Penny Ur at TESL Canada

Quick report from Kamloops, BC, where I'm at Thompson Rivers University for the TESL Canada conference. Yesterday I was at the Graduate Student Symposium where Penny Ur was the keynote speaker.

Her topic was "English as an International Language: What Difference Does it Make?" Ur is an interesting person to address this topic because she's kind of a teacher's teacher -- she doesn't have a PhD and hasn't made a name as a fancy scholar or theorist, but she's incredibly well known to almost every ESL teachers because of her books about practical classroom activities.

I like seeing somebody like her wade into the English in the World debate because she can help to cut through the theoretical morass most of us are stuck in.

Her main point, which is indeed a very practical one, was that NNES-NNES communication is the norm. Rather than wanting to do descriptive research like Jenkins, Seidlhofer, and the other ELF people, Ur asks instead "how then shall we teach?"

She went through Kachru's circles and touched a little on ELF, finally suggesting three possible ways of teaching EIL.

1. One of the native varieties (i.e., US/UK)
2. Diverse flexible models (i.e., all the trendy theoretical stuff -- grammarless, context-based, no right/wrong, focus on intelligibility rather than rules, etc)
3. A standard variety (i.e., the mythical -- my adjective, not hers -- World Standard English)

She argued that #3 was the most sensible for teaching. I understand her point, but her WSE ended up looking more like splitting the cost between American and British English, leaving out regionalisms and deferring to "simplicity" (program > programme, zee > zed) and other common sense-ish rules to settle disputes.

This makes a lot of sense, but it really just sounds like what every conscientious EFL teacher tries to do -- we're aware that there are different varieties, but we're pretty much bound to teach our own variety plus those major differences that we are aware of. How many times have I talked about crisps, chips, potato chips, and french fries in China? How many times have I made the "pants vs underwear" speech? I kind of feel like focusing on these bigger obvious differences distracts us a bit.

The big question -- "who decides?" -- is in part being answered by corpora, and I'd like to see how ELF research can support Ur's argument for a world standard -- though when I asked her whether she'd accept ELF features like non-marked third person verbs she said "the jury is still out" on these expressions which are "jarring on the ears."

In the end I didn't really think Ur's argument for #3 was much different from #1. #2 is untenable for a number of reasons -- and actually very few people support it outside of tenured professors in developed countries -- but the lacunae between actual usage, preferred usage, and what is taught are so wide as to make an argument for any of these pretty difficult. As usual, it comes down to teaching as best you can with what you know, and continuing to educate yourself about what English is and how it works.

The next keynote is Steven Pinker, who is not a TESOL professional, but a famous cognitive linguist and proponent of evolutionary psychology, which is probably my least favorite model for understanding human behaviour. But I've heard he's an interesting speaker.

Thought: Shifting from WEs to 'variation' in general

"Acceptability" is a facet of variation. If we accept the idea that error is in the eye of the beholder, we can investigate how/why people identify problematic variations.

But to limit that to one perspective might be too narrowing -- there are plenty of people who have come up with different ways of looking at variation. (Ferris/Truscott? Williams?) So what if I compare readers' reactions/rejections of certain chunks of language to a number of things:

- attested/proven/proposed features of a particular local variety of E? (We have to assume there's some kind of assumed standard English in mind that the local usage is being compared to -- and of course that's tricky, too, but we can at least gather, from WEs theory, that 'unenlightened' respondents are judging their local English against 'standard English')

 

- proposed features of ELF (this is a lot more important than i thought it would be, actually. The more I think about ELF the more sense it makes, and it would be interesting to compare what I find to ELF ideas.)

- traditional "common errors made by ESL writers" (Cf Hinkel, Silva)

- slightly less codified but also commonly cited "common errors made by Chinese L1 speakers" (cf. the thing from Chang that I wrote about a while back)

- this '"cross-language relations" thing which I'm kind of afraid of

In the end this study would be less about the bottom-up understanding of CE and more about how we deal with variation in academic writing. Can I actually look at all of these though?

Hmm.

The Interface Between Chinese & English

"English and Chinese constitute two of the most powerful language complexes on earth and it seems highly likely that their influence on one another in future will transcend anything that has so far transpired between them."

Tom McArthur's Oxford Guide to World English (2002)


"At a time when the PRC is moving towards full membership of the World Trade Organisation and the further opening of trade and other contacts with the world (including the 2008 Beijing Olympics), much more might be said about the possible futures of Chinese Englishes. That however would be the subject of another study, one which would deal with the contemporary and unfolding story of the continuing 'interface' between the world's largest two language cultures, both in China and throughout diasporic Chinese communities worldwide."

"I am grateful to Professor Tom McArthur for suggesting the use of the term 'Chinese-English interface' to refer to the complex cultural and linguistic interactions between the Chinese languages and World Englishes at a seminar on this topic at the University of Hong Kong in March 2000."

Kingsley Bolton's 2003 book Chinese Englishes: A Sociolinguistic History


“ [McArthur’s] idea was that English and Chinese are  both world languages, and are  both pluricentric languages, and that these languages are in contact in various places worldwide – in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Taiwan, but also, in the Chinese immigrant communities of Europe and North America. And that this contact is significant for the development of world languages, and for the development of both languages, not least modern Chinese which has been influenced by European languages in many ways over the last 200 years or so.”
– Bolton, personal communication


...stay tuned...

Categorizing acceptability judgments

Goss, Zhang, & Lantolf (1994) were actually the first to use a discourse analysis approach to AJTs. Here's what they say about characterizing the participants' judgments (their tasks were done in groups):

"...we need some criterion to differentiate between talk that reveals evidence of judgments based on genuine linguistic intuitions and talk that points to some other source, such as memorized rules or L1 translations, underlying the judgments."

[Personally I don't care especially about that difference at this point, but I do want some kind of taxonomy along these lines.]

"At the moment we believe that talk that cites rules, pedagogical or otherwise and accurate or not, the source of which may be an instructor or textbok, or that involves translations into the native language, is indicative of judgments based on something other than real linguistic intuitions."

[Again, leaving aside the question of determining 'real linguistic intuitions,' this starts to suggest a way to categorize.]

"On the other hand, talk characterized by the absence of rules, by remarks like It sounds right, or a difficulty on the part of respondents in putting what they know into words, we construe as evidence that abstract linguistic competence of some type underlies the judgments."

[This is good stuff for the interviews, definitely, when participants are asked to explain their judgments.]

Higgins (2003) and Rubdy et al (2007 & 2008) look for evidence of ownership:

"...not just indigenization in which speaker appropriate English for their own needs but the degree to which speakers 'project themselves as legitimate speakers with authority over the language.' (Higgins)

Higgins uses some ideas from Erving Goffman, of all people, to get at that. Between the three studies there are 5 things they look for in the data:

1. references of legitimization (appeal to external authority)

2. Use of pronouns ('you' or 'I' (or we?) rather than 'it's wrong)

3. modality indicators (what you can, can't, should use)

4. References to the speaker's own English usage 

5. References to intuition / not being able to explain

I might add

6. Teacher-y comments about incorrectness/error and/or direct suggestions for changes

So, all together now, based on this and what I recollect from the data I've seen in my own study so far

1. appeal to external authority

a. textbook/dictionary

b. teacher/how I was taught

c. native speaker or other expert speaker usage (eg 'Americans don't say this' or 'I've never seen this' - although maybe this could be under #4 also)
d. reference to grammar? Does a reference to grammar automatically mean 'external authority?"

2. Use of pronouns

a. "You say" (indexes authority - I tell you what to say)

b. "We say" (indexes membership in community of expert English-knowers)

c. "I say" (asserts individual authority as an expert English-knower)

d. "They say" (if referring to a preferred usage, a reference to expert/NS use; if referring to a dispreferred usage, a reference to learners or people who don't know English well)

3. modality (can, should, may, etc -- could analyse based on 'strength?') + how it is modified (definitely, etc) - not quite sure how to classify these.

4. References to the speakers' own English usage/knowledge (broaden, include S usage as in 2d?)

a. "I would say" (similar to 2c or 3, I suppose)

b. References to what is taught (I/we teach them to do X)

c. probably some other stuff...?

5. References to intuition - more for the interview, but could be things like:
a. feels, seems, etc (suggests strong intuitive sense of language?)
b. Vague/ambiguous adjectives ('this seems weird')

6. Teacher stuff
a. Simple "this is wrong" stuff. (also 'this is Chinglish') - could specifically mention an error
b. correction without mentioning anything else (could include modals)

...to be developed...

What Linguistic Features of CE have been 'claimed' in the Literature?

It's easy to complain that most people are operating with an unclear definition of Chinese English, but what have people actually claimed in the literature as empirical features of CE? Leaving aside discourse, which is a big one in itself, here's what I'm seeing.

Vocabulary

Summary:

1. Loanwords via transliteration of Chinese words

2. Loanwords via direct translation of Chinese terms

3. Semantic shift - word's meaning changes due to cultural context (many types mentioned by Xu)

4. Direct translation of Chinese idioms/chengyu (may be grammatical ...or 'weird?')

---

From the literature:

- Political terms (running dog, capitalist roader) 

- Standardized English translations of official slogans

- semantic shifts -- propaganda ('bad' in AmE, 'good' in CE)

- some Chinese idioms 

[Cheng 1992]

- loan translations (special economic zone)

- semantic shift (peasant = good, intellectual = bad)

[Gao 2001]

- loan words (baozi, mantou)

- loan translations (red envelope)

[Yang 2005]

- borrowings (same as loan words above) from various Chinese dialects

[Yang 2009]

- "Chinglish" idioms widely recognized (good good study, day day up)

[Fang 2008]

- Chinese loanwords (ginseng, feng shui) 

 - loan translations (paper tiger, Cultural Revolution)

-- standing LWs (tai chi) vs ad hoc loanwords (standing LWs probably begin as ad hoc LWs)

- 'nativized English words whose original meanings in ENglish have shifted...in relation to the sociolx contexts of China' (p 35) - aka semantic shift

INCLUDES: semantic broadening (play), semantic narrowing (acheivement = grade in school), pejoration (copy = piracy), amelioration ('upgrading' a word -- fixed = reliable), semantic change (open = turn on), "haphazard use of hyponyms" (hard to tell if this is on purpose or not)

[Xu 2010]

Grammar/Syntax

Not a lot out there done from a WEs perspective, but we could probably get something from CR if we wanted. Xu offers:

(from spoken discourse)

1. Adjacent default tense (yesterday I write a letter)

2. Null subject/object utterances (sometimes just play basketball)

3. Co-occurrence of connective pairs (because I X, so I Y)

4. subject pronoun copying (my mother she..., the building it...)

5. yes-no response (you don't like sports? yeah (i don't))

6. topic-comment (Cigars, the president never smokes them; Beijing...there are many old buildings)

7. unmarked OSV(other jobs I want to try; both languages I can't speak well)

8. inversion in subordinate finite wh-clauses (I don't know what should I learn)

(from newspapers)

9. Nominalization (there are a lot of specific things here that I need to take more time to read)

10. Multiple-coordinate construction (done with 'Chinese pragmatic motivations') (p. 92 - not unique to CE, but still a feature of CE for cultural/pragmatic reasons -- like 'the three represents)

11. Modifying-modified sequence (preference for forward-linking, subordinate clauses first)

12. Use of imperatives (in Ha Jin -- doesn't seem that unique to me, but he makes a good argument on p 102)

13. Tag variation (varying tag Qs, like Chinese)

Think-Aloud Data Analysis: "Open" vs "On"

"...your alarm clock is open..."

6 commenters point out that "open" is not the 'right' word to use here. Other suggestions are "on," "set," "turned on," etc.

So: what kind of situation is this?

You can call it a 'direct translation' error, assuming the student is "thinking in Chinese" where 关 means both open (like a door) and turn on (like a light or appliance). So he incorrectly translated guan - he picked the wrong meaning. (But maybe he didn't know that it can be translated as 'turn on' at all.)

Similarly, you could call it 'interlanguage' or 'interference' from Chinese, both of which would also refer to the situation above.

If you didn't want to think about it from an SLA perspective, you could call it a 'word choice' or even 'collocation' error -- any time you write, you can pick whatever word comes next, and in standard English we wouldn't expect an alarm clock to be 'open' but we would expect it to be 'on.' It's not necessarily directly because of Chinese. (It probably is, though, but you can't always prove that. Plus, other NNESs might use it.)

We could go so far as to call it a 'variation,' (that is, a legitimate dialectal difference from standard English) because it seems to be attested that open/close for things like lights is pretty widely used by NNESs. (I know some people who use it.) (see this Google search.)

I guess the most likely (I want to be careful about ascribing intent to the writer) is the 'direct translation' scenario. The commenters are more generally calling it a 'wrong word choice,' and I'm personally sympathetic to calling it a variation. Who's right?

Don't Be Polite

This is an example of the kind of comparison between Chinese English and "English English" that makes me crazy. (NB, this is not written from a world Es perspective -- clearly the author is doing a kind of contrastive analysis and pointing out difficulties or mistakes learners have -- elsewhere in the passage there's pronunciation, vocab, etc.)

I don't mean to be mean to the original author -- I get what they're trying to do. It's meant to be helpful. But from my perspective, it just isn't.

Seeing an asterisk in front of a phrase that is simply not idiomatic in "English English" (note another phrase here I've always been a little weirded out by -- "English people") doesn't seem right. The * is used in linguistics to designate an ungrammatical sentence, or in language learning texts to designate an error. "Please eat more" is not an "error." In fact, it is not just not an error, it's something you could very well hear in a conversation between "English people."

It's not that I don't understand that some of these are uniquely Chinese phrases -- but for the asterisked ones especially, I just don't see any benefit in telling a student not to use them, other than helping them to become some imaginary version of an English Person.

In conclusion*, some corpus linguistics work might really come in handy in reshaping the way we think about this kind of stuff.

UPDATE: Shamefully I note no instances of "don't be polite" or "please eat more" in the British National Corpus. But the limits of what we have already observed does not preclude the existence of the reasonably plausible utterance, right? (Right?)

* PS: I usually use "in conclusion" ironically, to introduce something that is basically a non sequitur. FYI.

Course Evaluations

New rule: don't look at your evaluations until you've taught another (different) course.

Every time I look at my evals I get depressed for several days. I know that they're supposed to be constructive criticism, that they're actually not that bad (really only a few negative comments), that people who have something negative to say are more likely to do the evaluations (only half my class did them), and that people who get lower grades give lower evaluations, but I still end up feeling like I am not only a bad teacher but a bad person. It just makes me feel awful -- and I just glanced at the comments.

I do know I have a lot to work on as a teacher -- I'm pretty disorganized (getting better) and when I give an assignment for the first time I tend to make the instructions vague (getting better at this too).

But I've got to quit reading the comments right when they're emailed to me.

What is Left Unmarked...

....is almost more important that what is left marked.

Usually in AJTs you can only get data about what is unacceptable, not what is acceptable. In other words, you get "this is not OK, because ...." but even if you ask them to give a thumbs up to sentences that are OK, you're not getting much (or any) feedback. On a traditional AJT, you just get nothing and can assume the sentence is part of the language's grammar.

Even on one of these in-context AJTs, though, you don't get anything on the unmarked parts unless you talk about it in the interview. (Which I don't think I did much of, really, though I will go through and find out.)

But...and here is where I am thinking/hoping that using a corpus might come in handy...I think that if I can create a kind of grammatical "map" of the essays and focus in on the stuff that was NOT commented on, I might get an interesting idea of nonstandardisms that are OK in the eyes of readers. (Or at least marginally OKer than what they commented on.)

For example, off the top of my head, I know that none of the commenters marked the chunk "Gulou campus" as unacceptable. In a sense that is the most Chinese phrase in the whole study, because it is an untranslated word used in an English essay. The fact that no one marked it suggests to me that things like this -- names of places I guess, or maybe this could even be considered a direct borrowing from Chinese into English -- are seen as OK by readers. And that therefore doing this, which seems like a feature of CE discourse, is not marked as wrong, and is acceptable...

Hmm. I'm just kind of riffing here, but can we say anything about CE as a result of this "finding?" Can we say something like this?

No reader objected to this  direct transliteration of a Chinese place names. Therefore, transliterations of Chinese place names are likely to be an accepted feature of Chinese English discourse.

I think maybe we can.

Grammar/Vocab Pet Peeves of Today's ESL Teachers

I asked my TESL certificate students to name their grammar (or vocab) pet peeves last week. Here's the list:

- there/they're/their
- contractions in formal writing
- nucular
- anyways
- the word "moist"
- misuse of 's
- your / you're
- the word "bro"
- overuse of articles by ESL students
- the term "VVTI" as relating to cars (this was a bit of an outlier)
- "can not" vs "cannot" (not sure which is right!)
- WRITING IN ALL CAPS
- the word "can" (overused?)
- "my bad"
- "mindful"
- "there is" / "there are" confusion
- you & I vs you & me
- confusion with plurals (for ESL Ss)
- the word "chillax"
- misuse/underuse of apostrophes
- overgeneralization of grammar rules (ESL Ss)
- "wuz up" (spelling)
- "have a fun" (apparently said by Korean moms)
- How to answer "do you mind if..."
- Effect vs affect
- "I could care less"
- "A lot" vs "Alot"
- overuse of exclamation marks
- "_____ one's ass off" (what is its origin, why do people say it?)

Notes on ethnographic notes

Pseudo-procrastinatory/preparatory/general knowledge-up-keep-y notes about how to take ethnographic field notes, ostensibly to jog my memory before commenting on students' attempts to write such notes.

From Atkinson & Hammersley's Ethnography: Principles in Practice. (Ch 7) (Note to self: this is from 1995 edition. 3rd edition pub'd in 2007 is out.)

Fieldnotes: relatively concrete descriptions of social processes and their contexts.


Adopt a wide focus

No attempt to code systematically

"Write down what you see and hear." (BUT: What should you write down; how and when should you write it?)

Use of actual words important.

Balance: concrete and descriptive, yet large scope.

Record speech and action: who, where, what time, what circumstances.

Spradley suggests trying to keep track of the following as a kind of checklist:

Space, Actor, Activity, Object, Act, Event, Time, Goal, Feeling


-----

Thin vs thick description: link.
Thin description: the bare details. The essentials and nothing more.

Some NVivo Resources

Teach Yourself NVivo 8 - Lyn Richards

QSR Tutorials page

Qualitative Data Analysis with NVivo - Patricia Bazely (book)

Handing Qualitative Data - Lyn Richards (book)

Take that post-structuralism

"If language is without an object, action becomes impossible - and therefore all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes pointless and impossible." - Confucius

Halliday v. Chomsky

Halliday is always courteous and circumspect when referring to Chomsky: he only hints at their differences. Nevertheless, it becomes clear from the hints that their theories of language differ radically. Chomsky believes that language is innate: Halliday believes that it is learned. Chomsky believes that all human beings possess a grammatical programme hardwired into the brain: Halliday does not – he believes that grammar mirrors function and is mastered through experience. Chomsky believes in ‘Universal Grammar’: Halliday does not. Chomsky believes that language exists separately from experience: Halliday believes that language only develops through experience of other people and the world around us. Chomsky’s theory is Cartesian – in other words: mind exists separately from matter: Halliday’s ideas are Darwinian – in other words: language and the mind obey the same laws as all other aspects of reality. Chomsky’s theories are metaphysical: Halliday’s are scientific.

From "Michael Halliday at 80: A tribute"

Building on what I mentioned earlier about Dan Everett -- Everett is lately touted as the first linguist to seriously challenge the foundations of Chomskian linguistics, and Halliday's work is extremely unsexy so it's rarely mentioned, but this paragraph shows that most of Everett's criticisms are implicit in Halliday's work. I've said before that I think SFL basically has a marketing problem: all the theory seems incredibly relevant, but then somebody tells you you're not allowed to call things nouns and verbs anymore and it's thanks but no thanks.

Side note: this paragraph also offers a fine example of the discourse I mentioned earlier, as well. Halliday = realistic linguistics = hard science = Darwin. Chomsky = 'theoretical' linguistics = metaphysics (which to a metaphysical naturalist = imaginary magic) = idle speculation = Descartes (who by the way gets an unnecessarily bad rap).

Not that I don't agree with the criticisms of Chomsky's way of explaining UG, but this description sets up a pretty unsustainable binary, if you ask me. And want an answer in fashionable jargon.

I'm blogging a lot so I must be thinking.

Rescuing acceptability

See, the thing is, we have to stop treating competent bilingual English-users are "mere learners." We can't treat their language use or their metalingusitic talk about their language as deficient. Even if that is how they want to see themselves. (There, I said it! I'm an academic asserting that I actually know better than the people whose behavior I am studying! I have crossed over to the dark side!) Modesty about your ability in an L2 is one thing. I am exceedingly modest about my L2 abilities (not without cause, in my opinion). But English is a special case. It is a lingua franca. It is a working language for millions of non-native speakers. It is a language that L2 English teachers function in at a high level.

I believe my Chinese colleagues who teach English at the tertiary level to be highly competent users of English. (I believe many upper-level L2 college students and certainly grad students are highly competent users of English as well.)  Certainly I believe my professors at UBC who speak English as a second language are highly competent users of English. Is there a difference between their English usage/knowledge and mine? Sure, in some abstract way. I am 'closer' to English on a personal level than they are in some ways, though I would argue that many of them are closer to it in a professional way.

Moving acceptability judgments from the domain of theoretical linguistics frees it from accusations that it is not actually measuring what it claims to be measuring -- linguistic/grammatical knowledge at a deep/unconscious mental level.

Moving acceptability judgments from the domain of second language acquisition frees it from the undue burden of having to provide an accurate map of a learner's 'interlinguistic competence' (to use Birdsong's term).

Putting them squarely in the domain of sociolinguistics, language attitudes, and world Englishes, etc. allows AJTs to be considered as another kind of behavioral data, elicited from people who use English in a specific way and a specific context, that can be analysed in a social practice framework.

This AJT data can then be considered in light of the sociocultural realities of English around the world -- insead of in terms of an abstract generative linguistics based on native-speaker intuitions (which is not that relevant to applied linguistics, much of the time), or a gauge of how well someone is learning the 'target language' which should conform to native speaker standards.

Birdsong (1989) on the abuse of acceptability judgments

Theory must account for data; if elicited data are shaky, other data are supplied by introspective fiat. These data conspicuously fit the existing model. If these data are questions by proponents of another model, then the search is on for speakers, be they naive or trained, whose idiolects provide data that fit the first.

He's saying that's a bad thing, FYI. "Introspection" is basically a linguist thinking about it and pronouncing his view as the correct one.

It is in a theory-internal sense that the distinction between 'grammatical' (derived from a grammar or accounted for by a grammar) and 'acceptable' (derived from elicited or introspective evidence) is to be understood.

Birdsong quoting from Levelt et al:

The empirical domain of Chomskian linguistics is linguistic intuitions. The relation between these intuitions and man's capacity for language, however, is highly obscure.

(This does seem pretty nuts.)

Linguistics is a potentially fraudulent enterprise when elicitation data can be manipulated to substantiate pet theoretical analyses.

What language is and does

I don't devote a lot of time to thinking about the fundamental nature of language as a thing in itself, nor the origins of language. (Partly because I am not (a) a linguist or (b) an evolutionary psychologist.) But I do feel like those things are pretty high up in the popular imagination in terms of what "laypeople" (for lack of a better term) want to know about language.

It also seems like the larger discourses of the primacy of the hard sciences, the idea of 'dethroning' the human species as unique in the world, and (maybe this one is reaching too far, but I do think it's growing) the assumed importance of evolutionary explanations for how we do (or even should) go about our business are driving people's interests in language as a cognitive phenomenon that should be studied "scientifically."

I don't by those scare quotes mean it shouldn't be studied that way. I just note that there's not a lot of interest in sociocultural explanations of what language is and how it works in the media. Dan Everett's book Language: The Cultural Tool (which I'm currently reading) has attracted a lot of attention to linguistics and I'm glad that his formula for 'what language is' -- cognition + culture + communication -- includes so much that is sociocultural. And I feel like people will be more likely to accept this argument from him than they would from a sociologist or literary theorist because he couches his arguments, to some extent, in terms that track with the discourses mentioned above.

Of course there's a danger of people seeing that the study of language is a science and thus reifying culture and communication as things that can somehow be pinned down by, say, neurological or biological observation (obviously I don't think they can, and I suspect most people don't), but overall I think the popularity of Everett's work is a good thing for the general understanding of what language does.

Some writing projects

Short essay on long time no see  - submitted to a journal. If rejected, retool and submit elsewhere.

Methods comp - need to edit down more, possibly add examples. Will submit to a journal.

Essay on ''new'' approaches to variation in academic ESL writing - abstract by end of month, draft by end of summer.

Review of Language the Cultural Tool for Books and Culture -- sometime this summer.

Learning the Wrong Lesson from the Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel is an endlessly fruitful metaphor for linguists, and it's showing up in current books like Michael Erard's Babel No More (which I recently won a free copy of somehow), Nicolas Ostler's The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel, and Dan Everett's Language: the Cultural Tool.

Regardless of who's referencing it and for what purpose -- and whether in a religious or secular context -- usually the implication is that it's a drag that we don't all speak the same language, because if we did, it would be better and easier and we'd understand each other. (Think of Douglas Adams' babelfish, a creature that instantly translates from any language to any language.)

This is the wrong lesson to take from Babel -- wrong in the religious sense, and simply wrong in the sense that it  misunderstands what language is and how it works.

To briefly sum up why this is the case, I'd like to quote from Mingyan Hong's excellent dissertation "Spirituality and SLA" (Second Language Acquisition):

Many Christians cite the Babel story as clear evidence that ... that the diversity of languages is not to be celebrated, but should rather be mourned or tolerated while waiting in hope for a promised future restoration of unity. 

This in fact is not the point, she argues. Hong goes on to interview Suresh Canagarajah (a thinker whose implications for a Christian understanding of language really need to be further explored), who adds:

...this is what I see as a sign of the Tower of Babel, eliminating diversity in order to become one against God. And God punished them. The lesson is against monolingualism, or even monoculturalism, reducing the diversity of humanity by becoming one people with a single language, culture, etc.

The point, then, is that the divine mandate for human flourishing is for diversity and difference, not singularity. And indeed, most of us accept the weak form of linguistic relativity -- that linguistic (to say nothing of cultural) differences allow for different perspectives, ways of expressing things, etc. And really, if you get into social constructionism, it's our use of language that in large part creates the world(s) we live in. If we abide by that theory, a single language describing a single reality is nearly impossible. (That assertion has its own epistemological and theological controversies which would need to be sorted out.)

Also, Babel is linked with Pentecost, which is really interesting in that it is an affirmation of multilingualism (because everyone is using his own language) but it also claims that everyone understands what is being said equally. It would be worth exploring that.

The Future of English in Japan (ca. 1935)

From a 1935 issue of the Journal of the American Dialect Society.

Also of note, a related issue some 75 years later: the somewhat dramatically titled "Fall of the Japanese Language in the Age of English".