Haley De Korne: «It's a long path to get away from those old stereotypes»

Haley, can you tell me about your educational and professional background, and how you became interested in multilingualism and language activism?

I have always been fascinated with both language diversity and how different languages structure meaning differently and different languages can arguably give us a different window into the world depending on how they deal with things like animacy and gender and the different words that they have for different objects. So I started researching indigenous languages already in my bachelor's studies because I became aware of the issue of language endangerment, the fact that perhaps up to half of the languages that humans have developed over millennia are at risk of going extinct.

One of my main motivations is learning about some of these different languages and learning about how we can perhaps create a world in which all of our language diversity doesn't go extinct in which we have room for different languages and different ways of expressing and different ways of thinking really. So I have studied in anthropology, in linguistics and human geography. The field I associate most with now is applied linguistics where we look at real world challenges that relate to language and communication.

I don't know if applied linguistics exists as such in German-speaking academia. I also sometimes say that I do socio-linguistics because I look very much at language in society or educational linguistics, looking at language in educational contexts. My doctorate is in educational linguistics, and I studied indigenous language education in a specific region of Mexico, in Oaxaca in the south of Mexico.

I looked at how one indigenous language, which is called Isthmus Zapotec, is being taught in community programs, as well as in some schools and some universities that are making the effort to change the language hierarchy in that context. So many, many indigenous languages have been marginalized through processes of colonization and continue to be threatened, sometimes due to ethnic or racial prejudices, socioeconomic prejudices. But I see in many places positive trends as well, where languages are being recognized and being included in promising ways.

So that, in a nutshell, is my background and my motivation.

More generally, how has your journey been in this field so far?

I started off already in my bachelor's doing a project looking at indigenous language revitalization and teaching in northern Michigan, where I grew up. The language there is often called Ojibwe or Anishinaabemowin is the proper name. And so from early on, I was meeting indigenous language teachers and program coordinators and people who are at the grassroots level of the struggle to preserve endangered languages.

And that inspired me and motivated me to keep studying, to keep trying to learn skills that would be useful in helping them answer some of the questions they had about how do I make this program work? How do I create better learning materials? How do I get the regional government to recognize what we're doing so that we can get some funding, for example? 

I've been very fortunate to learn from teachers and language promoters in different contexts. So I also studied applied linguistics in British Columbia, in Canada. I spent a year in Luxembourg learning about multilingual education in Luxembourg. I've done a project on multilingual education in the Philippines with Save the Children, which is an NGO. And then I've done a lot of research in Mexico on indigenous language education there. So I have found it very inspiring and very useful to learn from practitioners in these different contexts.

And I'm very happy to get the chance to meet some Swiss education practitioners and to learn what's happening here and what people are working on here. There's certainly many differences between indigenous language education in Mexico and German or Italian or French education in Lucerne. But there's also some common questions about how to teach language and to promote multilingualism that are interesting to consider across contexts.

Could you elaborate on one of your current projects at the Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan, known as MultiLing? What are its main objectives?

So the MultiLing-Center, or the full name, as you correctly said, Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan, is attempting to promote interdisciplinary research on multilingualism, where we look at both cognitive or psychological aspects of language processing and development, as well as social and political and ideological aspects of multilingualism in people's lives, in social practice, and in societal institutions and structures. So we have quite an ambitious aim as a research center. And we have colleagues who are experts in these different areas.

And we have also an applied linguistic aim in that we're aiming to contribute knowledge that will help address problems related to multilingualism and help to improve quality of life for multilingual speakers, whether it's through understanding more about language development or language and aging, or helping to intervene in social services or educational programs, for example. So our aims are quite ambitious. And we make small progress towards them as best as we can.

What are some key challenges you’ve encountered, especially in southern Mexico or northern Norway, and what have been some rewarding experiences?

There are, when it comes to the promotion and teaching of minority languages, such as indigenous languages in Mexico or Sámi, the indigenous language in northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, one key challenge is ideological or related to attitudes and beliefs. During the era of nation building and colonization, there was a strong push towards a monoculture, monolingual norm. And subsequently, other languages and other cultures were being explicitly framed as something negative, something from the past, something barbaric, even.

And it's a long path to get away from those old stereotypes or those old beliefs, and to move towards an era in which we recognize the rights of different cultural groups and the linguistic rights of these groups. So the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for example, is from 2007. That's, you know, a few years back, but not so many years back.

In Norway, Sámi was recognized as an official language in the 1990s. And in Mexico, indigenous languages were recognized as official in 2003. So we have in this new century, 21st century, there is a shift in the ideological space and also the political space, which recognizes minority languages more and more and recognizes the rights of groups to have self-determination and to use their heritage language.

But it's a long process to change the attitudes and the way people feel at the grassroots level. And indigenous language speakers often still meet prejudice from majority language speakers asking, why would you teach this language to your children? Isn't it something from the past? Shouldn't we move forward and all speak the same language? So another part of the problem is the idea that we should all just speak one language. And if we speak more than one language, that's not normal, or that's a problem, that multilingualism is a problem.

Maybe here in Switzerland, there's a bit less of that. You do have multiple languages within the EU, there's the mother tongue plus two approach. But there's still in many places, this idea that extra languages, we should just drop them.

They're a problem. When we know from research that the human brain can manage many languages and can actually benefit from acquiring and using multiple languages on a regular basis. So that's also a challenge then to deal with what we can call a monolingual ideology or a monolingual bias that doesn't leave space for other languages.

And then finally, of course, you have to mention the challenge of resources. There are always limited resources, no government or department of education has unlimited funds to make everything happen. So of course, there's always difficult decisions that have to be made.

And any initiative to promote a minority language will have to be negotiated within the political context. But these are not impossible challenges. These are things that we can and are making progress on, in my view.

What are the implications of teaching global languages, like English, alongside local indigenous languages for social well-being and linguistic equality?

I think it's very important to show the equality of different languages within the education system. So nowadays, most people are exposed to a lot of English online and in the media and will very clearly get the message that you need English for work or you need English to travel. English is an important language.

And I don't deny that English is an important language. But at the same time, other languages can be important for other reasons. If there's a language that you would use to speak with your grandmother, that's an incredibly important form of communication where you will learn a lot about your family history and all the knowledge that your family has.

So in the educational space, sometimes we only represent certain global languages as important and other languages are really erased or not mentioned. So at least mentioning, and if possible, including the presence of other languages and the fact that it can have meaning for an individual student in their personal communicative repertoire is an important step, I would say.

Could you share insights on how trans-languaging practices could be integrated into culturally or linguistically diverse educational settings?

The topic of trans-languaging can be a little contentious when we're talking about minoritized or endangered languages. And this is because there are so few spaces where they get to be taught and to be used.

And thus there's sometimes a need to really protect those spaces and try to make it a space only for that minoritized language or where that language really is the dominant language without switching over to another language in the environment. So sometimes people working with minority language education really reject trans-languaging in their classrooms because they want to create this protected space. At the same time, minority languages are always spoken alongside other big languages, have a lot of contact with those languages, and in daily communication most speakers of these languages will use a lot of trans-languaging.

So Isthmus Zapotec, the language I work with in Mexico, an authentic Isthmus Zapotec conversation is going to include quite a lot of words that we could call Spanish. These words have been taken into Isthmus Zapotec as part of the language in the way that certain English words have been taken into other languages and they're sort of appropriated into the language. So this kind of trans-languaging happens every day and for some teachers it's important to recognize it and not to stigmatize it and to say, yeah it's okay, speak as much as you can in the target language, but if you need to borrow from another language that's fine, don't worry about it.

I've seen different attitudes and different strategies of indigenous language teachers on this particular issue. Some who feel strongly that no, I can't allow trans-languaging, I need to protect and really create this space. Others who are more flexible and say, well that's the way people speak on the street so we might as well use that in the classroom as well.

And I think there's good arguments behind both and it really depends where the teaching is happening, who the students are, what their aims are. Sometimes there really is a need to say, no we're creating a sheltered space and other times it's less important, I would say.

Which of your publications or contributions do you believe has had the most impact on the field, and why?

Interesting, well I don't, I think some of the things that I've produced as a scholar that have probably had the most impact are actually not my academic publications but rather more practice-oriented materials.

So in collaboration with language teachers in Mexico, I've created some templates for indigenous language workshops that can be used by people who don't have teacher training but who speak the indigenous language and who want to do some community-based classes. They can use this template and it can help them build up a simple lesson with the linguistic knowledge that they have to then have a lesson with children. And I know that those those templates have been used for example. I also, when I did a project for Save the Children on multilingual education in the Philippines, wrote a report on assessment in multilingual classrooms and the impact that assessment has and the assessment regime that teachers are working within, the impact that that can have on the efforts to teach the local mother tongues and to teach in a multilingual way.

And that I think is probably the most downloaded thing that I have written and published because the Philippines has been trying to implement a mother tongue multilingual education model. So there's a lot of teachers who are told okay do this and they go online and they look for resources and that's one thing that they might find, some of them have found. So while I enjoy writing academic publications in dialogue with other researcher colleagues, I don't necessarily think that my academic publications are the most impactful thing that I produce to be entirely honest.

But in terms of impact in the scholarly domain, not the practice domain, it takes time for things to make an impact, to be read and to be cited. And I think that at this point some of the work that I did a while ago on indigenous language education policy or on bicultural identity, those things have been cited more but I think it's because they've been published for a long time and then people see them. So yeah that's hard to say.

What do you see as future directions for research in multilingualism and language activism?

I think the theory-practice nexus is crucial. While some more traditional approaches to research might focus on theory building and knowledge for the sake of knowledge, I think in the field of multilingualism the social significance of what we do is crucial, and more and more the strategies that universities and research funding bodies are producing are recognizing that research needs to address social problems, research needs to help with issues that people care about every day. Of course there is room for purely theoretical research, I don't deny that, but I think in particular for those working with multilingualism then the practice orientation is really key.

In a university of teacher education that's not a revolutionary thing to say because everything people do here has that societal relevance. I work in a department of linguistics where many of my colleagues are not that interested in societal relevance and they're more interested in theory and maybe documenting language diversity but not intervening in the messiness of the real world. So my answer is informed by where I sit and where I work in a linguistics department that we can't ignore the real world and we need to engage with the challenges that are emerging around us.

I think another key direction that is supported and even and demanded more and more is an interdisciplinary approach, and as I mentioned that's something that we're working towards with the Multiling Center. I've also been part of a project with ecologists and biologists documenting indigenous plant names and plant uses and then my part in the project was helping to take the information that they documented and turn it into pedagogical materials that could be used again in community workshops. This kind of interdisciplinary project where language experts or multilingualism experts are talking to people who are working in the area of environmental conservation or health communication, health literacy for example: there's a lot of important intersections between these areas and bringing a multilingualism lens to those topics can be really important as well.

So in terms of what kind of topics I think need to be researched then it's the ones that address real problems that are observable around us and the ones that don't lock themselves into one narrow disciplinary approach but are open to interdisciplinary collaboration.

What advice would you give to young researchers and activists who are passionate about preserving or reviving minoritized languages?

Oh yes, definitely. I would say that it's very important to keep a big perspective and keep the long game perspective. When we're passionate about something we want to solve all the problems right away and sometimes you might actually make a big splash with your very first attempt but if you don't that doesn't mean it was a failure. I very much believe in the importance of small efforts that make a small change over time and sticking to something over time when we're working on issues that relate to broad social attitudes and prejudices or structural inequalities and systems that need to change in some way. None of that is going to change overnight.

So having a long-term commitment and staying hopeful and staying positive despite the fact that not everything might seem to go the way you want or not everything might seem to have the impact you want it to have is very important. Secondly having a team or a network that you're a part of. No one makes an enormous social change alone and really no one does groundbreaking research alone either.

So this is both whether you're an activist or a researcher you need good colleagues, you need a support network, people you can talk to when it didn't go the way you wanted it to, people you can learn from and be inspired by. So not trying to do it alone but really working in a collective way when possible. And personally, I find it very useful to learn from different contexts as well as I mentioned earlier.

Of course, your place-based context-specific knowledge is really important but it's also nice to kind of raise your view and take a broader perspective and learn from other places as well. And keep a sense of humor for dealing with the ups and downs of this kind of engagement.

What motivates you personally to continue working in this challenging field?

Well when we look at the big societal challenges like climate change and poverty and conflict, it's easy to say that language is over there and how could we spend time on language that's not one of these pressing conflicts.

For me I'm very glad that people are working on climate change and poverty and conflict resolution and as someone who's always been passionate about language, I feel that my work on language is also taking up a useful space within the broader picture of social well-being and what we need to understand in order to have functioning societies in our current era of diversity, of globalization, and migration. So while I sometimes think maybe if I really want to make an impact I should switch over to study climate change, right? But I think that we need people looking at these different areas and we do need people who are interested in how communication happens, in how languages are being taught and being used, and how we can continue to develop better strategies and better systems that are supportive of the multilingual population that we have around the globe today.

Finally, how do you balance your academic responsibilities with fieldwork, community engagement, and the pressures associated with these challenges?

That's very challenging, there's never enough time to do everything. This is where the networks come into play and now that I have the great privilege of working at a university, I do have less time to spend hanging out in community workshops and schools in southern Mexico, for example, but I'm able to try to work with junior scholars and teachers who maybe do have the time to be there and are able to be in those spaces and I'm able to try to acquire funding that can support some of their activities. So one approach is to try to think of the bigger picture and your networks and not try to do it all yourself, but try to support other people in roles that you maybe don't have the time or the expertise to do yourself. The other piece of advice is again to keep the long game in mind and try to stay patient and not too frustrated with the fact that you cannot do it all at once. Sometimes you have to prioritize one thing over another at certain times.