What have EU citizens done for the UK and the world?

Last week the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield called on colleagues to write 'a paragraph on what an EU member of staff or student has done for the UK or the world' (http://goo.gl/4vqZFj). Although primarily aimed, it seems, at colleagues who are from the UK, I also have a view. It took me a while to formulate my thoughts, but this is what I wrote, eventually:

Many members of staff and students in the School of Languages & Cultures come from outside the UK, mainly elsewhere in Europe but also North and South America, Asia and Africa. It stands to reason. Colleagues from outside the UK make an enormous contribution to our learning and teaching, not only as language teachers, but on all fronts. Students from elsewhere ensure that we have not just a multi- but an intercultural learning and research environment, sometimes through formal teaching but more often by engaging with other students, for example as tandem partners or in our student societies, or through their unique contribution to our research. Likewise, hundreds of language teachers from outside the UK are employed in the country's secondary schools. They have become an indispensible force. Without them many schools would simply have to reduce the number of languages taught or even close their languages departments. And that's already happening far too often.

I myself am one of those non-UK teachers in the School of Languages & Cultures. As a Dutchman, I have known from an early age that I was also a European citizen and that will not change. But here's the irony: most of my colleagues and students who were born in the UK also feel European and that will not change either. For the time being, they are still EU citizens but they will always remain European citizens in their hearts, minds and deeds. I am proud to be working with so many of these EU citizens from the UK.

The University Council of Modern Languages (http://www.ucml.ac.uk/) has called on its members to challenge any language that separates the UK and Europe. I would like the University to do the same. Those labels don't help, because #WeAreInternational.

Languages after Brexit

The UK electorate has voted to leave the EU and we will probably have to live with it. There is of course still a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the next moves for the UK, but that should not stop us thinking (and talking) about what it means for language teaching and learning in this country.

The background is clear. For over a decade language learning in the UK has been in decline in both secondary and higher education. Recent moves to halt this decline, at least in secondary schools through the introduction of the Ebac, have so far not been successful. Soon, only two English exam boards will be offering languages GCSE and A-level exams, with an emphasis on the three most popular languages: French, Spanish and German. Thus, languages are also losing breadth of coverage. Moreover, languages are being pushed out by other subjects, especially in many state schools. They are therefore rapidly becoming a middle-class preserve. Most universities offer their students an opportunity to study foreign languages in institution-wide language programmes, i.e. as part of, or in addition to, their degree course in another subject. Whilst this has been a welcome move, it has not stopped the decline in courses for specialist linguists.

As linguists we all believe in the importance of language learning, because it is so much more than just speaking that foreign language. Speaking another language teaches you about other people, it widens your horizon, it broadens your mind, it opens your heart to others. It also makes you more flexible, adaptable, creative and ... more employable. Many employers in the UK are crying out for workers with more, and better, foreign language skills. They know, like us, that English is simply not enough.

None of this will change.

Promoting learning and teaching foreign languages has always been important, but as many commentators have said in the days since the referendum, languages have just become a lot more important. The country needs its linguists now more than ever. That means that language teachers need to make the case for languages more forcefully than ever. Not only in highereducation, but especially in secondary education. More young people from all sections of society need to learn languages. And we need to better recognise the linguistic capital that already exists, for example in community languages and the country's minority languages.

But there is something else. Learning a foreign language and its associated cultures is not an end in itself. The ultimate aim of good language teachers is to develop their students' intercultural skills through foreign language learning. This is what I mean when I write that learning a foreign language widens your horizon, broadens your mind and opens your heart to others. However, we would be missing our aim if by learning foreign languages our students become estranged from the society and communities in which they are also anchored.

Many young people, especially students, are said to be angry with their elders because of the different choices they have made, which they feel reflect negatively on their own future. We may agree with them, but we also need to get across to them that another culture is not necessarily far away, but can also exist within your own culture. Learning to live with and negotiating those differences at home is just another aspect of intercultural competence.

INAR 3

On 9 and 10 October 2015, the third INAR conference took place, INAR3 (check also #INAR3). INAR stands for International Network on Address Research. Address as a concept for linguists includes second-person pronouns ('you'), names, titles ('professor'), honorifics ('Mr') etc. These are all tools that language users deploy to manage social relations. INAR's activities largely straddle the linguistic sub-disciplines pragmatics and sociolinguistics, and there is also a strong historical (socio-) linguistic interest.

INAR was launched during a workshop in the summer of 2013 in Berlin, followed by one in Hildesheim a year later  (whose website  is no longer available) the following summer. There was also an INAR colloquium during the 20th Sociolinguistics Symposium in Jyväskylä in the same year. There is of course an excellent INAR website with details of more events, the first INAR publication, a volume of papers from the 20th Sociolinguitics Symposium colloquium edited by Catrin Norrby and Camilla Wide, has just been published by Palgrave, and John Bejamins now has a book series, Topcs in Address Research (TAR), whose first volume should appear in 2016. So in the space of less than three years, INAR has achieved a great deal that this informal network can be very proud of.

INAR3 was the first edition in the western hemisphere, with the Department of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M in College Station (in, yes, Texas) as host. It's a long way to go from Sheffield, but well worth it because Irene Moyna and her team put on an excellent conference. The bare facts: there were 30 papers, many covering specific languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, the Spanish-based creole Palenquero, Vietnamese), others focusing more on general issues but with data from Dutch, English, the Slavonic languages (Bulglarian, Polish, Russian). Quite a few papers dealt with different forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC; especially Facebook, but also WordReference) and some were more theoretical (e.g. discussing the idea of address as a modal operator, politeness theory, Natural Semantic Metalanguage or NSM). Two papers dealt with language acquisition: one on teaching Spanish as a foreign language, the other on name learning and retrieval. According to the participant list, 39 people representing universities from 13 countries took part in the conference (attending in person and/or contributing to papers) and four papers were presented by video links from Canada and Australia.

All the papers were of course very high in quality, but I particularly enjoyed hearing American colleagues' perspectives on address, because the two previous editions of INAR had been attended by only a small number of them. Surveying the programme, it becomes clear immediately that a major concern of address researchers in the USA is Spanish. This is not surprising, as Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the country and also the most widely studied language at schools, universities and colleges. Plus, there is a remarkably wide and interesting range of variation in the use of address pronouns in Spanish, especially in Latin America. A further noticeable feature of this conference was the fact that a good number of papers dealt not with the pronouns of address, but with various nominal forms of address in a wide range of settings, such as the Aboriginal hip-hop community, the gay community and the (sometimes very entertaining) minutes of a local ladies' club over four decades in the 20th century. 

Address is clearly a popular area for graduate students to explore. It was great to be able to listen to so many impressive, enthusiastic younger researchers with innovative ideas. Especially impressive were two undergraduates from the University of Manitoba who gave their presentations with great confidence and panache by video link. The future of INAR seems assured.

Small conferences like this, focuses on a very specific area, are an excellent sources of inspiration for future research. So what has inspired me to do further stuff? Two things spring to mind. Terrell Morgan and Scott Schwenter from The Ohio State University pointed out that we have been neglecting the use of plural address pronouns. They have quickly discovered that the plural of usted in everyday Spanish is much more likely to be vosostros than ustedes, despite the fact that most learners' grammars and text books assume a parallelism between the singular and plural informal and formal pronouns. And, yes, on reflection I'm sure that something similar can be said about Dutch jullie and u in addressing more than one person. The other is the methodology used by Hanna Lappalainen and her colleagues in Helsinki. They used cardboard cutouts of well known Finns to study address practices, inviting ordinary people in the street to ask these celebrities if they could take a selfie and recording these requests. The carrot for their participants was a selfie with the cutout. Now there's a plan for the next paper: INAR4 is in 2017 in Helsinki.

Wim Vandenbussche visits Sheffield

On Wednesday 8 October 2014, Wim Vandenbussche, Professor of Historical Sociolinguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel gave two seminars in the School of Languages and Cultures in Sheffield. The first one, "How standard was the standardization of Dutch?", was specifically for at students of Dutch and German following modules in Dutch Sociolinguistics and Comparative Germanic Linguistics. The second, "French-Dutch language contact in Belgium: from conflict to concord?", was the new academic year's first departmental seminar for the Department of French.

The first thing to note is that Wim Vandenbussche bribes his audiences with Belgian chocolates! And not a common variety either. Good quality Belgian pralines. He also lards his talks with pesonal anecdotes, such as his own English professors' insistence on the use of Received Pronunciation when he was an undergraduate. Memories of my own first year as a student of English at that other Vrije Universiteit, in Amsterdam. We, too, had to acquire an accent that is used by less than 2% of the UK population and which I lost three years later within months of arriving as a Harting scholar in Manchester.

The talk about the standardisation of Dutch was a good introduction to comparative standardology and its history as a theoretical framework. It discussed standardisation in various languages and along the way gave an excellent potted history of Norwegian standardisation (when discussing Haugen's work) and of the Low Countries since the late 16th century. Wim critiqued a large number of authors and throughout the seminar his big message was this: for much of history 99% of the people have ignored the rules of standard languages, and yet there is no chaos. The role of language as social (upward) mobiliser has become important only in the last couple of centuries. Early in the 19th century upper classes started to apply the rules seriously, followed by the middle and lower classes by 50-100 year intervals. Why this happened at that particular time all over Europe is not an easy question to answer (so it was good that one of the students asked), but the industrial revolution plays a role, as does the increased importance of written communication and education.

The talk about the Dutch-French language border was an attempt to explain the present political situation in Belgium. Timely, because it followed the announcement the previous evening that there was a new Belgian federal government, which had meant that Wim had needed to do some quick rewriting. We learnt something about Belgium's parliamentary structure and were treated to a (rather long) BBC clip visiting all seven parliaments in Belgium, including the European parliament. Wim gave a historical overview since 1962 and used a lot of quotes from the foreign press about Belgium's political divide and usually claiming that the country is about the fall apart. Again we went back to the Burgundian empire at the end of 14th century and raced through time to the early 19th century, along the way busting several myths created by traditional language historians,. It slowed down for the history of Dutch vs. French in the last 200 years. And we learnt a good French expression from Quebec that applies equally well to the Belgian language situation: Les deux solitudes. The historical overview concluded with a critique of the present situation, especially in Brussels, where there are still a lot of bilinguals. There are stable voting patterns in Dutch language communities around Brussels, but in the communities with facilities for French speakers numbers of French voters is going up, indicating that much feared shifts in population are largely exaggerated. Most importantly, there is a major power shift to speakers of other languages than French and Dutch in Brussels, which present politics hardly seems to notice.

Wednesday was an exciting day for Dutch in Sheffield and both talks attracted good audiences. The first was was spiced up by some excellent critical questions from students who kept Wim thinking on his feet. It is sure to have provided the necessary inspiration for student projects and essays later this year. The second one was attended by people from all over university and in fact all students of Dutch should have attended this as a quick introduction to the linguistic and political situation in Belgium. You can reread a step by step account of it on Twitter: @FrenchSheffield.