 Fynyddwch, a'r amlwg, i'n mynd i bwyntio'r gorllewin y hynny'n teimlo. Mae'r ystod gan ystyried i'r yrhwyro. Mae'r amlwg am ysgrifennu grants, ac hefyd wedi gyfyrdd ar gyfer rhesud i'r rhesud. Rwy'n gwybod rydyn ni'n bwysig i'r ffwrdd. Rydyn ni'n bwysig i'n bwysig i gweld rhyw o'r perthyn nhw'n gydag eich hynny'n bwysig i'r ffodol. Ond ydych chi'n gael i'ch gael i'r ymddiad y pwynt y pwynt yw Paul os i'r gweithio cyflym yn yw hwnnw, ac mae hynny'n bethau mae'r ysgolwch yn ymddangos, ond mae'n sellid o'r sellid. Y sellid o'r sellid o'r sellid o'r sellid o'r sellid o'r sellid o'r profesor those who have been named and supported by the school. A celebration of their fields of interest, and also, in many ways, a personal celebration of them and their work. So I'm delighted to see many friends of Ann Powell's, here in the audience. Not only from across the university here, but from across the world. So welcome to you all. Welcome to SOAS. ddweud i chi i'n ddweud ar y ddiwyddiad. Fy nesaf, mae'n gweithio'r ddweud i'r ddweud i chi, y profesor Ites Sachdev, sy'n ddweud i chi i'r ddweud an-Powls. Ites was bwrdd a fydd yn Ceniadu. Fydd yn dweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r Unedigol i'r Cyngorol Ieddon yng Nghymru i'w ddweud i'r ddweud i'r Cyngorol Ieddon yng Nghymru i'w ddweud i'r Unedigol. Fydd yn ddweud i'r Lengwistu Gweithreit, i'r Unedigol Lundanaeth, i'r ddweud i'r Ddweud i'r Cyngorol Ieddon, i'r Lengwistu Gweithreit a'r Ddweud. Fydd yn dweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r profesor i'r ddweud i'r unigol i'r ddweud i'r Soas, ac yn twerwbeth y ddiweddol o'r centau yw Rhyngethaf yw Llywodraeth a Oeddechon Cymaeth sydd wedi gweld gwiriaeth fyddaod, yw'r pwysig. Mae'n ceisio trafodd yn y President yma, Caerdydd Cynedigol, ac mae'r President yw pwysig ar gyfer lans a'r Cyfryd Cynedigol. Mae yw cyfryd yn cyfryd a llangwyd ac yr unrhyw mewn fitfyniad leadering research with various ethnolinguistic groups, including those in Bolivia, Canada, France, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunesia and the UK. He is also the recipient of various national and international awards for his research, including the Prix du Caverca, C. Graham's International Fellowship a Llanguage and Social Psychology Robert Gardner Award for his research in inter-ethnic relations and language. I should also introduce to you another guest this evening, the person who will, at the end of this evening's lecture, offer the formal vote of thanks. He is Professor Tony Liddicott, Professor in Applied Linguistics of the School of Communication International Studies and Languages at the University of South Australia. Professor Tony Liddicott is also the President of the Australian Applied Linguistics Association and has been President of the Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers. Professor Liddicott obtained his PhD from the University of Melbourne in French for a thesis later published by Muthon de Greta as a grammar of the northern French of the Channel Islands, the dialects of Jersey and Sark. His research interests include language issues in education, conversation analysis, and language policy and planning. In recent years, his research is particularly focused on ways of improving the teaching of culture as a part of language teaching, and his work has contributed to the development of intercultural language teaching methodology, an issue which, of course, is very much at the heart of language work and language teaching at Siras. And he has published many books and many papers in this area. And you will hear from Tony at the conclusion of Anne Powell's lecture. Just before I conclude and go and sit down and invite Itesh to come up to the podium, and I have to just ask you please, as a matter of housekeeping, to make sure that you have either turned off or muted your mobile telephones. And I also need to point out to you that should the fire alarm sound, there are two exits on each side of the lecture theatre if you can't see them. So, having completed my housekeeping matters, can I invite Itesh to the stage? Thank you, Graham. It sounded like an airplane announcement that I heard on the plane yesterday. And I think maybe I should continue, you know. Apparently I'm wearing Canadian colours bright and I did take Air Canada yesterday. And I think when I began my journey yesterday from Toronto to London, the person came on and said, we thank you for choosing Air Canada. We know that you had a choice to be elsewhere, but it's good that you're here with us. So I say the same to you, welcome. Okay, my job today is to introduce Anne Powell's to you. So I'm just going to try and get this going, set up slideshow from current slide. That's it. Okay. Now, Anne and I have only recently become colleagues at SOAS, although when you look at some of our work and at least I can think of a long time back, I remember a long time back and we were talking about this recently. We discovered that we were looking at either other research at the same time many years ago, even though we'd never met and we only met officially three years ago, four years ago at SOAS. I would say that Anne became familiar with my work in language attitudes at about the same time that I was doing some experimental work on how to persuade people to use non-sexist language and was doing some really wonderful pioneering work at the time. And I thought that some of my work would benefit a lot and it did. Thank you, Anne. Since then, I have followed some of our other work and I can say I'm really happy that our work is finally converged and we are now collaborating in the field of community languages both in the UK, Europe and elsewhere. Now, although our training has been quite different, Anne is in social linguistics in Australia, mine is in social psychology from Canada, we do share a very important topic of our research and that's the role of language and communication in multi-lingual settings. So what I want to do today is just very briefly tell you how I know her, well, I already told you how I know her, I met her here, give you a little bit of a background, her background in Belgium, tell you a little bit about our schooling and I'm doing this because I wanted to see that it's pretty amazing to see how languages are part of the air that she breeds. In fact, really we should be talking about multi-lingualism and she will be telling us a lot about that. I'll tell you a little bit about her doctoral work in Australia and then a few words about her academic career and a few words about her research. Okay, let's start with her background. She was born in Belgium, a German-speaking mother, a Dutch-speaking father. You can already start seeing the bilingualism, multi-lingualism coming through. Of course, Belgium is not an easy place if you're living there, particularly when it comes to issues with language. I think it's the only country in Europe at the moment without a government. I'll close the language and it is doing quite well, by the way. I hope there are no politicians in the room or maybe there should be. Okay, her schooling, her professional work has always had a very personal edge to it. She grew up in post-war Belgium. She soon became aware of the sort of the national politicized language conflict in Belgium at the time. In the 60s, there were some incredible major upheavals in Belgium. There were language riots triggered by the linguistically two nations, the rivalries between the French-speaking and the Dutch-speaking, Flemish-speaking Belgians. Furthermore, in those times in the 60s, feelings towards German speakers in the 60s were also pretty mixed, basically because the Belgians identified German as the language of the oppressor during the first and second world wars. And soon realized that language was much more than a mere tool of communication. In fact, in her youth, it was really a loaded weapon, if you like, in her environment. This early realization of the social and political complexities of language use inspired her to dedicate, to examine the complexities of language use and she decided to spend significant amounts of her time to studying languages both in school as well as university. And in school, you can see the languages that she learned, Latin, ancient Greek, French, German, English at university. She read German philology, which basically involved an in-depth literary and linguistic study of German, Dutch and English, and even some Phrygian and Afrikaans thrown in for good measure. Now inspired by the language contacts and particularly the lecturers that visited her and her institution then, there was a visiting German American scholar who persuaded Anne to explore this area of linguistics further and particularly to go overseas. And being a person who wanted to minimize risk, she's an diverse risk taker, she applied for a range of scholarships all over the place and given her record, one of the scholarships she got was from a leading Ivy League university, but it was a chance encounter with a very special person, the late Michael Klein, who from Monash University in Australia, that sealed her fate. In 1979, she took up the scholarship to study Dutch English language contact in Melbourne in Australia, completed her MRes in 1980 and then enrolled for a PhD in 81, which she completed in two years. Her PhD was in the impact of dialect on language maintenance patterns in the Dutch and German communities. She then began her career in academics in Australia. To begin with, between 83 and 89, she was a lecturer in German linguistics at Monash University. And then, what I should say is that in 1989, she became the director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Communication and Community Languages. The Centre was the outcome of a successful grant application to the Australian Department of Education and focused on research and training to assist those working in the health and legal professions to deal with their multilingual clientele. During this time, she produced a book on cross-cultural issues to assist those who are working in medical encounters, to assist those who are working in medical encounters. To this day, it continues to be used in the Australian medical training courses. In 1992, Anne had a central involvement in the establishment of the National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia, which was basically set up to support research on language matters as well as to implement the Australian national language policy. She became director of the associate or the affiliated centre on language and society. During this time, she not only taught and researched in the field of multilingualism, but she started working with schools, preschools, parents and community groups on issues of bilingualism, bilingual immersion and the teaching of those community languages. Anne has always been keen to ensure that the results of research reach the communities and others who could benefit from this knowledge. Meanwhile, her research on language and gender, which is the way I met her, more specifically the linguistic portrayal of men and women was attracting the attention of the Australian government, which commissioned her to sensitise the Australian civil service to gender bias language by producing guidelines for gender inclusive and racially fair language. This exercise revealed the more controversial aspects of linguistic advocacy. Whereas her advocacy work on community languages and bilingualism was received warmly by the communities, very positively by parents, community workers, thanked her for her insights, her gender work tended to attract less positive reactions. In fact, Anne received anonymous death threats and abusive letters, accusing her of having butchered and emasculated the English language for advocating the use of non-sexist language. In 1995, she moved to the University of New England as a foundation chair in linguistics, where she continued her work on multilingualism, gender and language learning. Soon after them, she became head of linguistics department and then head of school, and then she was head-hunted, I think that sounded good, to take up the deanship of arts and become the first professor of languages, first professor of languages of linguistics at the University of Oolongong. That was in 1998. After then, in 2001, she moved to the University of Western Australia, where she was dean of arts, humanities and social sciences, and also for her academic affiliation, she was professor of linguistics. After this, she was recruited to set up a new school, the College of Arts and Law, at the University of Birmingham, and then we enticed her here, where she became last year the dean of our faculty of languages and cultures and the professor of social linguistics. I should just say a few more words about her research. I will not give you a full list as it's very long, very extensive, quite innovative, and with a variety of very important international collaborations. Her research area is language and communication with very, very specific attention to language, gender and culture, language and migration, language and society, multilingualism and language learning, and of course language policy. During the past 25 years, she has initiated, facilitated and participated in numerous research collaborations and developed a variety of research partnerships across many national and international contexts. You can see a wide number of them spanning the whole globe. In terms of her publication record, there are a lot of publications, many books, a large number of refugee articles. She's got enormous number of competitive research grants being much needed money, research consultancies and all kinds of commission research projects, and this could be your opportunity to go on the SOAS website and look them up. Her current projects, which I don't know how much she's going to talk about, but we'll see in a minute, are these two looking at the Australian diaspora, an interesting diaspora for those of you who live in parts of London where it exists, and also in the higher education context she's looking at languages in the universities of the English speaking world. To give you a little flavour before I hand you over to her, just to give you an idea of the titles of her book so you get an idea. Here's one, Boys in Foreign Language Learning, Maintaining Minority Languages in Transnational Context, Australia and Europe, Language and Communication, Diversity and Change. This is just a selection of women changing language, cross-cultural communication in health, and the one I think that's lost on this slide is non-discriminatory language. Now these titles give you a good idea of the kind of work that Anne has been doing over the last many years. Before I invite Professor Anne Powles to speak to you, let me say that her arrival at SOAS has delighted many of us. I have already talked about her research, her academic and managerial contributions in higher education. These have been very outstanding. I should also add that Anne couples her academic success and responsibilities with some of the most wonderful personal qualities of generosity, humility and pragmatism. As a member of her faculty, I am very appreciative of this and I think so many of my colleagues. Thank you, Anne. And with those words, let me now invite Professor Anne Powles, Professor of Social Linguistics at SOAS, to come to the podium to give her inaugural lecture. I'll do quite a few thank yous after this, but I'll start with a few small comments. It is with great delight, yet with some trepidation that I stand before you to deliver my inaugural lecture. Of course, one normally expects some nervousness before delivering a public speech. It actually gets the necessary adrenaline flowing and I'm certainly not immune to that. However, my trepidation is more linked to the fact that I've had several attempts unsuccessful at inaugural lectures before and therefore I hope that there is no last-minute cancellation notice, a fire drill or indeed a real other emergency. Let me briefly explain. As Itesh pointed out in his introduction, I became Professor of Linguistics in 1995 when I was appointed to the Foundation Chair in Linguistics at the University of New England in Australia. A few months after taking up the chair, I was contacted by the event management team to plan for my inaugural. To my surprise, actually consternation, I was told that the university had a bit of catching up to do as the inaugural lectures had been suspended for a while. When I asked when I could expect to deliver mine, I was told that there was just a few others before me in the queue and if everything went well, I could expect to be the first one to herald in the new millennium. It was 1995. By that time, I had moved to the University of Western Australia as both Professor of Linguistics and Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Unfortunately, the university had just decided to abolish the practice of inaugurals, so no luck there. To make matters worse, the year I left the university to take up the position at the University of Birmingham, the university decided to reintroduce the practice. So you do understand that I was therefore delighted to hear that SOAS did have the practice of inaugural lectures, but at the same time anxious that SOAS would not change this practice before I had my go. Meanwhile, I have learned that notions of time are somewhat different at SOAS, so there was little doubt of a change, a massive change before I would give my inaugural lectures. Also, before I commence my lecture, I would like to thank very much Itesh, as well as Graham of Professor Sachdev and Professor Furness, for their very kind words introducing me. I'm also very grateful to Professor Tony Liddicoat, who is a long-term friend and colleague who is on sabbatical in Europe from the University of Australia. Tony and I have shared a dedication to languages, language learning and multilingualism for many, many years, and we've had the pleasure of working together to shape, or at least to assist to shape the Australian policies around languages and language learning from preschool right through to university. We have jointly relished the successes and supported each other, and that was more often when we were disappointed at policy directions that seemed to turn the clock back decades and decades. Tony, thank you very much for your friendship and for your collegiality and for your willingness to undertake the vote of thanks. My most sincere thanks, however, go to my family and especially my partner, who has been there for me not only in the stereotypical background way, but also in the front row and on the stage, sharing with me ideas, collaborating on projects and keeping me to deadlines. Thank you very much. So let me go to my lecture. I've chosen to talk about a topic with which I have engaged for the past 30 years in both a professional as well as a personal capacity. I've also chosen a topic which I believe is quite accessible for people not specialised in linguistics or sociolinguistics for that matter. Since my early years, I've been fascinated by languages, in particularly the relationship between a system of symbols and the speakers and communities that use, abuse and manipulate it as part of human behaviour. As Itish mentioned in his introduction, my growing up in Belgium at the height of what was called the language wars and being at the same time a speaker of a then tainted language, German, has undoubtedly contributed towards my focus on language and linguistic matters, especially in sociocultural contexts. At university I decided to go beyond the learning of languages and in specialised in sociolinguistics with specific attention to sociocultural aspects of language and communication, especially in multilingual settings. My work focuses on the interaction between language and society, exploring how language and communicative behaviour shapes and is shaped by our environment, physical as well as human. Given that my research is often centred around linguistic minorities and questions of language and power, I've always felt a responsibility to sharing the results of my research beyond the boundaries of academia. I therefore unashamantly engage in linguistic advocacy work and call myself a linguistic activist. My talk today brings together insights of my research, my professional and personal experiences over the past 30 years in relation to the management of multilingualism and the learning of languages. I've structured my talk around the following headlines. So I'll say first of all a few things about language and globalisation, also about how to manage multilingualism and then moving to combining both my, let's say, administrative work as a dean with that of a researcher on languages, looking at learning languages in this hyperlingual reality with specific focus on the higher education context. Speaking in front of an old audience here at SOAS, it is almost a perfluous to state or observe that multilingual societies are the norm rather than the exception around the world. Of course, the multilingual nature of a society in national country may not be officially recognised, but it is hard to find societies that are truly monolingual in their makeup. Yet, despite its exceptional status, monolingualism has certainly gained pole position, at least since the Romantic Era, as a preferred linguistic condition to achieve linguistic harmony, unification and indeed endorse state and nationhood. In my view, the strength of this Romantic notion is still considerable today in many modern nations and continues to influence both the management of multilingualism and the provision as well as the conceptualisation of language learning, as I will try to demonstrate in this lecture. However, let us return to multilingualism and linguistic diversity. Neither are static phenomena and over time there have been considerable transformations, mutations and alterations in multilingual makeup of societies around the world. The growing number of languages that end up on the endangered list is one of the more dramatic permutations that warrants serious investigations. As colleagues will know, SOAS is at the forefront of this research, being the home of the Hans Rausen Endangered Languages programme. Another prominent transformation is linked to the ever-increasing mobility and movement, real as well as virtual, across societies, communities and countries in the world. Whether voluntary or forced, legal or illegal, long-term or short-term, people are moving much more and more regularly across much greater distances than their ancestors even a mere one or two generations ago. Consequently, more people have first-hand experience of multilingualism and indeed of pluralism. I should say that having done most of my work in Australia, we use these two terms as synonyms, but in the European context, the latter term, pluralingualism, refers to someone who can use several languages, whereas the former, multilingualism, is used to describe societies in which a variety of languages are used. This is particularly the case in large urban environments around the world where the presence of speakers of hundreds of languages is not unusual. In fact, a recent article in The Economist claimed that New York City had nearly as many languages that is 800 as Papry Nugini, the country often regarded as home to the most languages, around about 830. London is reputedly home to around 230 languages. Despite a range of measures often linked to national security to curb wide-scale transnational movement, there is no indication that this hyper-mobility is likely to hold soon. Hence, hyper-diversity of languages, or to potentially coin a new term, hyper-lingualism is going to be characteristic of many environments and areas around the world for a long period. Although we cannot equate multilingual societies with multilingual individuals, as there is no one-to-one relationship between the multilingual character of a society and the linguistic abilities of its members, especially in the case of so-called territorial biomilitial-lingual societies, my birth country being a prime example of that one, multilingual societies do accommodate a high number of bi- and plurilinguals. In some multilingual societies like India or Congo, going about one's daily business requires a repertoire of various languages and varieties, many of which are required rather than learned. On the overhead, I have quoted an example from a standard introductory textbook in sociolinguistics to illustrate the varied linguistic repertoire of an individual living in a multilingual society. Now, given the age of the textbook, you'll notice the outdated geographical names. As it is fairly clear, I won't actually read it up, but give you some time to read it. Increasingly, we see similar multilingual interactions and repertoires in communities and countries whose multilingualism has become more pronounced or more visible in more recent times due to large-scale transnational movement linked to various forms of migration resettlement. For example, many countries in Europe which had been sourced countries for migration to the new world, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand have themselves become recipient countries often from former colonies, of course the UK, Netherlands and France and other typical examples, but also resulting from changes in visa regulations for example across the European Union, employment opportunities and humanitarian causes. My next example is taken from a recent book by Jan Blomart on the Sociolinguistics of Globalisation. Blomart, a fellow Belgian living in Antwerp, describes what I call the hyperlingualism of his neighbourhood in which he lives. I'm quoting this as a poignant example of new forms of multilingualism and pluralism found in cities and communities around Europe. The repertoires of new migrants often appear truncated, highly specific bits of language and literacy varieties combined in a repertoire that reflects their fragmented and highly diverse life trajectories. Thus, recent West African, for example Nigerian immigrants in Belgium may combine one or more African languages with West African indigenous English, which will be used with some interlocutors in the neighbourhood and will also be the medium of communication during weekly worship sessions in a new evangelical church in the neighbourhood. English, however, is not part of the repertoire of most other immigrants in the neighbourhood. Most of the shops, for instance, are owned by Turkish and Moroccan people who often use vernacular forms of German or French as emergency lingua francas. So, when a Nigerian woman goes to buy bread in a Turkish-owned bakery, the code for conducting this transaction will, for both, be in a clearly non-native and very limited variety of local vernacular Dutch, mixed with some English or German words. At home, the Nigerian family will have access to television and the choice will go to English medium channels with an occasional foray often initiated by the children into Dutch medium children's programme. There will be a very low level of consumption of local printed media. At the same time, telephone contact in native languages will be maintained with people back home and fellow migrants now living in Brussels, London and Paris. Occasionally, there will be mutual visits during which the African region language might be the medium of communication amongst the adults, while the children refer to vernacular forms of English to interact with each other. There, meaning the children's exposure to education environments in which different languages are the meaning of instruction, for example, Dutch or French, constraints their use of any other language. Those of you who live in or around London or any other major city in Europe may recognise this scenario as not that different from the now regular linguistic landscape, which, let's call it, langscape of many urban environments. As a linguist, you sort of have to try and make up a few words here and there. I'm not unique in that. These langscapes are no longer relegated to the distant and exotic lands or communities. My final example highlights another linguistic development, which can be linked to the heightened mobility or hypermobility, that of the multilingual family. This refers to a family whose members have been geographically dispersed for a period of time and, as a consequence, have acquired or learned various languages. In some cases, the dispersion has left them without a common language. Therefore, I need to communicate across languages, bilingualy, multilingualy, or find a lingua franca. In the interest of time, I won't provide a commentary to the slides. There are only two, as I think they speak for themselves. However, a little bit of information. This is actually a case study that was told by one of my former students to me just before I left to come and work in Britain. I'm trying at the moment to use it to look at how such families, if they're interested in maintaining their language, what is it that they want to maintain and how best to do that. Because in most cases, language maintenance efforts have had a certain level of, let's say, stability, so that a group moves to a particular country, sets up structures to basically maintain their language. In this case, as you will see, these people, fairly closely related, are moving fairly constantly. What you see on this slide is basically, I will talk about Twang and Dong. Obviously, they are pseudonyms. Also, my sincere apologies for not pronouncing the Vietnamese names correctly. You will see that there are Swedish and French names. Again, this is at the request of the particular people who wanted to have their name reflected in the language area in which they grew up. We're basically looking at Twang and Dong and that kind of family. As you can see, they've moved quite a bit, but just as a background to it. The case study outlines the story of two Vietnamese brothers who fled Vietnam in the 1970s. Twang was a chemistry lecturer visiting Australia at the time, and he obtained refugee status in Australia, but failed to bring over his wife and two young sons. His wife died of natural causes in Vietnam, and his two young children were therefore looked after by his brother. Truc and his wife Mai wanted to go to Australia, so they fled Vietnam, hoping to reunite with Twang in Australia, but they ended up in France. For reasons unbeknown to me, Twang's sons were unable to relocate to Australia and stayed in France with their uncle and aunt. There are subsequent movements you can see on the overhead, and then in 2006, Twang's two sons were reunited with their father in Australia, and they now live in Australia. The next slide shows the linguistic resources of this multilingual family group. I'm not going to detail how much it is, but as you can see, they bring together quite a number of different languages. Of course, the scenario outlined on these two slides is not new. This type of multilingualism is quite typical of some well-established diasporic communities. However, I contend that the current conditions have led to a sharp increase in such families across the socio-economic spectrum, so not only the top or the bottom, but the whole range. In fact, as a recent conference in Paris, I met an academic colleague from Denmark, whose immediate family, meaning his partner and children, whose immediate family was spread over three linguistic zones. His partner commutes from Denmark to London on a twice-weekly basis. He works in Germany, and their children live with their Dutch grandparents in the northern part of the Netherlands during the week. All these languages have now become so much part of the family interaction that they are finding it difficult to decide which language is their native language. I'm sure that if I were to ask you if you knew such multilingual families, you'd be able to give me some examples, perhaps even that of your own family. I've provided these examples to give you a taste of the multilingual realities that are part and parcel of our societies, communities, and indeed, for many of us, part of our daily lives. Indeed, our environment is increasingly multilingual, if not hyperlingual. Many of our fellow citizens speak and use variety of languages in their interactions. Furthermore, the constellation of languages that make up this multilingual palette is a very dynamic one. New languages come on the scene with others shading in the background to re-emerge and others disappearing altogether. So let me move briefly to the area of managing multilingualism. Multilingual realities, especially those described before, have always been a challenge to countries or perhaps better states in terms of management. Questions that arise in the context of linguistic management of multilingual societies and multilingual situations include, should there be a common language that is given official status as a national language? Should each language that is present in a particular area be given the same status? Is there a different rule for so-called indigenous languages based on use solace versus immigrant languages? Or should there be educational provision for all languages and, if so, for whom and by whom? Linguistic management, the management of multilingual situations, belongs to the realm of language policy and planning, which by its very nature is a highly politicised field and subjected to ideologies and ideological debates around language and statehood, around human rights and indeed linguistic rights. Although official actions and statements on the management of multilingualism are mainly in the hand of the political forces broadly speaking, linguists as well as scholars from other fields, just to name a few political scientists, economists, education, sociology, psychology, contribute their expertise to providing models and frameworks for the management of language problems and complex linguistic language situations. As well as to undertake critical analyses of language policy decisions, exposing often implicit ideologies in them. Of course, ethno-linguistic communities and groups within a state will also be able to influence language policy, either through political representation or various forms of activism. The vastness and complexities of the management of multilingual realities prohibit me from engaging comprehensively with a mass of questions and issues linked to it. In my talk today, I will restrict myself to one specific aspect of this management, the learning of languages in this hyperlingual environment. I've chosen to focus on the higher education context to examine this question for a variety of reasons. My own sphere of operation over the past 30 years has been the university in a number of countries, mainly Australia and now more recently the United Kingdom, but also Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria. My work linked to languages has often focused on higher education. Secondly, higher education institutions and I don't mean simply universities, but institutes of advanced education, training colleges, et cetera, are usually the ones responsible for the training of language teachers. Those developments undertaken at this level will have usually an impact on languages elsewhere in the educational cycle. Thirdly, staff and students at higher education institutions, especially universities, are often part of the multilingual realities which I've just described. Academics and students continue to be a group that often traverses a range of linguistic zones throughout their careers and studies. This makes universities microcosms of this new reality. My attention is primarily directed at the impact of this new multilingual reality on the teaching and learning of languages in higher education. As you can see on the overhead, this translates into a number of questions, but I will deal mainly with the two on the overhead. Is the linguistic diversity of a community reflected in the language offerings of higher education? Secondly, are language learning pedagogies, practices and indeed models for teaching reflective of the linguistic profiles of the learners? In the next two slides, I present two tables. One in relation to Australian higher education which draws upon my own work, and one relating to community languages in higher education in England, drawing upon the extensive report written by Itis Sajdeff and his colleagues that presents data on the link between language diversity in the community at large and the provision of languages in higher education. I'm not going to spend much time on this overhead, but I just want to give you the various categories there so you can read them whilst I speak. On the one hand you have the languages that the 20 top languages spoken by Australian home students or domestic students, so these are not international students, but these are students that are Australian-born or at least Australian citizens and who indicate that they speak a language other than English. As you can see, Cantonese has the most speakers. The ranking refers to the community languages ranking in the society in Australia. The largest group of community language speakers are the Italians, that's why it's got a one. The next area is the universities in which at least some form of provision is made. This does not mean degree programmes per se, but it means actually that at some stage some language, some course is given. The final one of not such major interest to the current context is in fact which states of Australia offer some programmes. This is based on slightly older data, so in the meantime mostly more languages have disappeared rather than appeared. The next one is the one for community languages in England. Just to say that in terms of Australia, as you can see, there were quite a number of languages spoken by a substantial number of Australian home students. In fact, 18% of Australian home students use the community language other than English at home and that covers about 120 languages, yet the provision at higher education is still relatively small. In terms of Britain or in terms of England, I would say it reveals a fairly similar picture. What you have here is the top 12 community languages and it compares their provision with three foreign languages studied in the UK, French, German and Spanish. Of course the latter are also used as community languages, but certainly are much more studied as foreign languages. As you can see, it is a fairly similar situation. The report particularly notes that there are no degree courses in the four most widely used community languages in Urdu, Cantonese, Punjabi and Bengali, but then in earlier on it did say although SOAS will offer a degree course in Bengali from autumn 2008. More recently I've started gathering data from universities in continental Europe, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Sweden on this matter. Given the amount of inter-European students and staff mobility, it is worthwhile to see how our other European countries deal with this phenomenon. In the interest of time, I won't present the detail figures for each country, but will give you a taste of my findings to date. My impression from the initial data is that the situation there is the same if not worse than in Australia or in the United Kingdom. An additional complication in many European countries is a lack of census type statistics on languages. In fact in Belgium it is prohibited to collect any information on linguistic backgrounds for fear that one group might win over another. As Itesh pointed out, we still haven't got a government. The country runs probably better, but anyway. In Sweden, Albanian, Arabic, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, English, Farsi, Finnish, Kurdish, Polish and Spanish are the main languages other than Swedish that make up the linguistic landscape. Although there are actually another 113 languages recorded. English and Spanish are very well-cated for in higher education, although not as community languages. In fact only one language is and that is Finnish. Some of the other languages which I've mentioned are available for study at mainly Uppsala or Stockholm universities, but all as foreign languages. The situation in German universities is very similar to that found in Sweden. Although German to some extent is more linguistically diverse than Sweden, as it accommodates a greater number of so-called guest workers, especially from Turkey, Italy, Greece, Northern Africa and also more recently refugees from Eastern Europe and increasingly Asia, the provision of languages at universities is not linked to the multilingual reality. The largest language group besides German speakers in Germany is Turkish and only 10 out of 104 comprehensive universities offer a Turkish studies programme. However, the programmes are not geared towards language acquisition, let alone students who have previous knowledge of the language. In countries with a so-called substantial colonial past, such as the Netherlands and France, there are a few institutions that cover the study of a very large range of former colonial languages. For example, in the Netherlands, Leiden, and I'll just name one in France, in Alcor in Paris. Although a substantive number of speakers of these languages have settled in the respective countries and actually are studying at universities, these institutions have not changed their provision nor their mission in terms of accommodating this focus. What we do see in a range of countries is an expansion of what Britain calls institutional wide language programmes which are offered in language centres or institutes affiliated or incorporated in universities. Here we may find a greater reflection of multilingual realities in various countries, although often the increased offering involves new and newer world languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Japanese. So, in summary, universities, despite being multilingual microcosms, have not accommodated their language offerings very much to reflect these new realities. Of course, the more political question would be should the linguistic reality of a community be reflected in the language programmes offered in higher education? This brings us back into the fascinating realm of language policy and to ideology-based arguments, whether or not to reply in the affirmative or negative. You may be disappointed, but I won't delve into this debate in this lecture. Not because I do not wish to reveal my position or display my advocacy, but because I wish to touch upon one more aspect of this theme formulated in my second question. However, before I leave you, before I move on, I leave you with two observations why, potentially, it should be reflected. Schools in a number of countries, especially in Australia, now offer final year exams so the equivalent of A levels in a large or much larger number of languages, many of which cannot be studied at university level, thus forcing students wishing to study the language to go elsewhere. Here I particularly talk about Australia, so if your language that you can study at A level is not available in Australia, you have usually quite a long trip before you can find somewhere. The other thing is I'll leave you to think a bit about that in terms of how on languages are or community languages suddenly appear when it comes to linguistic, sorry, security matters. Almost, so let's talk about the last question, language learning pedagogies and practices reflective of the linguistic profiles of the learners. Almost a year ago, I was asked to speak at a conference entitled Languages for the 21st Century, Training, Impact and Influence. The theme of the conference gave me the opportunity to reflect on the state of language learning in higher education beyond dealing with the crisis discourse that so often dominates discussions about language learning in Anglophone countries. On the overhead, you have an example from 2007 where the title of the equivalent of the Russell Group university's document was Languages in Crisis and as you can see, the word is a rescue plan for Australia. It gave me the opportunity to go beyond thinking about crisis and actually look to what extent university language teaching reflects or has accommodated to the hyperlingual and hypermobile reality we are living in. So let me talk briefly about the linguistic diversity amongst the student body. The profile of students undertaking any form of foreign or second language learning in university has become much more diverse than even a few decades ago. In part, this reflects the greater diversity among the student population per se, which is a consequent of the changing nature of higher education in many countries. Many universities engage in programme to widen access to higher education leading to a more diverse student population in terms of socio-economic background, class, race, ethnicity, language background and other profile indicators. The internationalisation agendas of universities encouraging students to study abroad together with a continued necessity and or desire of students from countries with less developed higher education systems to seek education abroad has had a considerable impact on the linguistic and cultural diversity of university campuses. Thus, in the 21st century, the linguistic profile of many learners of languages is characterised by diversity in terms of linguistic background, linguistic competencies, language learning context and experiences. In fact, the language student whose competence has been built primarily, if not solely, through language classes in school is becoming the exception rather than the norm. Whilst there is growing awareness and acknowledgement of this fact amongst language teaching professionals, including at universities, the prevalent models and modes for university language teaching and modes for university language learning have not yet come to groups with this fundamental change in learner profile. University language teaching, especially in the degree programme, continues to operate with an underlying monolingual learner profile. That means the learner is assumed to be monolingual with either no prior knowledge of the language to be studied in the case of Abinicio programmes or whose prior knowledge has been gained through school-based formal learning. Learners who bring a plethora of pluralingual backgrounds or other learning experiences to the university language classroom continue to present significant challenges to the university language learning structure. As a result, they often receive very mixed treatment in the classroom, ranging from being advised not to participate because of inappropriate language skills, either far too good or too vernacular, ignoring their bi or pluralingualism and previous language learning experiences, considering them a nuisance or even a threat, to providing separate instruction for them and welcoming them as additional language input for other students. Most pernicious, in my view, in this context, is the equivalent of a discourse of unfair advantage. In other words, students have acquired knowledge of the language in question outside the classroom, are seen as having an unfair advantage to those having not had such exposure. Whilst measures to neutralise, and I use that word here in euphemistically speaking, this unfair advantage, so whilst measures to neutralise this unfair advantage have become quite elaborate and very sophisticated compared to earlier times, and this is an example of earlier times, they nevertheless continue to construct prior knowledge as something that needs to be penalised. I have taken out the particular reference to the place. You can, of course, check client 2005 and then find it, but I thought I would read this to you. The board developed an official ways of discriminatory assessment in languages against students, who or whose parents spoke the language at home. Their identities were detected by introducing ad hoc questions, some deviants on students' home background in oral examinations, and this information was used to mark them down in the written examination. In addition, the English in translations into English was overrated to reduce the scores of students whose first language was not English, and particularly, orthographical and punctuation areas were penalised very seriously because they were considered typical of second generation bilinguals. On till about the 1970s. In my observations of language classes in Australia and the United Kingdom, as I said, I've noted that a small but growing body of language teaching professionals are aware of this change in learner profiles and wish to accommodate to these changing learning profiles, yet they are largely left to their own devices within a learning structure that continues to be based on the monolingual learner profile as described. Perhaps most unfortunate for a university context is that the impact on university language learning structures of significant advances in research on language learners, which, by the way, is usually generated in universities, is rather limited. Although students with a home background in minority community languages are perhaps most affected by this monolingual filter in current language learning provision, it is, of course, also affecting many other students who are bilingual who have had various other language learning experiences. In this context, however, it is interesting to note the following and our stress anecdotal evidence provided to me by both learners and teachers. The type of reaction does seem to be influenced by the language studied and the nature of the background knowledge. If the student's language is French and their background knowledge results from having lived in France or having a French parent, language departments tend to be willing to accommodate advanced knowledge better or at least praise it rather than in the case of a student whose parents were from Réunion who spoke French and Creole at home. As this is purely anecdotal evidence, no conclusion should be drawn about the impact of language and speaker on this accommodation process. Yes, it does hint at linguistic and experiential hierarchies not to speak of socio-economic ones. In that context, I sincerely hope that the recent statement by the education minister, Michael Gove, about the importance of languages is meant to be inclusive of all languages and all learners. My very final thing, this is truly the last thing I will touch upon before handing over to Professor Liddocode for the vote of thanks and a well-deserved liquid refreshment, I would like to end my lecture on a slightly provocative note, at least for some of you. It is provocative because some would say it would change the fundamental nature and purpose of language learning, acquiring native-like proficiency. In discussions with teachers and students of languages in Australia, New Zealand and many parts of Europe, we've often talked about the issue of the desired outcomes of language learning in relation to the language skills component. I do stick skills as opposed to studies. Although answers varied significantly in terms of depth, sophistication and technical know-how, in fact some colleagues can refer to established language competency skills, frameworks and benchmarks, whereas others simply say native, the overwhelming majority of answers made explicit or implicit reference to the native speaker. That is, reference was made to the desirable yet unattainable goal to acquire native-like proficiency in the language learned. Here I do not wish to comment on the rather difficult, if not impossible task of defining what constitutes native-like proficiency, but rather on the issue of using the native speaker as the ideal and normative reference point for linguistic proficiency. Most respondents saw the goal of acquiring linguistic proficiency in another language to enable interactions with native speakers as a primary, if not sole interlocutors for the learners. In other words, acquiring competency in another language is about learning to interact and communicate in whatever mode or way with native speakers of that language. That construction of native speakers echoed that described by Claire Crumsh, a major scholar in applied linguistics working out of Berkeley, quoting her, recent research on individual and societal multilingualism had profoundly put into question foreign language pedagogy inherited from 19th century nationalistic ideologies. The idea that languages are autonomous and self-contained symbolic systems, that native speakers speak standard national languages linked to easily identified national cultures and that any deviation of the standard is defective and has to be redressed. I raise this matter here not because of disputing the importance of striving for advanced levels of competence such as those a native speaker has, but because this focus on the native speaker as the prime target for foreign language communication takes little account of the growing reality of multilingual interactions as I've outlined in the first part in which interlocutors use their foreign or other language in a lingua franc away. Of course the prime example of this growing practice, at least in the western world is English, which has far more second and foreign language speakers than so-called native ones. Hence learners of English are more likely to use English in a context devoid of so-called native speakers than to communicate with a latter. This has led to a questioning of the concept of native speaker in English and to proposed changes in language pedagogy. I believe the time has come to examine this development in the context of other languages. Of course this will affect some languages more than others. For example languages such as Spanish, Chinese, Swahili, Arabic, Russian to name but a few may be more likely to be used in a lingua franc away than languages like Dutch, Czech or Igbo. There is plenty of evidence in today's world that the romantic notion of one language, one nation is less and less applicable to language and linguistic practice around the world. Yet mainstream language pedagogy, at least in many university settings, is still implicitly, if not explicitly, couched in this romantic framework. In true academic style, which is probably befitting an inaugural lecture, I have raised questions which led to more questions. And my answers or responses have also been in form of questions. However, the questions that I've raised are so many other questions which occupy our attention scholarly or not, require collaborative attention to find solution and to affect changes. So I thank you wholeheartedly for listening and hope that the lecture will inspire you or reflect or act as you see fit or indeed to formulate your own response to the title of my talk, The Politics of Multilingualism and Language Learning, Who Benefits. Thank you. This is my first experience of a British inaugural lecture and as a discourse analyst, I've discovered that one of the most frequent speech acts is the Speech Act of thanking. In fact, I've already been thanked for the thanks that I'm about to give. We've just listened to a presentation that has spanned a broad range of topics. It's presented us with some key issues, I think, that face all language teaching in all parts of the world, not just in the English-speaking world which was the main focus of Anne's presentation. This presentation was actually very typical of Anne's work. I've known Anne for a long time since we first met in the early 1990s as we worked for the National Languages Institute of Australia. At that time, I was just beginning my academic career and I was struck by Anne's passion for and commitment to multilingualism in what was and what remains a very monolingual environment. Anne has always been someone who's challenged what our colleague Michael Klein has called the monolingual mindset, the idea that monolingualism is somehow the norm by which our world is judged, and she's done this for us again tonight. And Anne has done this regardless of the role she's had in academia. She is quite rare among deans as managers of the sorts of areas that teach language in actually being supportive of language and in fact her work as a dean in Australia actually led to some expansion of the teaching of language, in fact to her and to the work of her colleague Joe Winter we actually owe at my own university the introduction of the teaching of Arabic. If you'd met any other deans in Australia responsible for languages you'd be overwhelmed at how unusual such support and such commitment actually is. You here at SOAS are actually very fortunate to have a dean who is fundamentally committed to the teaching and learning of languages. Anne's presentation was thought provoking and she engaged us in a number of quite deep issues I think without many of us really realising where she was leading us. One of the things she talked about was the impact of the romantic idea of one nation, one language, the unification of language and national identity. This is actually something that for me as an Australian returning for England for only the second time in my life has been brought home to me a lot. I come from a country of immigrants but we tend to think of immigration as something relatively recent. My immigrant story isn't recent my entire family have been in the country for more than 150 years. When they left home that ideal of one nation, one language was being strongly articulated through the romantic movement as Anne has discussed. If you think of the immigration experience of my family to leave family and friends to go to the other side of the world in a journey that took months never to see your family again never for many of my family to have any contact with them again because a number of my ancestors were actually illiterate there were no telephones or anything like that. For one of my great-great-grandparents to have left a minority language community in the Netherlands the Friesian community to go to a country where he would never have again met a Friesian speaker you can understand how the sorts of immigration experiences of those times meshed with the idea of one nation and one language and how people assimilated quite readily to those sorts of ideas going to a new country such as Australia. If we look at what Anne has just introduced us to in her anecdotes tonight we can see that that world the world of my immigrant ancestors is not the world of the contemporary migrant a contemporary migrant can have regular contact with her home through visits but through technologies and so on language is no longer the choice of which language language is in these days much more possible in forms of multilingualism and quite complex forms of multilingualism and I want to thank Anne for sharing that insight with us tonight for me it was one of the most powerful things that came out of this presentation. She also spoke about another issue and underlined the importance of it the idea of the unfair advantage the unfair advantage is in Australia and I know in other parts of the world a very strong discourse it's a strong discourse that actually limits the possibilities of language learning it limits it by assuming that language education is for the mainstream it's for the monolingual monocultural mainstream group to move out perhaps a little from their monolingualism and monoculturalism the reality of the needs of language learning are actually such that that is not the only model we should have and not even the dominant model we should be considering as Anne has reminded us we don't think of the English native speaker sitting in a class of international students as being unfairly advantaged similarly we should not think of someone who speaks a language at home or because of the various experiences of their lives as having an unfair advantage we all have languages we are all differently abled in different languages in different contexts and our education systems need to adapt to recognise that as the reality of language learning and the human life as Anne has indicated to us finally she introduced the idea that the monolingual native speaker is not the model for language learning she reminded us that language learners are to use Claire Crampshire's term an academic that Anne has already cited intercultural speakers that is when one learns another language and to become a native speaker one learns to become something quite different a person with multiple languages and multiple cultures and Claire Crampshire reminds us that this perspective the intercultural speaker is a privilege it's not the negative of the non-native speaker the intercultural speaker allows us to see things from multiple perspectives from different perspectives from inside and from outside what we've just heard tonight I think is part of that privilege and lived experience of multilingualism personal and professional has allowed her to develop new perspectives on the situations that confront people in policy in practice every day and I'd like you to join me in thanking her for bringing these issues to attention with such further and such commitment I have one more thank you to make and that's a thank you to all of you who came along this evening an inaugural lecture is a wonderful opportunity for an academic to present ideas that have been a passion of theirs to a new audience thank you for coming along thank you for so many of you coming along and thank you for your time and commitment and support coming here we'll end now and I'll remind you that there is a reception upstairs to continue the celebration of Anne's work and that you're all welcome thank you