Whiteness, Accents, and Children's Media
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Welcome to the NewBooks Network.

Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the NewBooks Network. My name is Bryn Quick, and I'm a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Laura Smith-Khan. Laura is formerly a Chancellor's Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney, and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Law at University of New England.

Her research examines the inclusion and participation of minoritized groups in legal settings, especially migration processes, and seeks to address inequality. She was also the 2022 recipient of the Max Crawford Medal, Australia's most prestigious award for achievement and promise in the humanities. In addition to all of these amazing qualifications, Laura also

Laura is a mum and so am I. My kids are ages 12 and 9 and Laura's kids are ages 7 and 3. And as academic linguist mums, our brains are 100% on the right track.

constantly analyzing language, even when that language comes from the cartoons our kids watch. So today, Laura and I are going to discuss language and accents in kids' cartoon characters, and then we're going to investigate what a choice as seemingly banal as a character's accent has to do with whiteness, standard language ideology, and securing a nation's borders. Laura, welcome

Welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks, Bryn. To get us started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became not just a linguist but a lawyer and migration law scholar as well? Yeah, well, I think maybe like a lot of people who get into linguistics, I had an interest in learning languages from quite a young age, which was great.

kind of quite unusual in my context of being in a fairly monolingual English-speaking small town and family. And that led me to go on an exchange to France when I was a teenager and learned French, and then to pick up further language study at university during that study to study linguistics. So I already had that kind of curiosity about learning a language and using different languages in different contexts.

and then had the chance to start looking at that in a study context. Towards the end of my first degree, I also started to, you know, I'd been studying politics as well in my first degree, as well as languages. And I kind of started thinking, like, I want to kind of study something that has some kind of practical application in a kind of professional context somehow. And that

actually started to make me think about studying law, which was something that in the past I hadn't really thought about. So I ended up enrolling in a law degree after my first degree and spending a total of seven years straight in undergraduate education, which was actually great fun. And I had this opportunity during my law degree to start working with a registered migration agent, which is a professional who does similar work to a lawyer, but specifically on

things related to migration, so applying for visas and this type of thing. And he was originally from Afghanistan himself, and so he actually helped a lot of asylum seekers as part of his work, which really gave me this very unique or very, you know, different type of experience and led me into wanting to do some study in refugee law.

which I did as part of my law degree. And through that discovered where I could bring my interests together in this lovely subfield of looking at language in asylum and migration processes. And I started that as an undergrad essay in one of my subjects in my law degree. And it's, you know, it's still with me now, like 12 years later. So it's been really, really interesting work. I can't believe that you started that in...

undergrad because I've read quite a bit of your PhD thesis. And can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I thought that it was such an interesting combination of language and migration. Yeah. So I just, you know, I had this, I did refugee law as a subject in my final year of my law degree. And we had this opportunity to choose a topic for a research essay, which as an undergrad isn't something that always happens that much. But because of, you know, the work I'd been doing and then

this interest in languages i was having some trouble kind of trying to find a topic and then i just stumbled across something written by the wonderful diana eads who has done some work obviously a lot of work on language in legal settings but also did a little bit of work on language in asylum and that really you know sparked this interest to me i was like wow okay the coming together of my world and i wrote you know i wrote my little essay and then i was like oh really

I really love research, but I've been at university for seven years now, living in one of the most expensive cities in the whole world, working many, many jobs on the side to get through it. I would love to stay here and do this more. But, you know, I need to find a way to actually get paid to do that. And I was really lucky to get some, you know, a three year full time position as a research assistant in refugee law, which led to some really amazing research experience across the world as well. And that was kind of fantastic.

how I ended up then going into, you know, looking into higher degree research after doing that. So I was really lucky. Yeah. And I always love when we can bring in our love of languages and linguistics and apply it to another discipline where maybe it doesn't always seem like

it would go together. But I think a lot of us do that. And I think that that's a really important work. And especially with yours, with talking about migration and asylum. And I know that your thesis dealt a lot with sort of how migrants face becoming a migrant.

you know, a citizen or a migrant into Australia and the actual immigration officers, how they go through those processes. It's fascinating. So if anyone gets a chance to read it, they should because it's really good. Now let's park that for a minute. We're going to shift gears into our sort of

mum hats. So we're going to talk about a post that you made on blue sky that started you and I talking about kids, cartoon characters and accents. So on October 5th of this year, you posted, and I, I can't, I can't say skeeted. I refuse. So I know that that's technically the verb for a blue sky post. You're shaking your head. No, I'm shaking my head.

I refuse. I refuse. I'm going to say posted. So on October 5th of this year, you posted a question aimed at sociolinguists with small kids. And you asked in the post, quote, has there been any commentary about

Octonauts and the characters' accents in the original UK version, end quote. So for our listeners who might not be familiar, very much unlike us because I hear the theme song in my dreams, tell us a bit about what the Octonauts show is and what you noticed about their accents. Yeah, so you've just said the word Octonauts and I'm actually hearing the starting song of Octonauts right now. I can hear the little siren. The little siren. Yep. Yep.

Yeah. So it's Octonauts is an animation. It involves this team of different types of animals and they're basically, you know, anthropomorphized animals. So they wear little outfits and they have equipment and they're basically humans, but in animal form and they live and they work on this thing called the Octopod, which is this kind of underwater station submarine type thingamy. And they basically travel all around in the original series only underwater.

water but then in the kind of spin-off series they go on to land a bit and they travel around the world and they basically introduce children to and parents who are listening in to you know different species of animal different kind of nature related issues climates climate change concerns as well and teach them about that and the team themselves so the octonauts themselves

each have like a specialty or some kind of special expertise. So, you know, there's a map reader. There's one that does, you know, healing. So if they come across an animal who's injured, that particular character kind of takes the lead on that. Another one that's an expert in water, you know, so all these different kind of expertise that are relevant to nature and animals. And they go around, you know, helping them. So there's kind of education.

educational things, but they're also very much only interested in the natural world. So as far as I know, we never really see humans. We don't see cities. We don't hear about kind of political kind of countries or states or anything like that. It's really about the natural world and different parts of the natural world.

which in itself I think is quite interesting. So from what I've understood or picked up about the show, it started as a book series, which people who've read say was really good but kind of limited to the characters and kind of the focus. It was picked up originally as a UK production and since then there's been kind of some spin-offs. So there's a Netflix

production called Octonauts Above and Beyond. And so that's when they get out on the land a little bit more with various vehicles that they have. And they introduce some additional kind of regular characters at that point in time as well. But what really interested me, and this was really, you know, big caveat, obviously, this is not my professional area. We haven't, you know, systematically researched the show or other shows or anything like that. But what

What interested me as I listened in doing my chores and hearing, you know, the show going on the background was that these animals seem to have a range of different accents and that they weren't just, you know, like all kind of standard American accents or kind of, you know, standard UK accents or something. But there was something interesting going on there with the different characters.

And then I kind of listened in a little bit closer and I noticed that, you know, we had kind of central, I guess, if you will, English accents. Like there are US accents, there are UK accents, but there's a variety of UK accents. So there's like a Cockney one who's the pirate looking one.

And there's a, you know, one that sounds Scottish and there's at least one Australian accent. And then I noticed as I went on kind of listening to different episodes, like, you know, there was one that sounded like a Spanish speaker and there was also an Indian English speaker as well. I was like,

oh, this is quite cool. There's a good range of diversity, but it's also not presented in a way that's like super stereotypical. Like, you know, like it's just who that animal is and how they speak. It's not like I come from this place and we always eat, you know, we always have barbecues or, you know, whatever it is. So we don't have those kind of really overt things

references to the accent, but they're just speaking in their accents. So I found that really refreshing. I was like, oh, this is really cool and, you know, progressive and everything. And then the second thought was like, hold on, we have Captain Barnacle, who is obviously the captain, the leader, you know, the one who directs everything. And his accent is received pronunciation British.

All of a sudden we see Catru's circles in our brains and we go, wait a minute. Now we've still got the inner, the outer, the expanding circles. Absolutely. Yeah. So I was like, okay, so there's those subtle kind of representations are still potentially happening.

there. But then, you know, I kind of looked a little more. And so looking at the Indian English speaker, there was these other kind of really nice things that I picked up. So for example, his name is Pani, which means in Hindi and Urdu, and maybe also some other Indian languages or subcontinental languages, it means water. And he is the hydrologist. He is an expert in water. Yeah.

Yeah, so I thought that was really nice, seeing a little bit of diversity and subtly done as well, not kind of those really kind of strong national stereotypes coming through. Although we can still see some potential issues or we can comment or observe some things about the way the social hierarchy works within that particular group as well. Well, do you know what was interesting? You said about having that there was an American accent. And for me, originally an American, the first time that I heard

ever heard that American character in the show. I was actually shocked because it's a deeply Southern American character. And often Southern American accents get stereotyped as being sort of like the dumb or the stupid character, the uneducated character. So I was actually really pleased to see that this Southern American who talks like this

She was being portrayed as this very intelligent scientist and still having this accent that often gets discriminated against in America. So to me, that's kind of what I glommed on to really quickly. But then I noticed the exact same thing that you did that. Oh, but wait, the captain has this received pronunciation, British accent that really

We all know is that sort of standard, quote unquote, English accent that a lot of people when they're learning English think that they should try to emulate because that's the quote best accent. Yeah, some kind of ideal to work towards. And then, yeah, so having starting to think about this and having these conversations also kind of led me to do a little bit of online research.

and I've come across, you know, there's whole fan sites dedicated to discussing the Octonauts, the different series. So many. I found someone had written a thesis on it. Oh, amazing. I know. I was like, this is awesome. Yeah. So when I started looking at that as well, that brings a whole different level of discourse to it as well because on a lot of those sites you'll have kind of like a little character profile card. And so then you see the ideologies that maybe aren't explicitly

expressed kind of explicitly coming up in the way viewers or fans make sense of the characters. So for example, you have like the Captain Barnacles, who's again, yeah, that British captain of the team. His profile has, they all have a nationality line. So he is listed as British, right? Because of the way he speaks. Yet at various points in the show, they talk about how his family come from Alaska or maybe from Canada because he's a polar bear, right? Yeah.

Um, so there's these, this kind of, you know, tension between, you know, drawing on those ideologies of how people sound to make sense of their political status or that, you know, where they live to these other types of strange realities that happen when you make animals into, into humans. Those ideologies are quite interesting as well. And there is quite a lot of discussion or question around accents, um, and also the changing of some characters accents across the two productions. Um,

Yeah, we should we should talk about that. So when you first were talking to me about, did you know that there was this accent change? I was like, wait, what? And so then I had to go look. And it's true. So as you said, originally, Octonauts was a British production.

And so I'm assuming that production happened in the UK, that probably casting happened in the UK. But then Netflix, like you said, I guess acquired at least part of it and has now produced this sort of spinoff series called Above and Beyond. So tell us what happened then. What happened when Netflix did that? The 2024 F-150 Lightning Truck gets dirty and runs clean.

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Yeah, so I think...

in my original post on Blue Sky, I was a bit misled because even in my own mind, the problem is when you're listening in as a mom and there's like a million episodes available and they're all flying around here and there, they all blur together. So originally I thought there was, for example, the Pani, the Indian English speaking macaque who's

a macaque from the Indian subcontinent, nicely enough. I originally thought he was part of that original program. And yeah, so I'm still, I think I still need to go sit down and look at it systematically. But reading the fan discussions, I started to get an idea, problematic as that could be, about, you know, accent change. So I'm fairly sure at some point the, yeah, the Southern American accent, for example, wasn't there and came, or maybe it was the Spanish speaking accent, I think got lost. I think it was the

Spanish speaker accent got lost or changed to to like a shifted accent, more of like a Central American accent as opposed to like Spain Spanish, maybe. But you're right. Like regardless, there was a shift. So basically the the cast, I would assume, changed probably because for a Netflix production, the production and the casting is happening maybe in America. Yeah.

Okay, fine. But that means that we then change some of these accents. You're absolutely right. And so when I went and looked at the cast, I was trying to find out who was actually doing these voices. And so then again, this comes, this interacts with what we're going to talk about in a minute about Rosina Lippy Green's chapter. These issues of, you know, having a small voice cast do lots of characters potentially. And so therefore putting on and, you know, trying to

to convincing varieties of various accents to different degrees of success. I went and looked at the cast in the original and it was like, I think three white guys and a white woman, right? And so that's your kind of diverse cast for like any number of characters across any number of different accents.

appeared to be British. Like, yeah, you're kind of saying, you know, that makes sense based on the location of the production, right? And then you have this shift, obviously, to the US, we presume, and the cast changes, but they do some interesting things. So when I was like, okay, so there's an Indian English accent in this show now.

who is doing this voice? Is it a white guy? And I went and looked him up. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. I went and looked him up and he's a British voice actor of Indian origin. So I read an interview with him and his grandparents migrated to the UK from India and they're from North Indian background. And so, you know, they're Hindi and Punjabi speaking and he speaks a little bit of

Punjabi and a little even less Hindi. So he's still contriving an accent, right? Because he is a British born, you know, man and his, you know, his kind of at home accent would sound quite different to the accent he's using in the program. But I did find that quite interesting, I guess, that that is there. I'm just thrilled that it's not.

A white man putting on an accent like the Apu in the Simpsons conversation that, you know, had been going on for a few years. That's at least good to know that maybe we're getting a little bit better. Yeah. And I think that's also reflected in the way he speaks as well, because like, I don't know, in my, again, I'm not an accent expert.

But from the way I perceive the way he speaks in the show, it's not a very kind of stereotypical exaggerated, you know, Indian English. It's quite a subtle accent, I would describe it as. So that in itself, even putting aside who the person is doing it is quite pleasing, I think.

Well, that's a that's a real win because this blue sky discussion about the Octonauts accents prompted one of your followers, Dr. Jonathan Haston, my apologies if I'm mispronouncing your last name, of the University of Westminster to reply that this was an example of, quote, the timelessness of Lippy Green's paper on Disney, end quote. So let's talk about this paper.

and what he's referring to. So Rosina Lippy Green is, of course, an American writer and very famous linguist. She is famous for her hugely influential 1997 book, English with an Accent, Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States.

So this paper that Jonathan was referring to is chapter five in that original book or chapter seven in the second edition, which is what I have. And the chapter is called teaching children how to discriminate what we learn from the big bad wolf. So let's talk about this paper and what Lippy Green says about how children learn to interpret social variation in the language of others, even from cartoon characters. In the beginning,

of this chapter, Lippy Green talks about how Disney released its animated short called The Three Little Pigs. We've probably all seen it. I definitely remember seeing it as a kid. In this release, at one point, the Big Bad Wolf is visually portrayed with anti-Semitic

tropes. So portrayed with a hooked nose, money in the palm of its hand, scraggly beard, curled hair locks, a yarmulke. And this visual representation stayed in the short until, and I couldn't believe this, 14 years later in 1948. And it was only then when the Hayes office asked Disney to re-release the short with a different portrayal of the wolf because of the horrors of the Holocaust that were by then well known. But what happened was even after

after Disney reanimated the wolf to not have this visual anti-Semitic depiction, the quote Yiddish accent, but like as we were just talking about, it was not a natural, normal Yiddish accent. It was a very exaggerated Yiddish accent. That was still kept and the wolf's accent wasn't changed until much later. And then we get...

so many more examples of this with Disney. I mean, we're both a very similar age. We probably both saw Aladdin when it came out, or at least shortly thereafter. And Rosina Lippy Green says in the chapter, quote, 60 years later, a similar controversy would arise over the portrayal of characters in Disney's Aladdin, a movie set in a mythical Arabic kingdom. An offending line of dialogue in an opening song, but...

which was as I quote, where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face, it's barbaric, but hey, it's home, end quote, was partially changed in response to complaints from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. But as the representative of that committee pointed out, the accents of the characters remained as

as originally filmed. So the representative particularly objected to the fact that the quote good guys, Aladdin, Princess Jasmine, her father, they have that standard American accent. But all of the other characters that are supposed to be Arab or Arabic speaking have these nebulous, heavy accents that are not really clear what they're supposed to be.

And quote, this pounds home the message that people with a foreign accent are bad, end quote. So what else do we think about what Lippy Green says in this paper? Tell me your thoughts. Yeah, it's such a great chapter. And it really made me kind of reflect and think more about the Octonauts and about some other things as well. So she talks about how one of the things that happens when you have an animation is that you

potentially can lose some kind of visual identity prompts or, you know, information. And this is especially true when you have an animal who's supposed to be a human. So there's a chance that you lose some of your visual hints that might be there if it's a person. You know, are they white? Are they black?

Are they, you know, tall, short, old, young, wearing certain types of clothes, etc. Those things aren't there. So there's work that can be done or choices that can be made about accent to try and quickly, she says, you know, like efficiently pass on that message to the viewer so that they understand the type of character this is. But the process.

problem, as you've pointed out very aptly, is that that relies on really problematic stereotypes and helps to, you know, perpetuate those stereotypes and entrench those stereotypes in people's minds, including in children's minds from a young age. So you have this idea that, you know, the good guys, the heroes speak like, quote unquote, us or speak like, you know, the people from whatever the dominant society is in the context of Disney movies, the US at

kind of mainstream US accents she talks about. And then the others, the problematic others sound foreign. And so what the foreignness sounds like can differ. So she talks about, you know, particular points in history, you'll have kind of whoever the baddies are vis-a-vis the US at that particular point in time. So you've got German accents, you've got Russian accents, you've got Arabic accents, etc.,

But then there's all these other types of characters, like you talked about Southern American accents. So even within the US, kind of certain accents are marked in certain ways and are used to index certain kind of social attributes very problematically. In other ones, she talks about the work that having some characters having an accent, especially with animals, helps to indicate place as well. So, you know, if it's supposed to be a cartoon set in France, like

maybe a couple of the characters have a French accent, but still the main characters, maybe it's absolutely fine for them to have a kind of mainstream US accent. And that's, you know, acceptable. You know, these are the facile kind of stereotypes that come up, right? Because she even points out in the chapter that,

in, for example, Beauty and the Beast, which is supposed to be set in France because it is originally a French fairy tale, that the only three characters that have your quote stereotypical French accents are, you know, the feather duster who...

Sexually kind of suggestive character. You've got the amorous candelabra, Lumiere. And then there's one other with a French accent. Now I don't remember who it was. Possibly an artist or a chef, judging by the general trend of things. That would make sense. That makes sense. But you've got Belle and her dad...

have basically my accent, you know? And it's like, how does this make sense? But you're right. It's like that over-exaggerated French accent is being used to index something that the creators want you as the audience member to

to think about in your head. It's like a quick, efficient way of saying, oh, well, this character is romantic and that's why they're given a French accent. And Lippy Green, I really like this quote she says in the chapter, quote, animated films entertain, but they are also a vehicle by which children learn to associate specific characteristics and lifestyles with specific social groups and to accept a narrow understanding

an exclusionary worldview, end quote. And, you know, all we have to do is, especially if we're thinking about Disney, is like you were saying, think about the villains in the Disney movies. So we've got the accents of the bad guys, quote unquote, is usually some form of other, right, English. So often it'll be received pronunciation British English. So

Jafar from Aladdin, Scar from The Lion King, Shere Khan from The Jungle Book, Cruella from 101 Dalmatians. So people might, I mean, obviously not our audience, but other people might think, okay, so what? You know, these are just kids movies. What people sound like in these movies is no big deal.

But this carries on into adulthood. And we see this in adult media as well. And one way that we see people's accents and languages being used to other is in the arena of nationalism and borders. And you and two co-authors, distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr. Hannah Torsch, recently, very recently, published a paper titled,

entitled Trust at the Border, Identifying Risk and Assessing Credibility on Reality Television. So tell us about this paper and the parallels that we can see between this research and how we've been talking about accents in children's media. Yes. So this is the second paper in hopefully an ongoing series of papers that came from a project that Ingrid Piller was running at Macquarie University. And it involved us collecting information

we ended up with 108 encounters from this very long running famous TV show, the Australian version of which is called Border Security on Australia's Frontline. I think I haven't written down the sub title, which I have now forgotten.

But it's basically, it's filmed at airports around Australia. It's been going for, I think, 23 years or something now. A long time. A really long time. There's lots of international versions of it as well that I assume are just as successful. And it has involved a very close cooperation between, obviously, the Australian government agencies that are

control that space and Channel 7 in Australia that's been the producer of that particular program. And what it purports to do is basically show us the reality. So it follows, you know, officials or officers working in these airports and follows them on their everyday work to

protecting our borders. So it's quite an interesting space because on the one hand, we'll have criticisms or commentary about TV and other forms of popular media where we say, you know, there's a real over-representation of, you know, the dominant group, like, you know, white L1 English speakers on TV, and it doesn't represent our societies. So at first glance, we go, oh, this show kind of bucks that trend because we see all the

different types of people with all different language, all different appearances, you know, on this program. But their representation on the program is very specific. And it's, again, it's teaching us certain things. And there we can actually see some parallels with Lippy Green's chapter again as well, because there's an over-representation of, for example, L1 Australian accented, I guess, white presenting people

in one group, the officers and the figures, I've got the figures here so I can tell you about that. So we had 253 officers across all those encounters. So we didn't selectively, you know, pick out particular encounters. We took a whole period of time, whatever episodes were available, and we got each and every encounter that occurred at an airport from those episodes. And so across those 108 encounters, we had 253 officers to 128 passengers or travellers.

And so we looked at what was happening there, who was represented in those two groups. And we found that the officers, as I said, were mostly white presenting. So we, as a team of three researchers, kind of all coded and compared our codes. And we said, you know, 81%, we counted 81% of the officers look to be white. That's how they present. And 90%, 9-0% white.

sound not just like native speakers of English, but Australian accented native speakers of English. So this is a huge number and the whiteness and the accent almost perfectly map onto each other in that particular group as well. So I think we counted only two white looking officers that didn't have a kind of core or Australian accent, English accent.

And we also talk about other things like, so the way they're named in the show, you know, Officer Susan, Officer Joe. So there's this uniformity and this, on the one hand, officialness, but also casual familiarity with these lovely people who we can personally relate to. And also the fact that they wear, you know, standard uniforms, et cetera. So there's this idea that they're a homogenous group and there's all kinds of other mechanisms to kind of, for us to put our trust in them and that they're kind of the heroes of the show. They're tasked with this really important job. But then we look at the

passengers. So in the passengers, we see almost the flip of that profile. So we see 73% don't present as white and 66% sound like they are not native English speakers at all. And only 8% actually sound like Australian native English speakers. So almost completely the opposite of the officer group.

And again, they're named and described in different ways. So they're described in kind of vague ways, like, you know, a woman from blah, traveling here, a band member, a Bulgarian farmer, blah, blah, blah. So often specifying nationality or ethnicity and kind of these more generic naming practices. And of course, they don't look as neat and as uniform as the officers after their long journeys from wherever they've been.

So very, very different presentations of the two groups. So first of all, I think those particular percentages themselves are super problematic in terms of representing the reality because we know, for example, that in Australia, more than 50% of the population now are born overseas, you know, first generation Australian. So that's, you know, you can make some guesses about what that means for accent and also potentially appearance, but also that very commonly people traveling into Australia will be A, Australians or B, actually English people.

So in terms of the diversity that's represented, we've got some interesting production choices going on there. And we also have a very collaborative

clear over-representation of wrongdoing. So we counted how many encounters actually involved the officers finding out that the person had done something wrong. So they're uncovering some suspicion and they're actually finding out wrongdoing. And we found that it was like more than two thirds of the encounters they had done something wrong. So obviously this has to be an over-representation of what the reality is.

So they're very clear production choices, even though, you know, the quote unquote real encounter is something that's really happened. The way that the production puts together and chooses what to present within the show forms some very specific messages for the audience. It does. And do you know what I've noticed a lot?

in watching the show is the number of times that they will show the officer sitting across the table from the person who's wanting to come into Australia. And then they've got that speakerphone in the middle and there's an interpreter on the speakerphone because the person who wants to come into Australia, obviously maybe their English is not at a level where they can understand sort of the complicated nature of what the immigration officer is talking about.

in English. And I feel like that is always portrayed in a way that makes it seem like a burden,

on the immigration officer. You know, this is this burden that I have to go call up the, you know, service for interpreters and I have to get this interpreter here. But also the nature of having the interpreter on a speakerphone is really difficult. It would be really difficult for either party to kind of listen and really understand. And so you as the viewer get this feeling of like,

come on, hurry it up. This is annoying that they have to be engaging in, you know, having to go through an interpreter. And it's sort of like implicitly drives home that point of isn't this a burden that this non-English speaking migrant wants to come into Australia or even just, you know, someone who's coming for a visit will often get pulled aside. And in that way, again, we see that representation of the quote other accent as being the problem, as being the bad guy.

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Absolutely. Yeah. So there's a few things I can kind of say related to those observations. So firstly, that scene that you describe of someone sitting over a table, we could call that like the second stage in an investigation because it's, you know, when there's a serious concern and the person's actually taken away to a private room for some kind of further investigation or informal interview. So there are a number of steps that happened before that, I guess, were

we talk about basically kind of three potential stages. So the initial kind of one is a visual or potentially just the interaction that takes place at passport control. And then someone might be kind of flagged as being suspicious for whatever reason, or they're seen kind of waiting for their baggage. And, you know, they're looked at from...

in the distance from one of these officers and the officer says, you know, this person looked nervous or something. So they have some kind of explanation for their initial reason to kind of investigate more, to ask questions, to open a bag, you know, to proceed with some kind of investigation, right? But then the first...

of their questioning or their, you know, their interaction and investigation, if you will, takes place, you know, out in the open in the hall where the quarantine is or the customs area is or whatever, out in the open. And what we see in that context is almost in every single encounter it's only in English and there are no, you know, multilingual accommodations

accommodations that are kind of clear. And so, but you have the work that's done by the narrative narrator of the show and also the work that the platform that officers are given to talk about those investigations, obviously privileged them in terms of being able to frame those interactions in certain ways. So you'll have either of those voices saying something like we have this great quote in the article.

this passenger is difficult to interview because their English isn't very good or something like that. So it's just that straight out, you know, multilingualism is a problem and the problem is the person, the other, right? It's not a problem that our whole board of

Processes are monolingual English ones where we don't routinely have multilingual staff. We don't, you know, there are a couple of exceptions. There's one particular airport and one reoccurring officer who is of Chinese background and serves in a very interesting way as a kind of sometimes a communicator, but also sometimes as a kind of cultural communicator.

mediator for the audience so she talks about oh this lady has brought this in because you know in chinese culture blah blah blah and so she's doing this work for this imagined you know white anglo kind of audience right that these people need this explained to them but generally speaking this is a very expected to be a very monolingual english space and interaction

Yet somehow it's still framed as if officers are doing work and being accommodating. So you've pointed out an example at the next stage, which is when they actually do call in an interpreter. But even before that, they'll point to things like, so when you're coming into Australia, you get this little card where you have to fill out. Yes, you're rolling your eyes, Bryn, because we have both experienced this card many times. I'm horrified.

hard rolling my eyes yes because that is the worst they give it to you on the flight and you have just been on this flight for like 400 hours you're exhausted you've been scrunched up in coach they give you these cards and they're like fill it out right now before you land and then you're like can I have a

pen and the flight attendants are like no and so you have to make friends real fast with whoever is sitting next to you and be like does anyone have a pen does anyone have a pen it is I feel like I could write a whole thesis about that card process it is so frustrating

Absolutely. And so there's lots of examples in those interactions about how people have answered that. So on that card, you know, it asks you where you're coming from, what your profession is, how long you're staying, diseases. Really importantly, in our context, are you carrying any food? Are you carrying any medicine? So basically almost everything.

Every other country I've traveled to in the world, you get into the airport. There technically is a quarantine or customs area, but there's usually no staff there. No one actually really cares that much. And that was a real shock for me the first time I went somewhere else because always coming back into Australia, that's actually super important and it's taken extremely seriously. And if you've watched any episode of this particular show, that is one of the key messages that the show is trying to teach viewers. So you really cannot bring any kind of fresh food into the country.

But even me as, you know, a lawyer, as a first language English speaker, very highly educated in terms of the number of degrees I've done, I still find myself second guessing those questions. Have I answered it wrong? Am I not declaring something that I should declare? You know, I've got chocolate. Is that an issue? Like to this day, I'm still panicking about this because I'm quite paranoid for some reason about going through those. I can't imagine why. Yeah, right? Yeah.

about going through those processes. But the problem is then you'll have this card and you have to fill it out and you have to sign it. So it really is this official legal document. And you present that as you're going through, you know, trying to exit the airport. I think it's the last step after going through, you know, immigration and everything that that entails. And the quarantine officers then will look at it and they'll look at you.

And then they'll see whether they want to scan your bags, they want to open your bags, they want to question you more or not. And there are serious repercussions. For example, if they find something in your bag and you haven't declared it, big trouble and you're more likely to get a fine for it, etc. If you declare it and they, you know, they want to keep it because it's not allowed, then usually that's fine because you've declared it. But there's a lot of moral consequences.

messaging that goes on in the show around this. There's a lot of kind of framing of like, oh, we think she's learned a lesson. So she's going to, you know, we're going to let her off today with a warning or this person has received a fine because this is a serious threat and they don't seem to have understood the seriousness of it.

etc. But language comes up in this as well, because for example, for certain flights, from what we could see, they have translated versions of the card, I think into Chinese, for example. So this card is difficult to get your head around. It's not something that seems to be common in any other, you know. It's really not. It's really not. And for anyone who hasn't had the fun of having to deal with this particular Australian flight card, it is like a front and a back

and it's on kind of cardstock. And it's got like the boxes where you have to put the individual letters, you know, of whatever you're spelling out into these boxes. It's very much like taking a standardized test. But I, again, I mean, you're saying it, and I'm the same way. I have too many degrees, honestly, at this point, you know, and I'm beyond educated. And I am

have been going back and forth in and out of Australia for a decade and I still have trouble filling out this card and English is my first language. I can't express enough how frustrating and convoluted this card is but like you're saying how 100% of the utmost importance it is too and it's like those two things together the fact that it is so convoluted but so important

means that if you are trying to fill out that card, especially if English is not your most dominant or most comfortable language, that's going to be so much pressure. And so we have examples in the encounters. And again, it's like, you know, you've got the written and then you've also got the spoken interaction, right? And they're two very different things, especially if you're not an L1 speaker, especially if English isn't your first language. So for example, in that situation, if I'm unsure about the chocolate,

I, you know, I turn up to quarantine. I have my smiley, you know, white face and my Aussie accent. And I say, oh, hey, I've ticked no, but I've got some chocolate with me kind of thing. And they're like, oh, yeah, that's fine. See you later. Nine times out of 10, right?

But if you're someone who isn't super confident in spoken English, for example, you filled out the card because you have to fill out the card, right? It's a requirement. And then you turn up there and you try and have the same or a similar type of conversation with the officer. It might go quite differently. First of all, in the show, across the different types of suspicions, there are kind of clear patterns in who's kind of overrepresented. So going to the quarantine example again, people who...

look like they're from China, for example, or who have just traveled from China, are much more likely to be presented in the show as, you know, raising a suspicion for quarantine, carrying food that they shouldn't carry into the country. So again, like what happens in terms of that initial creation of suspicion, right? But then what happens when they try and, you know, negotiate meaning with that officer? So for example, we have an example in the paper where it's someone who's brought in

some type of food and they say to the officer, like, look, I thought it, you know, in their, you know, L2 spoken English, that's obviously not super fluent or confident. I think it means meat, you know, that question. I thought, I thought that was what was meant by food, right? Because, you know, it's obviously it could mean a lot of things. And they're like,

but this card was in your language. This was translated into your language. So therefore you're 100% responsible for determining the only possible one meaning of that particular question in this list of really difficult questions. So they hold up that language accommodation of the translation as, you know, first of all, we're doing something to accommodate you. This is, you know, a plus on our side. But also you can't use misunderstanding as an excuse

here you know this is not this is not okay or while this passenger is trying to kind of put forward their confusion or the the ambiguity around the question and them answering this question that's quite unusual and you know uncommon in any other context in their second language in this this high-powered kind of interaction so that's one example and because you know translation has never gone awry from one into another like what

Absolutely. So we've got ideologies around translation and what it means to do that translation. Whereas if I come in dealing with this card in my first language, I'm not so sure about it. Maybe we can negotiate that and there's room for me to have some doubts about what something might mean. In this particular context, we start with suspicion based on origin. And then on top of that, oh, you're using this as an excuse. And we've actually accommodated you here because we've actually provided this written in your first language. The other way it seems to come up a bit is when

the card hasn't been translated, but the person fills it out, right? Because they have to. There's tick boxes and there's, you know, names and et cetera, et cetera. So they've ticked a certain box saying they don't have something to declare. They go through quarantine and then they're saying, oh, you know, I'm having some trouble explaining to you or, you know, I'm

English isn't my first language. This is a difficult conversation for me. And they basically use, they pick that up and they say, hey, this lady was able to read and fill out this card in English, in written English. They're now claiming, quote unquote, to have a problem with their English. But actually, I've evaluated their English as quite fluent because they filled out this card. Therefore, not only is what they're saying a problem, but I'm going to add an extra layer of suspicion or mistrust there.

against them because they appear to be using the I don't speak English well card as an excuse to be evasive or to get around this problem that I've identified. So we have all these really problematic, fascinating but problematic situations

language ideologies that come up in the interactions. This makes me want to hit my head against a wall because my background is in teaching English as a foreign language and also as an additional language. So in the context of people who are like living in an English dominant country and learning the language and the number of people for whom it is so

so normal to have higher proficiency in written English than it is in spoken English. That's such a normal thing. And we see that in multiple languages. When we learn a language for the first time, like in school or something like that, we often start

with the written form of the language. And especially for English, where the pronunciation is cuckoo bananas, it makes so much more sense that someone would feel more comfortable writing in English than they would in pronouncing the English. So the fact that these officers on the show can make, like you said, that almost moral judgment about the person based on their macro skill proficiency is just galling. It really is.

Yeah, and there's also other assumptions, I guess, in terms of even when it comes to the reading, right? Because if you think about that card, most of the questions that actually involve producing an answer are things that people, first of all, they'll be able to kind of use whatever technology they have to find out what the questions are if they need help. But also they're very, very straightforward answers like what is your name? What is your address? What is your age? Kind of thing. So fairly basic, like I'm thinking about myself in other languages, even if I have a really basic proficiency in

reading another language, I'm probably going to be able to answer those questions quite straightforwardly. The other questions actually involve a tick box of yes or no. And so you see examples of this also in the spoken interaction on the border that you can have a question and someone says yes or they say no. Have they understood? We have very little idea if they've understood because it's just saying yes or no, right? They could have completely misunderstood the question or the meaning of the question.

but that's not always the way their understanding is characterized. And that's what's really important in the program, obviously, because we have these officials who are acting as gatekeepers, literally gatekeepers and decision makers in terms of that individual interaction. But they're also saying things, they're commenting on the people, both specifically those individuals, but those comments then accumulate and make general statements or general kind of

you know, evaluations of certain types of people and certain types of behavior. And because they have the privileged platform to do that on the show and through the show, we're being delivered messages about different sorts of groups in society. They're likely to do and what we need to worry about in terms of those groups in our societies. Well, and then to break this full circle back to the question about accents and representation in children's media, this is why this is important because as kids,

If we grow up seeing diverse representation of different Englishes, of different parts of the world, of different accents, different languages, then when we grow up and we become these officers at an airport, then we might not be so quick to judge based on accent. Right. And here I do think that there's this really good difference.

quote that's attributed to Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, who was or is a prominent scholar in children's literature. And she wrote an essay in 1990 that I think sort of puts this into perspective. And she talks about how books can serve three crucial functions for readers.

And I kind of take this into children's media as well. So books or children's media can serve as mirrors where children can see their own experiences reflected, which is always important, but they can serve also as windows where children can look into the experiences of others. And then they can serve as what she calls sliding glass doors where readers can enter and connect with different worlds and different perspectives. And so I think what we see in

bringing it back is, especially with that accent representation, we're starting to see the beginnings of those windows and those sliding glass doors and mirrors. You know, I'm thinking about like any young kid who's from, say, Alabama in the States

who sees that scientist who's from Southern America, who sounds like them. And they're saying, hey, this goes against everything I've ever seen in media that says that my accent should be one of stupidity or an uneducated accent. But no, look, I can see someone who sounds like me, who's a scientist, you know? So what do we think is going right in children's media? Where do we think this is headed at?

Because I do think that children's media has come a long way since, you know, the 1990s and Disney. What do you think are some examples of getting it right these days? Yeah, I really like that idea of mirrors and windows. And also, yeah, also in Octonauts, I think also that idea that, you know, you can have this opportunity to travel and see the world, interact with all types of different

different types of people. So the team themselves are so diverse and they're working together and doing really amazing things to make positive change in the world. So I think those messages are really beautiful messages to share with children that all different types of people can be involved in that process. People that they can identify with personally and all other different types of people that might look or sound different to them. So I think that's a hugely positive message. I did want to acknowledge a caveat, which is that one of the recent episodes that I watched

Again, so those stereotypes are still there. Even when you have shows that are really doing it right, they really linger, they hang on. I think sometimes it's just this kind of almost laziness in terms of making that, indexing something quickly. So you have this great core regular cast of characters in that

show, but then they go around the world to different places and interact with, you know, one-off animals or whatever who they're helping or learning about, for example. And sometimes that's quite good. And again, you have this idea of accent indexing place. So, you know, they're in a place where the humans speak French, for example, and so they might have French accented animals.

But an episode I saw the other day involved, I think they were searching for these eels, these rare type of eels. So yeah, all these characters that they're interacting with, they have kind of vaguely Australian or New Zealand accents because that's the ocean that they're close to. They're in that area of the world. And then they're searching here and there and they come across a shark.

a problematic shark who, you know, is menacing potentially to eat them. They're searching for something and he gets a bit defensive and kind of threatens them. And what is his accent? It's like, again, I'm not an expert, but he sounds like a gangster from the back streets of New York somewhere. Ah.

He has like a gangster accent for one of better words, like a mob accent, we could say. But then they kind of are trying to escape from him. And then this pack of orcas comes through. So they're black and white. They're traveling in a group and they sound like NYPD officers. Like they're actually scaring him or dealing with him and helping them.

that part I remembered I didn't remember the shark but I do remember the orcas because I remember I was doing that thing where I was like cooking dinner I wasn't watching it but I could hear it in the background and I was like what you

You know, and I kind of looked over like, wait, what is that accent? Because the particular characters from the regular crew, again, I'm pretty sure it was, I'm pretty sure it's called, it's Dashi, the character. So she's got an Australian accent. It was her niece. So they're both sounding pretty Aussie. And there's maybe a third kind of member of the team with a different accent. And then they're interacting with all these kind of vaguely Australian New Zealand type accents as well. And then suddenly, I don't know. Suddenly?

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Around the streets of New York and there's, you know, this menacing mobster, you know, who's a shark as well. So it's like, why did they need to do that? And all I can think of is lazy stereotypes. He's a shark already. So, you know, the menace is there.

We don't need more minutes. What he's talking about is there. So why did we need to add this extra layer to just, you know, tell, teach children that this type of way of speaking is something we should be scared of. And this, this particular character is obviously a shifty one that we can't trust. Yeah.

And then also these hero policemen who have, you know, geographically a very similar accent but is kind of noticeably different. Yeah, really, really interesting how these old tropes kind of hang on. So I think one of the take-homes for me is that there's always room for improvement and there's always room to kind of discuss it. I really feel like the online space of being able to talk about these types of programs has potential to actually influence change, maybe on a scale that it didn't in the past.

So another example for me, I guess, as a parent of small children right now is obviously Bluey. For people who don't have small kids, a little bit of context, it's another cartoon. It's an Australian cartoon. It's set in Brisbane, which is reasonably close to where I come from, which is a city in Australia. And it's, again, a family of dogs in this case. And they're just a really lovely family. Both parents are really heavily involved in interacting with the kids.

It's very targeted at the current generation of children and their parents. And it's just been a huge hit. So it's been taken up by Disney, I'm pretty sure, again. It's syndicated by Disney. And so it's been rolled out basically everywhere in the world. If you travel to other countries where English is not the main language, you can watch it in other languages, which is a lot of fun too.

But one thing I really love about it personally, from my perspective, is first of all, it's an Australian production. So you hear, you know, a range of Aussie accents, which itself is nice. And then on top of that, you see other things. So there was a really, from my perspective as a French speaker, it was really cool to see a whole episode where it's basically Bluey going camping with her family and meeting Jean-Luc, who is Canadian. The only indication he's Canadian is in the show.

is that he's sitting at a table with a maple syrup bottle, this is my attention to detail, with the red maple on it. I'm like, oh, maybe they're supposed to be Canadian. But basically the main point is that Jean-Luc speaks French and only French and Bluey speaks English and only English. And somehow they manage over the course of, you know, the holiday that they're both camping at this campsite to strike up this friendship and spend whole days playing together.

even though, you know, he's only speaking French and she's only speaking English. And to watch that as a bilingual French-English speaker was obviously a lot of fun, but it was also just nice to see a little bit of representation of multilingual cartoon in an Australian-English speaking context and also to have that positive portrayal of kids playing together or people interacting with each other in a positive relationship building way, even where they couldn't, you know, understand everything that was said to each other, where they have that goodwill to do that.

And it's great as a parent because I, as a parent, when, I mean, I've seen that episode 5 billion times and I love it, but I was able to talk to my kids about it because when my youngest watched it, I mean, she would have been little, probably like five or six or so. And she kept saying like,

What is he saying? I can't understand what he's saying. What is that? And so then I was able as a parent to say, like, yes, that's the language of French. And look, I can tell you what he's saying. But look how Bluey doesn't necessarily need to understand what he's saying in order for them to play, you know. And that's just a really lovely thing to teach kids.

Yeah, it's really nice. I read a little bit of online commentary after that, though, and they were saying, you know, why out of all the languages you could choose, you know, why did they choose French? Why have they chosen French?

other dominant European language. It's not really a kind of, you know, a representation of another language that's commonly spoken in Australia, you know. So there's questions around that. And there's another episode I know where Bluey's dad is playing. So a lot of the episodes involve them, you know, having these really amazing games together. But in that particular episode, he's a chef at a restaurant. I literally watched this episode yesterday. Yes, yes. And the dad

And because I don't speak French, but I, you know, I can kind of guess because I speak Spanish. And the dad is basically saying like, you know, where is the discotheque in France in response to an English question that Bluey has? So it doesn't make sense in context. So you're right. That can that's you're kind of like, OK, yeah.

we could do better here. I think for me, the interesting thing there was just that, that reversion to that, you know, stereotypical, like if it's a French character, they're going to be a chef or an artist. So again, in another show I listened to the other day with my, my kids in the background that it was like,

Yeah, there was a bee and they'd lost their beautiful... No, sorry, a spider and they lost their beautiful web and they were an artist. You know, their web was their art. And of course...

what accent? Spider. Of course, of course they were French. Yeah, exactly. And then that shark from Octonauts was transformed into a bee and was the bad guy in this particular episode. But that's, yeah, that's another layer upon layer. And this is why as linguists, we can never just watch children's media. Like we're all, we're always thinking about it, but I think that's a good thing because we've seen this progression forward. We've seen it get,

better from that, you know, 1933 Big Bad Wolf depiction. And it has gotten better. You know, I'm thinking about things like Coco or Moana or Encanto. Those certainly have some really good examples of accent representation, dialect representation, you know, but there's always room for improvement. And my hope is that we continue to improve in our media. Yeah.

The other really cool example from Bluey was that they made an episode with a deaf character who, you know, used Auslan, which is Australian sign language, which is really cool. But also the fact that they actually heavily consulted with Auslan experts to be able to do that, especially in terms of, you know, animating, uh,

you know, they have characters that have not the right number of fingers for doing fingerspelling, for example. So they had to be really strategic about which words they needed to fingerspell. And, you know, things around aspect and orientation and all these types of details that obviously if you do wrong, isn't great. So the process of consulting for that particular episode

But again, yeah, there's still always room to improve. So it's like, yes, that character appears in that one standalone episode and then we never see them again. So what's going on there sort of thing. And so there's always room to kind of question and keep on working on it. But yeah, some really cool

developments that are really noticeable, especially when you have your constant lens of sociolinguists on and operating all the time. As parents, exactly. And that's, I think that this whole discussion, I think that what's so important for us as sociolinguists, as parents, is to say, look, we're really hoping that for this next generation, we're doing

better at showing these windows, these mirrors, these sliding glass doors, at showing representation so that when our kids are grownups in the real world and maybe they are making decisions about accents and who can come into a country and who looks suspicious and things like that, maybe they can think back to the media that they had as kids and not be so scared by the idea of a quote, different accent.

accent. So before we wrap up, I would love to know what's next for you. What are you working on? Are you going to be doing, you had mentioned that maybe this paper that you've written is part of a series. There is another one that comes before it, which was fantastic as well. Are you still working on this? Are you working on other things? What do we have to look forward to with you?

Yeah, so I'd like to, yeah, hopefully that a third paper in that series is possible, but it's not kind of currently at the forefront of my mind at the moment for myself personally, I'm really interested in thinking about and exploring how people develop their

understanding or beliefs or knowledge about law and legal rights and legal obligations and also then in the context of migrating and potentially being in a second working or living in a second language or a language that they're not hugely proficient in what does that look like that process and kind of looking at not just I guess on the one hand there's

kind of official information or resources that different government or NGOs can provide to people to help build their knowledge or explain the law. But is that actually how we find out about the law or how we assume the law works? Because actually, like even for myself as a lawyer, I make a lot of assumptions about what the law is without actually going and looking up every single piece of legislation related to that issue, right? I'm interested in figuring out kind of socially and kind of informally also how we make sense of that. And I can

kind of segue back into an episode of Bluey once again. So it's in, I forget the name of it, but there was a kind of long, almost movie length episode, like a longer episode of Bluey that they made, I think last year or earlier this year. And in one particular scene, the cousins, Bluey's cousins are also there and they have to go driving around in a car. So there's extra kids in the car. And so Bluey gets the special treat, yes, of sitting in the front seat. Ah,

which is very exciting for small children. But her mum had to kind of check, maybe Googled something to make sure it was okay, you know, to children under a certain age to sit in the front. And then they get pulled over by the police at one point and the policeman's like, hey, there's a kid in your front seat and he actually doesn't know the law.

And she has to like Google it or check it on her phone to show him it's fine if there's no other seat available in the backseat. Right. But this is actually a law myself, again, as a parent, it's very relatable that I have had to look up because I was like, oh, am I going to get in trouble if my kid sits here? Or what are the circumstances in which you can have a child under a certain age sitting in the front seat? And I'm

I was reflecting on that. I was thinking, I didn't actually go and find out whatever the, I don't even know what the name of the relevant law itself would be, but I just Googled and found it was like the, you know, the traffic authorities website or something had a little summary about car seats and positioning in the car, et cetera, that I looked up and that would have been exactly what Bluey's mum did in the context of Queensland law.

And so, yeah, so I'm really excited to try and find a way to do that research and look not just what kind of is officially and formally available, but actually how people in real life go and find out more about the law and how language and migration experiences might play into how those beliefs are made and how they find out about information. I can't wait for that paper. And I hereby demand that you cite

Louis in that paper. I need to see that citation. I'll try and make it work. Laura, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I loved recording this with you and I can't wait for you to come back sometime. Definitely. Thanks so much, Bryn. Always nice to talk. And thank you for listening, everyone. If you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move podcast. Leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time.