrants which is something I'm very concerned with at the moment personally now that territoriality surely is operative in debates about language policy here although it hasn't been mentioned and I suspect it might be operative in this very brave and still troubling defense of the lingua franca of the imperial language as a lingua franca and I've been grappling with that why does that bother me as a concept and I think it bothers me because I can imagine how do you say lingua francas lingua francas that have had no territoriality and for which if they were lost there would be no pain I used to speak one I still speak a bit it's a pigeon language used in mining in southern africa absolutely just for giving orders actually it's not a pastor civic power it's just pure power happy to have lost that one absolutely and it's gradually in the mining industry giving way to englishing which is encroaching on that but hey that one was pure imperial nomination it was a language with imperatives and lingua franca allows a bit more and you were talking here about spanish being used between indigenous groups so it's not anyone's l1 I assume territorial claims is just language of convenience as a lingua franca is in this classical definition what bothers me is that it is also the imperial language as was pointed out also has enormous asymmetries into it and I still remain unconvinced that we can forget about that forget about those asymmetries of people who do actually use it better more convincingly more with more fluency the greater ease than others and who do have some claim to territoriality so that's the one thing I'd like to raise that I missed in both talks and might connect them in some way I think it's it's very helpful to rethink the question of the it's too simple to say that the lingua franca has just stopped being imperial but I want to go back to territoriality because in the U.S. one of the most interesting things to me that I did and it's another piece that I had to pull out but Europe the contrast between Europe and the United States is really interesting Europe is held up in the U.S. all the time as the model for multilingual education but Europe the policies in Europe are that you do not teach immigrant languages or that has been the policy there's a certain amount of change now that has to learn languages but not immigrant languages whereas in the U.S. it's only about the debates are almost entirely about immigrant languages now the other thing in the U.S. that's really different is that the one place where multilingualism is recognized is absolutely a given feature of this society is the court system and in the U.S. you are entitled to legal representation if you are the federal government will only fund courts state and local courts that provide free language services for everyone in court and there's things like in Nebraska last year the rest has spent a million and a half dollars on court interpreters in 70 languages so there's and this is happening in communities all over it's putting incredible strains on budgets in local communities because there's an increase in the numbers of languages that they have to provide interpreters in and of course there's all kinds of flaws in the system and people waiting months for their case to come up because the one guy who is a legal interpreter in Marshallese is doing a case in North Carolina and you're waiting for him in Kentucky it's like that but it's really interesting that as far as I can tell in the U.S. across the whole political spectrum I have yet to hear anyone seriously questioning that as a right that language right here and you would think that the monolingualist ideology would lead people to say forget it if you don't know English you're not entitled to legal representation tough luck and so far that's not happening here at all and it sounds like there's a contrast there that I don't know if Europe is willing to has the same requirement for legal representation European law says that each defendant in criminal proceedings has a right to an interpreter in a language he or she understands so it's not maternal language it's not L1 but it's one they understand the strains are enormous because many non-professional interpreters are necessarily employed because we have no training in those languages so in Spain we get comic cases of the accused was the only interpreter available and one police yeah that's true and one interpreter was sent to an encounter at the police and was promptly arrested because he was on their list of wanted people but it's a disconnect between the demands which are palpable and the state training institutions have done nothing to train people in these languages same problem I mean there's no official policy for hospitals but it's working that way so where I live in Spain sorry my name's Anthony Penn hospitals in our area we have you know immigrants from the Maghreb we have Arabic and French for them from Senegal we have French it's just too much to ask to get any languages that's your lingua franca you have French in the hospital yes I want to pick up a little bit about what Anthony started to talk about my name is Barbara Costa I'm in the department of German studies here at the University of Arizona and about the lingua franca and I'm thinking of I have two kind of stories in my mind that maybe illustrate the power differentials of different speakers that may be speaking a common language coming to it from maybe different language groups but it's a common language and I'm thinking of for example in the German context there are German writers of Turkish heritage and when they write creatively often times I've heard native German speakers saying that they do not properly use the language there's a power structure between those who have a language as their native language and those who are non-native language speakers so I'm wondering that lingua franca it doesn't seem like it's there's a certain power structure that may be implied in that too and I'm thinking of a personal story as well I grew up with my mother is Austrian my father is Serbian and I remember one day as a teenager I was really angry with my father and my grandmother who are Serbian speakers and I said to them you know we're a family of sinkers and tinkers could somebody please think around here so invoking that I'm the native speaker and even though we're all speaking English you're not really speaking English Tom Rosento University of Calgary one comment following up on the American situation I believe American was first used for Native Americans when they spoke about Americans it was Native Americans it wasn't what we come to think of as quintessentially the opposite or different or white European so that whole history of labeling is something that would surprise a lot of people today and following up on this notion of lingua franca which is something I've been looking at a lot and thinking about there's a book by Philip van Perie who's a Belgian bilingual guy political theorist he's written a book called linguistic justice for Europe and the world he's got this grand scheme this is the book where people who are into economics and metrics mathematical formulations his idea is that everyone should learn English it'll help lead to a demos a global demos necessary for economic justice but I think what's missing in the analysis and is relevant to these comments that have been made is that there's always a symmetry and he acknowledges this between people who are native English speakers for example in Europe and those who aren't they're just simply are unequalities in terms of the ability to manipulate use the language in particular ways he says that the free riders the Anglophone countries should subsidize he's got a big scheme how this would work they should subsidize the teaching and learning of English as a necessary sort of remedy the point is the backdrop of this as has been mentioned is global neoliberalism in other words the hope for a situation where there would be the sort of solidarities and cosmopolitan or humanitarian you know possibilities for thwarting the dynamics which favor for example a very small number highly trained workers who speak particular languages like English and Ireland where there are 100,000 English people working for American owned companies because they speak English they speak English is to really have a fundamental huge change in the whole world order so in other words there's two things one is there's always asymmetries Himes talked about this native 85 even if they were a revolution there's still going to be asymmetries among languages and speakers of languages but secondly in the world order today it's hard to take out of the equation the mechanisms and structures and institutions and processes which render certain sorts of languages and sectors of the labor force as having favored privileged you know value without talking in great depth about the economic situation and the economic political situation so for example lingua franca's people have written about the way for more local development is using local lingua franca's to develop local resources and industries that would require Lingala or something let's say in that context in the Republic of the Congo or something because that's where most of the growth and the possibility for economic development is happening it's much more the informal economy is like I think the figure is like 100 times more than all of the A that has been given to low income countries in the last century is by local economy so local economy needs local lingua franca's I'm saying lingua franca can work but it's not necessarily English or the colonial ones but even there they're going to be asymmetries so they're always going to be asymmetries but the underlying situation with the socio-political framing that creates asymmetries more broadly in terms of distribution of resources and investment and bank and all that stuff it's sort of the elephant in the room so that sounds good but even found if you read his book it's very impressive except I think it doesn't really deal with why would people want to do this why is the United States going to subsidize the teaching and learning of English around the world what's and why would why does Pfizer want to make AIDS drugs cheaper in Africa they don't okay the Africans can make AIDS drugs much cheaper but they have no vested interest we can go on and on and on but there's this very complex framework which is relevant to this we can't isolate languages in this way so what are you saying is that in all the money that OUP puts in the the development of of English as a lingua franca in Vienna etc etc should it is it money that should be better spent not developing a lingua franca and and developing strategies for multilingualism I mean very small percentage of Europeans are mobile across borders in terms of the linguistic and educational skills that give them social mobility across European state borders so there is a class of jet setters and people with lots of skills who will benefit from Oxford English but most of the people you know in the United States and Hong Kong we can go on and on in other words the amount of benefit for English worldwide given the number of jobs there are and the number in the workforce and the number of people who work for multinationals who could use English the number of the latter group is tiny relatively speaking so there's a perception we have as the jet setters that we need to add a few more jet setters but it's not really helping it's not helping the very poor in other countries so Randall Paula from the University of Pittsburgh I think it's important that we're underscoring the relationship of language, economy and politics here I think that's very important I do not want to be the person who protects the empire promotes imperialism but I do think actually there's something to be said about those empires and those empires and I do think we might want to consider the way that certain questions of modernization standardization, efficiency, governmentality have operated differently across different empires historically and I can think about Central Europe and especially the Polish territories under the control on the one hand of Germanifying forces versus the I'm just sort of tossing this out I'm sorry to put this in the mix but in the Russian Empire one of the things that I know linguistic politics was that at first there was a move towards Russification but that withdrew into an attempt to standardize especially the Yiddish speakers and out of that then the initial grammars for Yiddish helped generate the flourishing of a Yiddish literature which is lost on a certain level I mean that speaking of that, that standardize the production of that literature but I do think that that's important for us to recall in some ways that there are ways in which empires are not simply exercises monolingualism but can also be structures which for various reasons can promote a kind of linguistic diversity and facilitate that David from German Studies here at the University of Arizona we're all professors everyone who has been presenting the next couple of days so our positions in this whole discussion are interesting in terms of what our responsibilities are at our individual universities my assignment is 40% research 40% teaching, 20% service and so what I'm wondering is Mary Louise Pratchas gave us a great example of producing research and service in a language other than English and so what I'm wondering is as we all consider hiring in the future of the humanities and the idea that 13% of those who do the teaching in at US University right now are ladder-ranked faculty are those who carry the rank of professor responsible for producing research and service in a language other than English and to what extent would you consider that a criterion for hiring the new generation of professors whether or not they're native speakers or non-native speakers or whatever else we call them so I think I was just inspired by what Mary Louise Pratchas did today as an example of a type of research that often doesn't get done among those of us whose first language is English and yet we teach in other languages so that usually focuses around teaching but not so much in terms of research or service so I wonder if anybody has any comments about that well so at my university so here's what's going on with all of the influx of Chinese Indian and other students from other parts of the world who may not speak English so you can spend a lot of money and time giving an ESL which as we know can be tricky depending on what the background has been you can teach a class taught in Chinese, engineering one on one in Chinese and that's what institutions like mine are doing how about that that's turning it right on the head now you'd think that the fare and the US English people would be down on that like you pick your metaphor so I mean frankly to be quite honest if we're talking about the metric or of efficiency what's more efficient is the massive students that you can make up of speaking non-English languages this is what's happening in the other way in Europe they claim in Sweden Denmark and some other countries degrees and programs are being offered in English and there's great fear that those really we don't think of Swedish as being threatened or I guess finished but there are claims that those languages are threatened because things are going the way of English so why not how open are we to that how makes us say well how willing are we to consider something as seemingly quite off the beaten track you know as so I throw that out as an example I've argued for that for a long time with on deaf ears often but I'll push class and also the department of German studies I would like to come back to my very first question this early afternoon and try to broaden this a little bit I wonder really why we do not have more multilingualism why we don't have more professors or departments which is all kinds of languages are being spoken and I would like to throw out a term that might illustrate this quite well the term is shibbolet you might have heard about it it's already in the Old Testament it was used in 14th century Poland in 15th century Sweden and I think 6th century Holland shibbolet meant whoever doesn't speak the language of the people properly was killed and that's what we see often on our computers we have a computer error shibbolet why do I bring this up you know let's say there's a statement in Polish and anyone who couldn't speak that sentence properly was regarded non-polish hence German sentence was killed it was part of war so I wonder really I mean it's extremely interesting for me thought provoking a fertile conference but at the same time I'm really worried that we are missing out also a little bit the political dimension because we face enormous resistance in the public we have heard a number of very good examples I think we also have to address a fear naked fear a large section of our population whether this is the white Anglo population or whatever they are afraid they do not speak Spanish they are afraid same thing let's say in Germany in terms of afraid too much English is coming in or the French whatever there is fear I think we have to face this but the entire fascinating really for us as intellectuals most productive and far reaching process of multilingualism causes enormous fear has always cost fear and has been used even as a political instrument to kill the other side so I would like to appeal to all of us to keep that a little bit in mind because why do we study this phenomenon of multilingualism in order to develop also practical strategies to defend to help to empower the next generation to understand a little bit the productivity and the creativity and the foresightedness of multilingualism but I think most people are monolingual speakers and they are afraid and jealous envious or angry about multilingual speakers or xenophobic I wanted that one more I also wanted to add that it might not be fear against multilingualism it's fear against a wrong kind of monolingual well I think it's one more question we have two minutes just respond to what David first said and what Albrecht said there is a political very important political dimension here that goes beyond language especially the way Americans use the word language I've discussed this with some of you already but Americans think that for instance Albrecht you're a professor of German studies that Albrecht grants degrees in German nouns and verbs that's what people think those of you who teach in other languages in the United States grant degrees in languages and all of the ideas go on in literature in the English department English means literature this is connected to this problem it is a political issue it's a form of protectionism content gets expressed in English French German Arabic these are tools used to gather knowledge and bring it back into English one of the ways around this for all of I'm sorry I don't want to sound imperious here but for all of you there are some things that people call languages which we in Europe understand very very differently we don't understand we don't understand French as simply the language with the culture and everything else involved you have to find ways to get your administrators to understand the content of what you're doing that students need to know how to manipulate content in something other than English and it's not a language skill that's the tool it's the end result and then the gentlemen you were saying about teaching actually teaching engineering in Chinese I'm sorry in the United States I think that may be an example but getting students to the point where they're operational in these other languages also getting yourselves recognized as not as noun and verb teachers but as historians of the German Baroque era or French art historians who teach in French departments and then tell the administration that if you have somebody teaching French art history who doesn't know French your university is fraudulent we need people who can do research in these fields in languages other than English and you guys got a real big fight in front of you because the administration as soon as you say German as soon as you say French they think nouns and verbs you got to find ways to change that I saw a hand up here this may be a lot of comments sorry so when I got my Ph.D. you had to have two languages in it first thing on our mind right we don't require languages of our doctoral students at universities University of Texas at San Antonio we need to get rid of a language requirement well if you get rid of it at the university you get rid of it in high school I mean there's no more direct way to influence language foreign language learning and I know we're talking about nouns and verbs but we can have that too then saying you don't have to take it I think at Ivy League schools it's still a good thing to do but I don't think it's I heard the president I think it was EVL saying we expect people to have three years of foreign language but other than maybe a few select schools that I know of maybe in Arizona you don't need to have foreign language so how can we expect there to be the kind of interest in even the broader issue of culture if we don't even have people studying any foreign language the problem sir the problem is not with the foreign languages the problem is with the English language departments that believe that everything can be said in English and everything can be researched in English and the fact that art history or some topic could be discovered in the French language and say things that the English colleagues would not know because the English language doesn't have access to that knowledge is anathema to English departments that teach foreign literatures in English I just want to mention that I think multilingualism in the US university systems is becoming the providence of the elite I'm at the University of New York I'm a product of the California State University System and University of California System and I think in both the CSU and we just fought this fight in CUNY exactly what was mentioned is happening we fought a tremendous fight for foreign language some kind of requirement to be preserved under a big curriculum reform and we were for the large part unsuccessful it will be preserved piecemeal within the CUNY system and it's been brought up by my colleagues that this is frankly racist because of the population of our our student population will be deprived of that now of course we have a huge population of immigrant language speakers but they're at the heritage language level and they're being lost by third generation and so sure at the Ivy Leagues there's still language requirements but it's definitely I would echo Professor Jacinto it's definitely in the public university system on the way down and we keep fighting we had members of the MLA write these eloquent letters to the chancellor of the CUNY system mostly to no avail once again thank you everybody for attending our next event is 7 o'clock tonight at Casa Vicente and we are hopeful that everything that we didn't get to talk about today we talked about on Saturday and Sunday thank you goodnight