 And, of course, I have the pleasure of introducing Professor Deborah Cameron, and I will keep this short so we can get to Professor Deborah Cameron. In August 1986, I packed my clothes that were strewn across my room in my Long Island, New York home and got into a car with my parents. I was about to begin my studies at a small liberal arts university in the Northeast U.S. I had graduated from a good public high school on Long Island and felt confident in my intellectual abilities. I never saw myself as a New York speaker. We rarely understand our own situativeness, particularly at 18 when we were in it. When I arrived at college, I found that some other students whose backgrounds were from private preparatory schools found my use of phrases such as don't matter, as in it doesn't matter, amusing, that I couldn't seem to muster the H sound at the beginning of words such as huge and humor, and to this day I still have to force it, was further fodder for their teasing. The teasing ensued and many of my linguistic practices shifted. Many of my mundane New Yorkisms slowly dissipated. This cleansing of my everyday linguistic practice was made more real for me seven years later while studying at the University of Wisconsin Madison when someone said, wow, you don't sound like someone from Long Island. To which I replied, well, I've only had one beer. In 1995, Professor Deborah Cameron published Verbal Hygiene, a book that helped redefine the study of language and communication, a book that was republished this year because of its continuing value in our discussions of how and why language matters. In the original text, Professor Cameron explores the ways in which systems of power structure the way language and particular linguistic conventions are normalized, made real through the practices of institutional authority and everyday practice. My mundane example, I would suggest, is a product of the wider attempt to erase difference and regulate language. It is about the power to declare what is appropriate language. That power is, of course, also about spatial control. It is, after all, when language seems out of place, that it often gets the most attention as the spatial boundaries of what is right and good is hierarchically overlaid on top of what is wrong and bad. What is said is also about who belongs where. And language, as Professor Cameron argues in the 2012 afterward to Verbal Hygiene, is a tool that is mustered to produce those effects and affects of power even as it fails to totalize in a variety of ways, a point I'm sure she will return today in her discussion of 9-11. As such, the notion of a monolingual global society where the English language erases difference and produces a unified identity thus fails to fully understand at how many different levels language works. As Professor Cameron has also noted in the afterward, she remains passionately committed to contextualizing the dynamics in which language and linguistic conventions are formulated. As she suggests, for example, in her 2000 article in American Speech, which might be the best title of a journal ever, quote, power matters and history matters. The construction of the self of a persona through language is a symbolic act, but it is also one constrained by the resources available to do it, which in turn are shaped by material conditions, those of the past as well as the present. In grounding her questions about language and the material conditions through which linguistic practices is produced, Professor Cameron provides us with a theoretical and a conceptual lens through which we might interrogate the shifting terrains of meanings that are part and parcel of the regulatory performances that try to clean everyday speech, even though, as we all know, those performances are always partial and incomplete. Her focus on power in language is also why she has been called upon to be a public intellectual, a role she takes on in her popular books such as The Myth of Mars and Venus, her blog on the Trouble and Strife website, and her participation in radio programs such as Women's Hour on the BBC. She does this work, of course, without compromising her efforts to untangle the discursive framings of what she has studied. What is so valuable, therefore, about Professor Cameron's scholarship is the way in which she works back and forth between the, quote, scientific debates around, say, a new Darwinian understanding of male-female difference and the much more popular self-help literature that draws from the new biological science of sex gender differences. In short, Professor Cameron is able to work across bodies of knowledge to show how discursive formations around sex and gender or sexuality may be temporarily reified through various outlets, be them scientific or popular. It is this ability to implicate what we do in the academy in what happens in everyday experience that also makes Professor Cameron's scholarship timely and important. It is thus very exciting to have Professor Cameron here today at the University of Arizona. Her work has influenced far beyond the fields of linguistics, anthropology, or communication as it operates across and through different disciplinary conversation and appeals to scholars across the liberal arts, such as myself from geography. With that said, I ask you to welcome Professor Debra Cameron, who comes to us today from University of Oxford, to speak about the one, the many, and the other, representing mono-multilingualism in post-911 verbal hygiene. Thank you. Thank you. Can everybody hear me? Am I standing at a reasonable distance from the microphone? Good. Okay, my title today includes the phrase verbal hygiene, which was also, as the dean said, the title of a book I published in 1995. And for those who aren't familiar with that work, I should explain that verbal hygiene is my term for all the normative metalinguistic practices through which people attempt to improve language or regulate its use in accordance with particular values, for instance, authenticity, beauty, truth, efficiency, logic, clarity, correctness, and civility. Verbal hygiene was never meant to be just a synonym for the more familiar term, prescriptivism. Prescriptivism, which normally refers to the conservative and elitist promotion of correct standard usage, is certainly one instance of verbal hygiene. But the hygienic impulse takes many other forms, and they may be underpinned by radically different values. Plain language campaigns, for instance, are generally motivated by anti-elitist sentiments. Campaigns against racism or sexism in language express a commitment to equality and social justice. The artificial language movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries were part of a search for peace and international understanding. While today's movements to preserve or revitalize endangered indigenous languages affirm the value of cultural diversity and a particular conception of authenticity. Those interventions are not usually discussed under the heading of prescriptivism. But they are all examples of what I would call verbal hygiene. And collectively they illustrate an important point about that phenomenon. In any given time and place, the most salient forms of verbal hygiene will tend to be linked to other preoccupations, which are not primarily linguistic, but are rather social, political, and moral. The logic behind verbal hygiene depends on a common sense analogy between the order of language and the larger social order, or the order of the world. The rules of language stand in for the rules that govern social or moral conduct, and putting language to rights becomes a sort of symbolic surrogate for putting the world to rights. That is why so many debates about language are engaged in with such extraordinary and apparently disproportionate fervor. Because in most cases they are not just debates about language. If you see a sudden flurry of media reports on some hardy perennial of linguistic discourse like children doing badly and spelling tests, or there's too much profanity on television. This may appear to be just the random eruption of grumbling or scaremongering that has always gone on and always will. But if we recognise that verbal hygiene is a coded discourse, it becomes possible to interpret these outbreaks as neither random nor trivial. But a symbolic expression very often of very deep desires and fears. Decoded in this way, the verbal hygiene preoccupations of a particular time and place offer a way into the collective imagination of the culture in which they arise. Now in the spirit of that approach that I've just briefly outlined, my question about multilingualism and monolingualism is not so much what they are as what they symbolise and what imaginative and ideological work that symbolism does in particular historical and cultural conditions. The point about historical and cultural particularity is very important in my way of approaching this. Verbal hygiene is a coded response to the anxieties of a specific moment, so it can't be assumed that the same linguistic preoccupation will have the same symbolic meaning in every case, that just because it seems to be about the same bit of language, it's actually always about the same thing. For instance, a minute ago I mentioned current anxieties about endangered languages. Today, I think it's fairly clear that these concerns are linked to broader anxieties about the future of the planet and about the loss of cultural diversity in an increasingly globalised world. At other historical moments, by contrast, the desire to preserve linguistic and cultural diversity has been linked to very different ideological commitments and expressed very different kinds of fears. The Nazis, for example, were ardent language preservationists. They championed the rights of the Celtic-speaking minorities in Britain and France and worried we might think presciently about the future dominance of English. But this position, which we would now be inclined to think of as politically progressive, was shaped in the Nazi case by the language ideology that Christopher Hutton labels mother tongue fascism. The linguists of the Third Reich asserted the primacy of the mother tongue on the grounds that every language expressed the essential racial character of the group that spoke it natively. If one race adopted another's language, they would not only be expressing themselves in an alien and inappropriate medium, but they would also be corrupting the racial purity of the language that they adopted. This principle featured very largely in discourse on Nazi anti-Semitism. The Jews of Europe were said to have a father tongue, Hebrew, but no mother tongue. They were accused of illegitimately appropriating other languages, such as German, and in the process, polluting them. Now, I give this example not to accuse today's language preservationists of fascism, which would be inaccurate as well as offensive, but rather to underline the point that verbal hygiene can only really be understood in relation to its specific historical and social context. Established discourses on language are continually recruited to address new social and political anxieties, and in the process they are re-inflected with new meanings which can then be carried forward and recruited to yet other causes. What I want to look at today is a case in point. The recruitment of discourses on language, including on monolingualism and multilingualism, to address the political problems and the cultural anxieties which have risen to prominence since the events of 9-11 and the onset of the so-called war on terror. I will focus in particular on the way that process has played out in my own society, which is Britain. But since in this case we are dealing with a transnational concern, there will undoubtedly be points of similarity as well as difference with verbal hygiene initiatives going on elsewhere for the same reason. And one of the things I hope to hear in the discussion is contributions from people who are from quite other places that I don't know anything about on how it has played out that. In modern European history, discourse on monolingualism and multilingualism, and especially on the former as an ideal and the latter as a problem, is strongly associated with nationalism and with the construction and the subsequent management of the modern nation state. Allegiance to a single language, identified with a particular place and the cultural traditions of that place, has been a powerful symbol on one hand of what unites the nation and on the other hand of what distinguishes it from other nations. It stands in other words for both identity and difference and these have prototypically been imagined in terms of ethnicity. Even today in parts of Europe, especially though not only post-Soviet Europe, it is possible to observe verbal hygiene practices expressing traditional ethno-linguistic nationalism, one people, one nation, one language, in a relatively pure form. In Britain, however, there is much less scope for that particular form of verbal hygiene, at least in relation to the majority language, English, because English of course does not belong uniquely to England as a place or to the English as a nation. In the case of English, discourse on language and nationhood tends to revolve around the issue of unity rather than distinctiveness. And what I think is very striking about the British case is how little purchase until recently that discourse has had on the popular imagination. In that respect, I would argue the United States and Britain have followed very different trajectories over the last 150 years. Although it is an oversimplification, it wouldn't be completely inaccurate to suggest that in Britain during the last 150 years, the anxiety about disunity and social disorder that has driven most verbal hygiene has focused primarily on divisions of social class. Whereas in the United States, for obvious historical reasons, more anxiety has tended to focus on racial and ethnic divisions. One consequence of that difference has been a much lower level of avert political conflict in Britain about multilingualism. It's not that Britain isn't a multilingual society, it has been one throughout its history, and today its largest city, London, is one of the most linguistically diverse in the world. In the year 2000, a survey of the languages known by school pupils in London identified 300 named first languages other than English. But it's only pretty recently that that diversity has become a focus for serious anxiety. Now, I certainly don't mean to imply when I say that that Britain has been free from racism, but that is certainly not the case. When post-war labor shortages prompted the UK government to encourage large-scale immigration from the former British Empire, especially the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean, the result, very quickly, was an upsurge of avert political racism. But while this was manifested in some very ugly ways, it was not on the whole manifested in racist campaigns of verbal hygiene. Nothing comparable to the US English-only movement ever developed. No attempt was made to enforce the speaking of English as a qualification for British citizenship, or to restrict the use of minority languages in public space, or to prevent local authorities from providing services in those languages. This may have been in part because the white nationalist organizations which hovered on the fringes of British politics from the 1970s onwards had no interest in forcing immigrants to assimilate. What they demanded was an end to immigration and the forcible repatriation of all non-white people, including those born in Britain, to their ancestral homelands. These groups commanded some popular support, but too little electoral clout for the mainstream political parties to feel obliged to take them seriously. By the early 1990s, when I was researching my book, Verbal Hygiene, there was a continuing current of opposition to immigration and a growing backlash against multiculturalism, particularly in relation to the school curriculum. But I found very little evidence of widespread anxiety focusing specifically on multilingualism. It was a fringe obsession. Yet today, that anxiety has become avert and ubiquitous. In the space of only seven years, my country has gone to being a country with virtually no language policy at all, no official language, no language requirement for immigration or citizenship or voting, to being a country where every week brings forth some new regulation or government pronouncement on the importance of everyone speaking English and only English. In 2005, a new citizenship test was introduced under the rather innocuous name of Life in the UK. Indirectly, it is a language test, since it has to be taken in what's called a recognised British language. That phrase has to be used because we really don't have an official language. We are a federation, nominally, of four nations and the indigenous Celtic languages that exist in three of them, though only with great vitality in one of them, Wales, also have to be recognised as British languages. So overwhelmingly, the test is taken in English. And in theory, someone resident in Wales or Scotland could opt to take it in Welsh or Gaelic, but that hasn't happened often enough for the Home Office to make figures available on how many candidates there have ever been. They do, though, make statistics available on the pass rates for applicants from different countries. And those figures are instructive about the gatekeeping function, the test fulfills, and the role played by English in relation to that function. In 2009, which is the most recent year for which full figures are available, US citizens, Canadians, Australians, and South Africans, so people from what branch Catru would label the Inner Circle, had pass rates of close to 100%. For applicants from outer circle countries like India, the figure was about 80%. For those from China, it was approximately 65%. And for those from Iraq and Afghanistan, it was well under 50%. Meanwhile, all non-EU citizens wishing to live in Britain, even if they have another basis on which to claim the right of entry, such as being married to a British citizen, must demonstrate some knowledge of English before the UK border agency will admit them. And if you're educated in Britain, mere proficiency in English is no longer enough to satisfy the government. Last month, the Communities Minister, Eric Pickles, that is, in fact, his name, made a well-publicized speech in which he declared, extraordinarily, that every school leaver in Britain should be able to, quote, speak English like a native. He didn't say which native. Those who failed to reach that goal, he said, risked making themselves an unemployable subclass. That he felt able to make that comment in the middle of a recession when something like 20% of all Britons between the ages of 18 to 25 are unemployed, tells us how far this demonization of the non-English speaker has become normalized in British political discourse. Only just before I came here to Arizona, I was reading a set of new professional standards for school teachers, which will come into force in England and Wales in September of this year. And they specify that one of the professional standards that teachers must be able to comply with, and it doesn't matter what subject they teach, is they must show an understanding of and a willingness to promote high standards of literacy, articulacy, and correct standard English. So what is driving this demonization? Well, partly it reflects the hardening of public attitudes to immigration, which has been seen all over Europe. The migrant who cannot speak English or who refuses to learn it is represented as a social parasite, a cynical freeloader who consumes Britain's resources without contributing to its economy. But the current hostility to immigration is itself not based only on economic considerations. It is also connected, I will argue, to the much larger reshaping of the cultural and ideological landscape which has taken place in the past decade, precipitated by the 9-11 attacks and the chain of events that followed. These events have provoked anxiety about the threat posed by certain kinds of immigrants, to the security and to the values of Western democracies. The increasingly assiduous policing of our borders is one response to that perceived threat, the threat of terrorism and of radical Islam. But in Britain, the war on terror is not just a war on immigrants. A no less urgent task than to keep the undesirable from coming in from outside is to defeat the enemy within and language is part of the terrain on which that battle is being fought too. As you probably know, Britain had its own small scale 9-11 in 2005. It took place on July the 7th and is therefore often referred to as 7-7. There's a touching failure there to understand what the double meaning of 9-11 actually is, but let it pass. What happened was that four Muslim men, all of them British, travelled to London from the towns where they lived, carrying homemade explosive devices which they proceeded to detonate on three underground tube trains and a bus, killing themselves and more than 50 other people. This provoked a wave of anxiety about the problem of the so-called homegrown terrorist. Prototypically imagined as a young man of Pakistani ancestry but born and raised in Britain, whose failure to integrate into British society has made him politically disaffected and vulnerable to being radicalized by extremists preaching jihad. Preventing this radicalization became part of the mission of a new government department which was set up in 2006 with the title Department for Communities and Local Government. The department now headed by Eric Pickles whose remarks on speaking English I quoted before. The central task of the Department for Communities is to promote something which is called community cohesion. In practice, what this has turned out to involve is a concerted effort to discredit multiculturalism and dismantle the apparatus which supported it while championing an overtly assimilationist agenda. Language emerged early on as a theme of this campaign. On one level, the message was straightforward and uncontroversial. To participate fully in British society, minority ethnic groups must master the majority language. But since no one had ever seriously disputed that proposition, the question arose of what purpose it served for politicians to harp on it so insistently. In my view, the purpose it served was basically ideological. It was being established and largely for the benefit of the majority rather than the minorities who were apparently being addressed was a code in which English monolingualism became the privileged symbol of social cohesion while societal multilingualism came to stand by contrast for division and fragmentation. If we understand this code, a number of things make sense which otherwise would not. For example, in 2008, the community's minister of that time who was a Labour politician, one of the interesting things about the community's ministry is that the change from Labour to Conservative has made absolutely no difference whatsoever to their rhetoric, it's remained exactly the same. So at the time, the community secretary was a Labour politician named Hazel Blears and she made a very peculiar speech in which she urged local councils to stop translating official documents into minority community languages. And what she said was, instead of translating everything, you should think very carefully about how you can bring people together. Now, at a literal level, I put it to you that it is quite difficult to follow the logic of that recommendation. How exactly does putting the same English-language leaflet through every citizen's door have the effect of bringing people together? For those citizens who are unable to read English, declining to provide material in any other language might well seem like the opposite of an inclusive gesture. Translation itself can be thought of, and very often has been, as a way of bringing people together by giving them access to the same texts even when they don't share a common language. But by the time the minister made her speech, there had been a sustained attack on translation as a multiculturalist practice which signified not inclusiveness but divisiveness and ghettoization. The image of the same text rendered in a series of different languages and scripts had become a very powerful symbol of ethnic and religious fragmentation, a stark reminder of difference and otherness which needed to be erased in the interest of cohesion. And this has continued. So, for instance, in the most recent report from the Department of Communities that I forced myself to read before I came, there was a whole section about how people felt very uncomfortable going into shops where they couldn't read the signs. And as I read this, I realized it was not talking about minorities being unable to understand signs in English. It was talking about the majority going into shops where there might be things labeled in Polish or Punjabi. So this made people feel uncomfortable and was there for something that should be got rid of. But the war on translation, which has continued since 2008, is by no means the most illogical element in the discourse which represents English monolingualism as a defense against fragmentation and the extremism it allegedly encourages. What much of this discourse unaccountably overlooks is that the homegrown terrorist whose spectacular emergence in 2005 prompted the whole concern about community cohesion is himself most often a native speaker of English and not infrequently a monolingual one. The point was dramatized shortly after 7.7 when martyrdom videos made by two of the bombers were retrieved and then broadcast by the media. No subtitles were required. The language in which these young men explained their political philosophy and said goodbye to their loved ones was not Arabic, Urdu or Punjabi. It was English spoken with a Yorkshire accent. Interviewed for a documentary, one survivor of the 7.7 attacks said that she found the accent the most chilling feature of the video. A fairly astonishing remark given the content of it and what followed it. But the idea that there is something particularly disturbing about the use of a regional English dialect as the medium for an Islamic terrorist's martyrdom video is not without a certain symbolic logic. In the discourse I've been talking about so far the key opposition, rhetorical opposition is between cohesion symbolized by English monolingualism and fragmentation or sort of social disunity associated with the maintenance of other languages. The fragmentation is figured as a threat but the nature and source of the threat is actually quite vaguely evoked using generic terms like extremism and radicalization. There's no actual mention in community's ministry documents. The word Islam isn't mentioned, the word terrorism isn't mentioned. But in the second discourse I want to talk about, the code is less opaque. Language becomes a metaphor for the so-called clash of civilizations and the central opposition is between English and Islam. Now this second discourse is not specifically British. In fact it seems to have originated in the United States. In a short article published in 2005 the applied linguists Sir Hale Calmini drew attention to a policy being pursued by the United States government after 9-11 whereby large educational aid packages were directed to countries which were considered to be centers for Islamic radicalization. The idea was to reduce Islamist influence by encouraging governments to adopt modern and secular forms of education in preference to religious schooling. Pakistan for example received over $250 million in aid as part of a package whose objective was described as quote, resting control of the schools from the mullahs. One of the initiatives this money funded was the introduction of English teaching at elementary school level as well as secondary level. Apart from being seen as a contribution to economic development English language teaching was also regarded by the architects of US policy as an effective tool for countering religious extremism and inculcating pro-western or at least less anti-western attitudes. Now it might be asked why they believed that learning English would have those ideological effects and the answer seems to lie in the old nationalist idea that each language has its own distinctive character and functions as a vehicle for the values that it distinctively embodies. This idea has been elaborated extensively on discourse in discourse on English but shown of its kind of any nationalist underpinnings and put into a global context. So English is recurrently said to embody the virtues of openness, tolerance, pragmatism and democracy. In many popular histories of the language these qualities are invoked to account for the meteoric rise of English from obscure and peripheral Germanic dialect to global lingua franca. Now in reality of course, the spread of English is explained not by its linguistic characteristics but by its speakers success in pursuing the classic four C's, commerce, conquest, colonization and conversion. But English boosterism remains a significant current in verbal hygiene discourse and the values the language is supposed to embody have taken on a political significance which is new in the post 9-11 context. In 2003 for instance, the right-wing commentator Paul Johnson offered an odd linguistic defense for the US-led interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan describing the US as quote, uniquely endowed to exercise global authority because America has the language of the 21st century. A more secure world, he continued, will be legislated for, policed and adjudicated in English. Now I said that the discourse this comment belongs to is structured by an opposition between English and Islam. English is figured as the language of legitimate global authority and as a natural vehicle for the core Western values of rationality, moderation, tolerance and democracy. Islam on the other hand is represented as irrational, fanatical, intolerant and autocratic. It is also profoundly unmodern. Whereas America has the language of the 21st century, Islam in this discourse is stuck in the dark ages. Now Islam of course is not itself a language and you might think in that sense that an analysis that opposes it to English is a flawed one. But the qualities predicated of Islam in general are often discursively projected onto language and one language in particular. Quite logically, Arabic, the language of the Quran which Muslims regard as sacred. Not that the Arabic of the Quran is the language used by Arabic speakers in everyday discourse but that nuance does not seem to stand in the way of the symbolism working. Well before 9-11 in 1994, a contributor to the journal Middle East Quarterly posed the question, does the Arabic language encourage radical Islam? He concluded that the answer was yes and not only because Arabic has been shaped by Islamic culture and history in much the same way that English say has been shaped by Christian culture and history. At a very basic level, he claimed, the language resists rational interrogation and critical thought. Last year, somewhat similarly, the broadcaster Al Jazeera got hold of a PowerPoint presentation which was being used to train FBI agents in the fine art of interrogating people who were either speakers of Arabic or from an Arabic-speaking cultural background. The presentation included a fairly amazing section on language which asserted among other things that, quote, the Arabic-speaking mind is swayed more by words than ideas and more by ideas than facts. As a literal proposition, this seems not so much wrong as just entirely devoid of any meaning. Facts are surely also ideas and many, though not all words, are the signifiers of ideas. So what is the FBI talking about? But at a symbolic level, I think the import is rather clearer. Arabs speak a language ungoverned by the norms of truth and logic. It is utterly alien and threatening to our values. Once again, though, what is elided in this discourse is that large numbers of educated Arabic speakers do in fact speak English. In fact, there's a growing phenomenon and some would say problem, whereby the most educated Arabic speakers find it easier to write English than having been educated in that medium than to write traditional Fusar, which they feel incompetent to do. The idea that more English teaching will mean less terrorism seems entirely misguided when one considers a point made very trenchantly by Sahel Karmany that the attacks of 9-11 could not have been carried out by Arabic monolinguals. To prepare for the attacks, organize them, execute them without being discovered, the terrorists had to have some level of proficiency in English. Conversely, the homegrown and monolingual English-speaking British terrorists of 7-7 got their political education not from continuing cultural contact with Pakistan, but from the online preaching of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was a valuable asset to Al-Qaeda because he spoke English and was therefore able to reach a global audience on the internet. Global terrorism is no different from global trade or global tourism. It too depends on the transnational flow of people, money, commodities and information. And in that sense, is inherently a multi rather than a monolingual phenomenon. This excursion into post 9-11 verbal hygiene might suggest that the traditional symbolic meanings of multilingualism and monolingualism are ceasing to serve any clear ideological purpose. In Britain and probably in other majority anglophone nations, it is still possible to generate political anxiety around the very idea of societal multilingualism. But I suspect that is largely because the monolingualism it contrasts with is specifically English monolingualism. Outside our own borders, we do not valorise monolingualism. On the contrary, British foreign policy like the USAID policy that I talked about before offers active support for the teaching of English and therefore in effect for global multilingualism. So it's one thing at home and another thing abroad. In continental Europe, the idea of a repertoire which includes English alongside whatever the nationalist symbol is is entirely unremarkable and it would be toothpaste you couldn't put back in the tube. So in current discourse and practice, I think the opposition that carries the main ideological load is not the contrast between multi and mono, between the one and the many, so much as the contrast between one language and another, the one and the other. In the age of globalisation, global conflicts, be they economic, political or religious, are increasingly played out in the symbolic arena of verbal hygiene by way of representations of languages and the values they supposedly embody. And one of the things I think is being expressed in this kind of discourse is a kind of fear among English speakers that the power they have wielded in the world for 400 years may soon be eclipsed. The extraordinary popularity of mass market books which rehearse the story of English, celebrate the triumph of English, proclaim it as the language of the 21st century, the global language that will last forever, the vector for democracy and the spread of capitalism and, you know, to places like China which have never known it before. This is, to my mind, one sign of this anxiety. The story of English never actually changes. It's the same facts in the same order. So the fact that people apparently want to read it over and over and over again, penned by various celebrity authors, might suggest that it is functioning as some sort of comfort blanket. Another interesting sign of the times is the emergence of a discourse which seriously considers what might take over from English. Mandarin is one popular candidate. Another that's been suggested is Globish, a kind of artificial English-based pigeon. Another is a scenario where you have the world divided again into regions where there will be a dominant language of influence for a region rather than the whole world and possibly the most radical is machine translation, as suggested by Nicholas Ostler in his book The Last Linguafranca which argued that English is not an exception to the law of history and that its global preeminence is doomed to fade away. In Ostler's vision of the future, no one will need to be multilingual and no surviving language will be endangered. Everyone will be able to use their mother tongue and be instantly understood thanks to the wonders of technology. I think we've heard this morning how far away we are from that position. Each of these imagined scenarios offers a different take on what moral and political values the ideal linguistic order should be based on. But although the answers vary, what I would say is there is and never will be any escape from the question. Yesterday, someone asked after Michael Holkvist's talk, what's behind the fear? Why are people so afraid of multilingualism or of other languages? My answer, that's always been my question. That is the central question of my work on verbal hygiene. And my answer is that what's behind the fears that drive verbal hygiene is always the fear of disorder, of social breakdown or moral anarchy. For cultures which have codified representations of language, which have reduced language to rule in any way. Language is always apprehended as a sort of microcosm of order, a metaphor for moral conduct. Linguists persistently misrecognise this analogy, this correspondence, this mapping of one order onto another. Linguists misrecognise this as a mark of people's ignorance and lack of understanding to be remedied by our more scientific knowledge about what language really is. I believe it is we, the linguists, who fail to understand something very important about our object of study, something which in my view is inherent to it and not just grafted on from outside. It is our failure to engage with the underlying logic of verbal hygiene that makes us so irrelevant or ineffectual in so many important political debates. And that's really where I want to end. I don't know if we can be any less ineffectual, but it certainly doesn't help if we don't understand what language is doing in events like the ones that make up the war on terror. So I'm going to stop now and open the floor to other people. Thank you. Total silence. Yes, thank you. I just, in terms of what you just did, your conclusion with which I completely agree. We're also shooting ourselves in the foot, linguists, by not doing that. Because we fail to see that it's precisely those attitudes which can precipitate sound shifts, linguistic changes, pronunciation shifts. And without, how can we properly analyze those without taking into account the cultural forces and all of those anxieties that you described that precipitate me? Thank you. I just, just to keep the dialogue going and finish very quickly, I was just getting into it. Surely English is remarkable as being historically unregulated. Remarkable lack of an academy or attempt to control it. Isn't there a sense to that? Yeah, that doesn't mean there's never been any attempt to control it. It just means that the agencies have been different from, you know, they haven't been state agencies, if you like, they've been private individuals or sort of institutions of one sort or another. There's certainly always been attempts to regulate it. But the idea that we don't have an academy and we don't have a government department of culture, actually, we do have one now. Department for culture and sport. But I think that's all part of the ideology of it's a pragmatic language. It's an open, tolerant language. It's the language of people who have no trek with all this continental intellectual, pointy-headed, finicking about. And we've just got on with it in our laissez-faire way and that's why we've triumphed and, you know, the French can go to hell. That's what it basically amounts to. But it's a bit of an illusion that there's no regulation. Sorry. So I guess, I'm like, I didn't want you to stop. And so I wish, the point on which you ended, I do want you to play it out a little bit because so let's say the linguists in response to say, I mean, one thing here that confirms your approach is the fact that we had, about a decade ago, we had a wave of English-only legislation which numerous states, I think 28 or 32 or something, passed various versions of English, official English legislation. And now it shifted over to anti-immigrant legislation and it's just a recartification of the same sets of anxieties, I think. But if the linguists' input on these kinds of questions of English only say are, well, just to say to people, well, actually, you're just afraid of disorder. How helpful is that? What difference does that, in other words, what actually can, what kind of intervention can be illuminating and effective? Okay, I didn't make myself clear. I make this argument at very much greater length in verbal hygiene. Then the issue isn't that linguists shouldn't make factual interventions. In fact, I think the extent to which they, don't bother to do so is kind of horrifying. Like one thing that I think never comes into a debate on this business about immigrants should learn English is, okay, how long does it take to learn English? That kind of thing. We have research on that. There are things in which a factual intervention can at least influence governments because they subscribe to a sort of scientist ideology in which they do attempt to make evidence-based policy. It's very, very striking how policy on language is less evidence-based and public debate on language is less rational than on many other subjects, which are actually, you would have thought, harder for the layperson to understand, economics or climate change or whatever. However, where I think linguists shoot themselves in the foot is that they insist on decrying the whole discourse of value. They insist on saying, no, no, no, no, all possible scenarios linguistically are entirely equal. It is a vulgar error to say that this matters, to say that there are norms in any way or that we could talk in a sensible way about what would be reasonable norms. I think if linguists won't talk about value, laypeople will always dismiss them. It's like, these people study language, but clearly nobody has ever cared less about language than the denizens of the Modern Linguistics Department. And I think that's absolutely true. So linguists refuse to say, and we could be debating what the norms should be, but what linguists usually appear to be saying in public is, stop having any norms, it's a category mistake. It's like, so if you take someone popular writer like Steven Pinker, his whole metaphor for how stupid it is to talk about norms, he says, imagine a nature program where somebody said, look at that humpback whale doing its song all wrong. Monkey's cries have been in a state of degeneration for thousands of years. He's saying, it's exactly like this. It's a natural phenomenon, it's an instinct. It's as stupid to talk about what we value in language as it would be to talk about what was right and wrong in the behavior of non-human animals. I say, it's entirely different. And if you don't understand the role that normativity plays in language, inherently, as well as symbolically, then you are betraying your objective study. There's an aspect of language that you are falling down on the job of both describing and explaining. So that's my objection to linguists. It's not that I'm saying they shouldn't ever intervene and say, well, actually research shows this or that, but they have to put it in a frame where it is not just senseless to talk about norms or value. Hi, thank you very much for your presentation. It was really amazing. So my name is Norman Mendoza Denton and I'm here in the School of Anthropology and I'm a native Spanish speaker. So I have a one-year-old daughter that I'm trying to speak in Spanish with all the time. And this is against the backdrop of legislation, well, a judge in Texas that decreed that speaking monolingually to your child was, I came to child abuse and so on. So I go to the Safeway to the store and I speak to her in Spanish and we're labeling all the objects in Spanish and she goes around and does that. And people give me incredible dirty looks. And then they say, and they hear that I also speak English because I speak to the shop people in English and they say, well, do you ever speak to her in English? You know, like in this really worried tone, do you ever speak to her in English? Because you know, I mean, I'm sure they're thinking that's important. And I say, no, I never do. Well, what about her dad? No, he speaks to her in Arabic. And then this incredible look of like shock and horror. Like, oh my God, an Arabic Spanish bilingual. And then they say, well, is she going to learn English? Like, well, she goes to school in English. Oh, big relief. And then they're like, okay. And I tell them, you know, you gotta give Spanish a chance because most of the day she's in school in English. And then I guess my question is that there's a deep ambivalence in the linguistic situation, especially in Tucson where a lot of people also speak Spanish. Once they realize what the program is, then they're like, oh, let me help you. And then they start speaking to her in Spanish. And I just, like that always floors me that there's both of those, well, both. There's that resistance of disorder and the threat of disorder and of an incredibly disordered situation where you have this clash of everything kind of all mixed up in one person. And at the same time, once they realize like, oh, maybe it's not such a threat, then they see it in this more benign kind of way of like, oh, maybe multilingualism is okay. This is a chance for me to practice. So I've just always been struck by the ambivalence in these matters. No, that's a very interesting example. And thank you. Part of the problem for linguists, it seems to me, is that they are perceived by the people who make policy as academic pointy heads. I mean, who are talking about something that because they have, they can't recognize that there is a professional specialized knowledge of. So that the linguistic knowledge of language is something that comes from people in the university. I mean, who are usually dismissed as being unable to contribute to a substantive conversation about value. So part of being concerned for values, it seems to me, is recognizing the peculiar value that we are perceived to manifest in the society in which we are working. Right, but what you're saying doesn't entirely apply to discussionable subjects. It's really very extreme in the case of language. So in other words, government policy makers will take advice from pointy heads on lots of things, including things that people have personal experience of, such as child raising. I think it's a very particular thing with language myself, which, and it is, that it takes, I mean, it takes all the years of a linguistics degree to get socialized so that you don't make value judgments anymore. You know, you really have to unlearn them. That's a major part of your task as a linguistics teacher, to get on and on at your students, no, that's not wrong, no, that's not bad. It's different. All varieties are equal, blah, blah, blah, to get rid of that value discourse. And I think that's what lay people can't understand. And I also think that, you know, just because you get rid of, you critique certain values, it does not follow that you have no values. I mean, well, I'll give you a very small example. Linguists aren't free from their own values about their own discourse. The organizers of this conference wish to start a new journal, the Journal of Critical Multilingualism, and I wish them luck, but I notice they say that anyone who sends in a contribution needs to conform to all the rules in the Chicago manual of style. Now, excuse me, but why? Those are, and, you know, those are not the native language of everybody as a British academic, I don't normally conform to the rule that distinguishes restrictive from non-restrictive relative clauses or puts the punctuation mark inside the quote mark, rather than, you know, I put it outside. This is entirely arbitrary, entirely conventional, entirely, and linguists take that for granted. But, you know, so while they're brow-beating other people about their stupid value judgments, there is no doubt in my mind that linguists too have their value judgments and they just don't see it, they're not reflexive. By the way, I don't object to, you know, I'll go along with the Chicago manual of style, but I just point it out, you know, as something where we haven't questioned our own prescriptivism at all. Deborah, thanks very much. That was immensely cathartic. And just to add to your lovely examples, the 2011 census last year obviously had a question on it about language policy. And the question was, how well do you speak English very well, moderately, or not at all? And this was the first time that that question had been included in the sentence. But I want to take up your question at the end about linguists. And I'm wondering about modern linguists having been in the UK part of a group that have been campaigning rigorously to have languages policies during the exact same time period that you're looking at in your talk. And where we've seen in England are languages, a modern languages policy come in, which is about the value of multilingualism, of learning a range of different languages. And where in the Scottish context at the moment we do have a Gallic language policy and all public institutions are having to think through what it means to embed a Gallic language discourse into the public sphere and how that fits with your questions around linguists and their norms and values. Okay, that's sort of a huge question. I'm not sure I can deal with all of it. I think the sort of multilingualism policy that you find in Scotland and in Wales, there's something very strange about it because it's caught between various discourses one is an old, sorry, the phrase that comes to mind is the kind of blood and soil. So I can have language rights as a Gallic speaker in Scotland or a Welsh speaker in Wales, but I can't take them with me to England. I can't, so then they're dependent on my territoriality. And so they're actually about preserving the trace of a particular heritage. I mean, when the Scottish Parliament opened up and people were swearing those of loyalty, I was very pleased to see that for everyone who swore an oath of loyalty in Gallic, there was also someone who swore it in Punjabi or Chinese, both of which have more speakers incidentally in Scotland than Gallic does. But this is a point that Mary Louise made yesterday about how post-colonialism produces a multilingualism that is not equal. But when the post-colonialism gets post enough so that the thing becomes indigenous heritage and is on the verge of extinction, then we change our tune. But I don't think that anywhere in Britain there is an egalitarian language learning or language teaching policy. And I think we haven't sorted out these things about. They are grappling with it in Wales. So in Wales, you can opt for Welsh-medium schooling all over the country. And many of the people who opt for it are not historic Welsh speakers. They're doing the same thing that people do with French and Canada, sort of buying a kind of advantage for their children in terms of cultural capital by sending them to a school where they will have the immersion experience. And the question of whether people have the right to speak a language which is not ethnically, historically, ancestrally theirs, something that you can't justify with old-style nationalist or identity politics, that remains a very vexed question, doesn't it? I think I'd also have to say about Britain that maybe Scotland is different. I'm not as in touch with it as I was, but in England anyway, all pious aspirations to foreign language learning in schools have to be subject to the critique that not enough time is spent on teaching foreign languages in schools for anyone to acquire any level of proficiency that makes any difference at all. So I think we're in a bit of a mess, frankly. I don't know if that answers your question. That's a very depressing point. I just want to bring it back to the US context and what you said before. Two points that go to value and norms. One is that, in fact, as somebody who speaks German to his kids, I've heard the same people who raise those same kind of fears about bilingualism with regard to languages, well, Spanish, can turn to me and say, oh, you speak German to your kid, that is so cool. So I think that not all bilingualisms are regarded as in the public discourse as equal and even, I'd then point to another dynamic that I've observed a lot is that speakers of languages other than English in the US also themselves are very fearful about using those languages, even with their own children. I've had many parents come to the university park and come to the university just to talk and say, should I speak language X to my child? I really, you know, I'm very worried that they will be disadvantaged and cognitively, socially. So that's a very widespread phenomenon and it should also be looked at together with these other conventions. Yeah, I think the first thing you said really does go to my point about, it's not a contrast between one and many, it's a contrast between one and other. So some others are more acceptable than others. So it is basically about how particular languages are symbolized in a particular context. So being bilingual in a Subbleton language and being bilingual in what's perceived as a kind of elite language are two very different things from most people's point of view. I imagine this discussion will continue and we may even see its immediate impact in a revised version of the call for submissions at this point. But I think we need to now take a break for lunch. So please join me in thanking Deborah Cameron for her wonderful talk. Thank you.