March 2019 – Page 2 – Educational Sociolinguistics

Code-switching in the workplace

Cixiu Duan

Last week, three PhD candidates gave an impressive lecture about multilingualism. A part of their presentation was about code-switching, mainly situational code-switching and metaphorical code-switching. In this blog, I would like to explore more about code-switching in the workplace.

When I was doing an internship in a foreign company in Shanghai, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Although all of my colleagues are Chinese and Mandarin is our first language, we sometimes mix English words in the conversation. For example:

Boss: 慈修，你update一下这个report, 然后email给我，顺便cc一下John (Cixiu, please update the weekly report, email it to me and cc John in the email.）

Me: 没问题（No problem）.

Blessings in Chinese New Year

Mengting Liu

For Chinese people, Chinese New Year or Spring Festival is the most important event in the lunar calendar. The celebration of Chinese New Year lasts about half a month, from New Year’s Eve (Chuxi) to the 15^th day of the first month (Lantern Festival) on the lunar calendar.

During the celebration of Chinese New Year, many characters are used to represent people’s good wishes. “福” (Fu) is the most frequently used character, which means “Wish you a fortune.” Another example is “招財進寶” (Zhao Cai Jin Bao), which means “ushering in wealth and prosperity”. Interestingly, this blessing is usually written in the form of compound Chinese character.

Blessings such as “恭喜发财” (Gong Xi Fa Cai), “财源广进” (Cai Yuan Guang Jin), etc. all convey the same meaning as “招財進寶”. Other blessings, such as “吉祥如意” (Ji Xiang Ru Yi), “心想事成” （Xin Xiang Shi Cheng), “一帆风顺” ( Yi Fan Feng Shun), etc., all mean “ wish you good luck and everything will go smoothly as you wish.” These good wishes basically convey the same idea, however take different ways to express, often used as greetings for people to start or end a conversation during Spring Festival. These characters or blessings are also printed or written on red scrolls in the form of calligraphy, stuck on or around doors as decorations.

Lantern festival signifies the end of new year celebration. It is a tradition that riddles are printed on lantern for people to solve. Families or friends will gather together to guess the answer from a word, phrase or poem, which provides an opportunity for people to communicate and strengthen their relationships.

Anglo à Paris

Amelia

I Broke Spring this year in Paris (Pah-reeeee), my first time there since I was 20 when I went with my longsuffering mother, dragging her petulant art-school grumpy-teen daughter from Louvre to Pompidou kicking and screaming. This time my agenda included: seeing my sister and her band perform, taking some photos for a friend’s fashion endeavour, and meeting up with an old friend’s Moroccan family. After my ridiculously long day’s journey into night and then day again, I arrived at Charles De Gaulle and immediately started feeling foreign. In PART 1 of this text you can read my ponderings on the linguistic landscape of Paris. In PART 2 you can read a description of the more intimate linguistic landscape of my week in Paris, among friends from here who were there for various reasons (it is less about language and more about a week in Paris: photos to follow)

PART 1: THOUGHTS

All of the signs indicating for one to continue going straight (as opposed to turning left or right) use a down rather than an up arrow. Already the visual landscape required attentive rather than passive consumption. The audio cues were in French, English and Spanish on the train platforms. The trains came, in sequence, onto the same platform with the same terminus but many different destinations – ATTENTION! was required.

Do I get a bonus?

By Andréanne Langevin

This morning I learned something new. I was skimming through the local news and I saw an article that caught my attention: Quel avenir pour la prime au bilinguisme? (What is the future of the bilingual bonus?) In the article, the journalist explains how federal government workers can earn a lump sum of 800$ per year if they can prove their bilingualism (with a language test). She also writes how this bonus was implemented in 1977 and was supposed to be abolished in 1983 once the government had successfully populated its various departments with enough bilinguals to serve the Francophone and Anglophone populations. However, the bonus was never abolished and it now represents about 60 million a year in federal taxpayer money (Beaudoin, 2019).

Hong Kong hotel life

Mela

A burst of blog posts blew into Educational Sociolinguistics in the brief time it took technology to blow me westward to the far East for a week of encounters with extraordinary scholars at the Education University of Hong Kong. A brief time by the calendar, but long in subjective time, measured by the innumerable back-and-forth fractions of an inch that make up all the movement possible in the cramped quarters one is confined to when flying for fifteen hours over the wide Pacific.

While I was uncramping over the weekend, the contributors to this blog were writing about sexism in Chinese and racism in English (the term “bootlicking bilingualism” particularly stood out for me as deserving of a wide public) and applying their knowledge of pragmatics across a range of tricky situations from snack ordering to sales pitching. The blog has been busy. Posts about poetry and how untranslatable it is—along with most of the really interesting language out there—have been flooding in.

“枫桥夜泊” –Language can stimulate something deeper

Dantong

A piece of “古筝曲”（Chinese Zither Music）about the Chinese ancient city “姑苏” （Gu su）

As is known to many people, the past February is one of the most important months for Chinese people, because it is the month for celebrating Chinese new year, which is also called the Spring Festival. During the Spring Festival, Chinese New Year’s Eve is the first day for the family reunion, accordingly, no matter how far away from home, Chinese people are always eager to get back home on this day and stay with their loving families. However, for those Chinese people who need to work or study abroad and cannot go back home, you might see that they use various ways to express their homesick feelings or emotions. For example, here is a news that I saw on the Chinese New Year’s Eve.

Lena Slanisky （2019, February 4）Man Spotted Writing Beautiful Chinese Poetry On STM Metro Platforms In Montreal.

How to translate the untranslatable thing

By Yunjie

I remember, last week, as we were doing the class activity on Style & Interaction, one thing impressed me—when Dr. Kerekes asked Yuri to translate “お疲れ様でした” into English, Yuri said there isn’t any appropriate English equivalent for it.

The interesting thing is, there is an almost correct Chinese equivalent for it—“你(Ni)辛(Xin)苦(Ku)了(Le)”, and I am faced with the same situation with Yuri— until now, I still don’t know how to translate this phrase into English accurately. Someone says it could be translated simply into “Thank you so much”, but it is not just an expression of gratitude. It is more versatile and adaptive linguistically and could be used in more complicated situations. You could say “你辛苦了” to your parents who support the family for a long time, to your teacher who gives an excellent three-hour class, to your classmate who has just finished a great presentation, or to your colleague who worked overtime yesterday. It is more like an acknowledgment of someone’s hard work or efforts, showing that you are empathizing with that person. Therefore, someone suggests it could be translated into “I appreciate what you have done ”, but it would be too formal and serious, not suitable for daily communication. Imagine your friend helped you buy something from the supermarket, would you say “I appreciate what you have done” to that person?

Pragmatics, raciolinguistically.

By: JM

I’m writing this post having been inspired by our last lecture given by Dr. Julie Kerekes on pragmatics. During the lecture, we learned about ‘speech acts’ and how these might be realized through a variety of phrasings. For example, to achieve the speech act of making an invitation, we could say “Wanna grab a bite?” or “I was wondering if you might want to get something to eat”. I’ve always understood these differences in speech act realizations as that of appropriateness; that is, speech which is congruent to its context. Thus, we would probably use a casual expression if the context is such that we are familiar with the interlocutor, and perhaps use an expression that is more polite or distant in formal contexts. If someone were to break these norms of appropriateness, especially a racialized speaker, they would probably be seen through some sort of deficiency-based lens as an ‘incompetent’ or ‘improficient’ speaker. How has that come to be?

Implicit Sexism in Chinese Language

During week 7’s class discussion about gender and identity, my group members and I talked about sexism in our native languages. My group members had a lot to say about that topic and when it was my turn, I told them: “I don’t know, I don’t think there’s sexism in Chinese language.” After some digging, I have to admit I was wrong.

Burgers and bootlicking bilingualism

Victoria

I witnessed a rather interesting interaction downtown the other day that sparked some thought for me, so I thought I would share it here. I’d like to preface this by saying that I did a whole lot of inferring during this brief observation, so please take my reading of the atmosphere with a grain of salt.

While grabbing lunch at an A&W, I was expertly served by a lovely lady with a strong Mediterranean accent (maybe Greek? I wasn’t entirely sure) in excellent English, her demeanour polite and friendly. While I was waiting for my order to be finished, a customer with a Chinese accent approached the woman to ask for a drink. The customer appeared to still be in the fledgling stages of English-learning, pointing at the drink machine to try to make her choice clear to the server. However, in that moment, the server’s entire attitude changed. Rather than smiley and outgoing as she had been with me, she rolled her eyes at the Chinese woman, pointing at the machine as she tried to figure out what the woman wanted, asking “this one? This one?” loudly enough to draw other customers’ and workers’ attention. After the woman and her children left the restaurant, the server turned to complain about the woman to her coworkers, lamenting about how she had slowed down the lunch rush with her difficulty communicating.