By: Matthew Richmond, LSE
On 15th July, the Latin American Geographies network (LAG) held its first online event: a roundtable on ‘Afro-Latinx, Black and Indigenous Geographies in Times of COVID-19’, which included an exciting group of speakers from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. When the organising committee began planning the event, we were quite quick to agree on the format, theme and speakers. However, when we got down to the logistics, one question kept coming up: what language would the event be in?
We had invited Spanish- and Portuguese-speakers who had varying levels of proficiency in English. We also knew that much of our audience might not be fluent in one or more of these three languages. We eventually settled on holding –and promoting– the roundtable as a “trilingual” event. We hoped that advertising it as such would prepare audience members for the likelihood that (depending on their own language skills) there would be sections that they might have difficulty following, but also that this was justified by the opportunity to open a conversation between diverse and interesting speakers and contexts.
Ultimately the roundtable was a success. It was adeptly chaired, there were stimulating presentations from the presenters, excellent questions from the audience, and the response we received was overwhelmingly positive (though we welcome further feedback). The experience got me thinking more generally about the role of language in academic exchange and my own personal experiences with language learning. In what follows, I explore these questions with the aim of developing proposals for how LAG can realise our aims of engaging openly and inclusively with Latin American scholarship, and thus benefit as fully as possible from the knowledge of our diverse members and interlocutors.
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Like many academics who work in two or more languages, I have had a long, slow and often uncomfortable relationship to language learning. In particular, having spent six of the last eight years living and working in Brazil, at different academic institutions, I have learned a lot about the dynamics of academic exchange across linguistic divides, in part by discovering my own linguistic limitations.
A first conquest for me during my PhD was being able to read academic texts in Portuguese, followed later by the feat of being able to sit through entire seminars and understand most of what was said. However, these receptive linguistic activities were the easy part. I soon discovered that it was far more challenging to talk about my research. I could partially get around this by preparing carefully scripted presentations, but when I found myself in non-scripted exchanges my fluency would quickly abandon me. Only after several years and much practice did I feel remotely capable of speaking off the cuff in academic contexts. Even then though, there was still a final frontier: writing. Throughout my academic career to date, I have had the advantage of being able to write primarily in my first language and although other aspects of my work life have mainly been conducted in Portuguese, my written Portuguese still feels heavily inflected by English. It is a skill that I have not been obliged to master, and as a result it remains underdeveloped (hence why –ironically– you are reading this in English!)
As this shows, there are many different skills and gradations of competency involved in the process of language learning. These develop gradually and unevenly, also affected by each individual’s background, circumstances and aptitudes. Despite, this as students (at least in the UK), we are generally not encouraged to actively cultivate academic language skills in a holistic way or to integrate them into plans for career development. Instead, we are left to seek pragmatic fixes, individually and on an ad hoc basis. For English speakers who conduct research in non-Anglophone environments, this tends to mean learning just enough to conduct our research, and, perhaps, familiarise ourselves with the relevant non-English scholarship. For non-native English speakers, a far wider range of skills is often required, including an ability to speak and write effectively, though this too depends on individual circumstances.
There is, of course, an entire political-economic and neo-colonial architecture underpinning these pragmatic decisions. Centuries of British imperialism and decades of US superpower status have helped to make English the default language of global academia. Many other languages have rich academic cultures and institutions, of course, and there are also intense inequalities between official and indigenous or minority languages in non-Anglophone countries (a particularly pertinent issue in Latin America). Nonetheless, at the global scale, English serves a hegemonic function. This places a huge premium on English language proficiency, and intensifies gatekeeping in Anglophone environments – whereas I was never required to formally demonstrate my proficiency in Portuguese before taking up postdoctoral positions in Brazil, international students in the UK must earn language qualifications just to undertake undergraduate study.
All of this puts non-native English speakers at a collective disadvantage. However, this can be more easily overcome by citizens of (usually rich) countries where formal English is taught from an early age or where additional resources are available to assist student language learning. Elsewhere, such barriers are only overcome when (usually wealthy) individuals are able to access such services privately. Taken together, all of these barriers ensure that a huge amount of knowledge produced in non-Anglophone contexts is systematically excluded from international academic debates.
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Given the powerful logics that sustain such global imbalances, I am interested in exploring strategies for how we at LAG can create conditions for more equal and democratic academic exchanges. This brings me to some further insights I have gained from my time in Brazilian academia about what happens in situations where such imbalances are less intense.
I have often found myself at events in Brazil where visiting Spanish-speaking academics have come to present their work. These visitors usually do not speak Portuguese and instead present in Spanish. Their Brazilian audiences also usually do not speak fluent Spanish, but are able to understand what is said. When it comes to discussions, some audience members may attempt “Portuñol” (those faltering attempts to speak another language, similar to what we call “Franglais” or “Spanglish” in Britain). More common though, is a kind of spontaneous reciprocity: questions and comments come from the floor in Portuguese and are responded to in Spanish. It is reminiscent of scenes I have often seen in London – of parents speaking to young children in their first language and the children replying in English. Both sides produce the language they feel most comfortable with, while being entirely receptive to the other, together constituting a seamless flow.
In the case of Spanish–Portuguese academic exchange, several factors contribute to this seamlessness. There is high degree of lexical similarity between the two languages – far more than either has with English, or even other romance languages. This means that it is relatively easy to deduce meaning and grasp the basic patterns of variation. In academic contexts, this is further assisted by the fact that speakers and audiences are, by definition, formally educated and usually knowledgeable about the topic at hand.
Beyond this, however, participants in such exchanges tend to use further strategies to facilitate communication, like speaking slowly and clearly, avoiding colloquialisms, and making use of non-verbal gestures and prompts. Philosopher Manuel DeLanda has described how in sustained contact situationsbetween different languages, even more innovative solutions often arise. He gives the example of slavery in the Americas, where slave owners typically brought together enslaved Africans from different language groups to avoid communication that they feared would lead to rebellions. This produced a process of “pidginisation” among slaves in order to communicate, as they simplified the language imposed upon them by removing redundant words. (This was later followed by “creolisation” over subsequent generations – a re-complexification that departed from official colonial languages). Today, in linguistic contact zones, like border regions, ports and markets, similar communicative strategies can also be widely observed.
By contrast, the relationship I have observed in Brazilian academia between Portuguese and English is very different. Unlike many other countries, a lack of English proficiency in Brazil is not a major barrier to career progression. Nonetheless, some Brazilian academics do speak excellent English, very many more speak “Portinglês”, and even those who speak little or no English are usually able to read and can often understand it when spoken slowly. With some minimal knowledge and effort on the other side, communication with Anglophone academics could be perfectly viable, as it is with their Spanish-speaking counterparts. However, when English speakers visit, exchanges are far less equal. Typically, the presenter will speak in the same way they would to any international audience, and there is no assumption that they should receive questions in Portuguese. Instead members of the audience will speak in English, or, if they lack the confidence to attempt Portinglês, will just keep quiet. In other words, Anglophone hegemony asserts itself and some voices are silenced.
Interestingly though, these roles can shift when all members of a multi-lingual group have at least some knowledge of Portuguese. In reading and writing groups I participated in as a postdoc, we would often read English texts – either articles that were not available Portuguese or manuscripts we had written and intended to submit to English-language journals. Nonetheless, our discussions were always in Portuguese. In these spaces, Portuguese was the easiest language in which everyone could communicate and so it could be activated even within a wider hegemonic architecture that ensured we were often reading in English.
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These games of scale and position, resting on top of larger unequal structures, determine under what circumstances different languages are activated in academic exchanges. In contact situations between large groups, Anglophone hegemony tends to exert a gravitational force, silencing less confident English speakers and preventing us from learning from and with them. The opportunity cost of this is especially great in an age where digital technologies allow us to connect with geographically distant scholars, practitioners and activists, like those we heard from at our recent event. These individuals may have profound knowledge of the issues we wish to understand, but are often less likely to have had access to the resources and opportunities required to develop English proficiency.
However, as I have tried to suggest, under certain conditions this logic can be subverted. Alternatives can be carved out and cultures of more equal linguistic exchange actively developed. Of course, given the inherent challenges associated with language learning, it is not realistic to expect most academics to develop proficiency in several languages. After all, Anglophone hegemony is also convenient for many non-native English speakers (that’s part of what makes it hegemonic!) However, I believe that for a community of scholars like LAG, which is based in an Anglophone country but dedicated to learning about and from a region in which two other (lexically similar) languages predominate, it should not be too difficult to imagine more equal and flexible linguistic exchanges.
This need not mean translating everything we do into three languages – an effort that would require time and resources that are not always available. It also does not necessarily entail rotating formally between the three principal languages of the network for different activities and events, which could risk creating siloes. Rather, I am talking about experiments like that we conducted with on 15th July, where we sit with linguistic difference and accept the imperfectness of communication across languages, while acknowledging that doing so is ultimately viable and carries benefits that heavily outweigh the costs. Individually, this probably means we need to get in the habit of speaking other languages imperfectly or conducting conversations in which we speak one language and expect to receive replies in another. Such changes may be especially uncomfortable for us “native” English speakers for whom Anglophone hegemony is most naturalised. But our contribution is crucial if we are to have any hope of breaking down linguistic barriers and opening up the possibilities that they currently suppress.
These suggestions may seem fairly timid in the context of widespread calls for a more root-and-branch decolonisation of academia. There are much deeper inequalities of knowledge production, not least the multiple ways in which speakers of indigenous languages are silenced. Making such voices heard on their own terms is a far greater challenge, and entail bolder demands than those I am proposing here. However, this makes it even more inexcusable that we should impose further linguistic barriers on voices that already struggle to be heard. We can, at the very least, create spaces in which in Spanish, Portuguese and other widely spoken languages – often more accessible to these excluded groups – can coexist on more equal terms with English. I believe LAG can set a positive example for how to do this in new and creative ways, starting with those I have outlined.
So, with this aim in mind, here is my proposal: Let’s all speak Portuñol!