36.2083, Reviews: Life in a New Language: Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Mo (2024)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2083. Mon Jul 07 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2083, Reviews: Life in a New Language: Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Mo (2024)

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Date: 07-Jul-2025
From: Elise Alberts [sealberts at pthu.nl]
Subject: Language Acquisition, Phonetics, Phonology, Sociolinguistics: Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Mo (2024)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-138

Title: Life in a New Language
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/life-in-a-new-language-9780190084295?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising,
Shiva Mo

Reviewer: Elise Alberts

SUMMARY
Piller et al.’s Life in a New Language is a comprehensive ethnographic
exploration of migrants’ lived experiences in moving to Australia,
focusing on the struggles, hardships and occasional successes involved
in adapting to life in a new country. The book offers a human-centred
alternative to the predominance of quantitative research on migration,
foregrounding social and emotional dimensions that often remain
obscured in statistical accounts. Ultimately, the book is a call to
stop seeing migrants “for what they lack, rather than for what they
have to offer” (p. 117) and to rethink the mental, social, and
linguistic effects of migration.
The context of the book is Australia, an incredibly diverse country
with a rich history of immigration. As the authors demonstrate, by the
early twentieth century Australia had been ideologically constructed
as a White, anglophone nation, with English positioned as the
gatekeeping language of national belonging. Through language policies,
migrants with a lower English proficiency were deterred from entering
the country. The authors focus on a diverse group of migrants who
settled in Australia between 1970 and 2013, representing 34 countries
and a wide range of linguistic backgrounds. Their own positionalities
as migrants or children of migrants (which is briefly discussed on
page 12), shape their research and analysis, and contribute to the
activist stance of the book, especially in its final chapters.
The book is structured around chapters titled 'doing something' in a
new language, each examining a different aspect of migrant life:
arriving, looking for work, finding a voice, having a family, facing
discrimination, and ultimately shaping one’s identity. As the authors
explain, some of these themes emerged organically from the
ethnographic data – employment, for example, was a recurring concern
among participants – while others were developed as focal points by
one of the researchers. Chapter 2 explores the experience of first
arriving in Australia as a migrant and the linguistic shock that often
accompanies it. For many, English had served as a valuable asset in
their countries of origin, opening up opportunities. Yet in Australia,
they found themselves positioned at the margins. The authors highlight
the case of 34 Iranian migrants who reported that the formal,
test-orientated English they had learnt proved to be largely
ineffective in everyday interaction. Conversely, African migrants,
many of whom had strong oral skills – what the authors call "street
English" – and rich multilingual backgrounds, were deemed
linguistically deficient because of their lower literacy skills. Both
groups, as the chapter shows, received inadequate support and a lack
of institutional recognition from the Australian government.
Arguably the most pivotal chapter, due to both its impact on migrant
feelings of belonging and its relevance for policy making, is Chapter
3, which examines the experiences and struggles of migrants in seeking
work. The chapter illustrates how migrants are poorly supported during
their job search and how English proficiency is frequently used as a
pretext to exclude candidates – regardless of their actual language
competence. The authors argue that the barrier to employment “is
created by the ideological association of migrants with an
English-language deficit” (p. 37). The chapter also shows how the
Australian government systematically invalidates prior qualifications
from other (non-Western) countries, even when migrants possess
extensive professional experience. It underscores both the
significance of work for personal fulfilment and the ways racism and
sexism pervade the job-seeking process. As the authors argue,
job-seeking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: “their English
language proficiency is assumed to be low, regardless of their actual
proficiency or the communicative requirements of a specific position”
(p. 37). Even more alarming, participants describe internalising these
externally imposed deficits, leading to diminished confidence in their
job search even when their level of English is objectively high. As
the authors note, these beliefs “function to transform the linguistic
barrier to employment from a social fact to an individual
responsibility” (p. 4).
Although racism and discrimination in migrant experiences are present
as underlying themes throughout the book, Chapter 6 confronts these
issues more explicitly. It explores how racialised appearances – being
perceived as non-White – places a disproportionate burden on migrants,
who must constantly navigate microaggressions. The authors show that
perceptions of language proficiency are deeply racialised. White
migrants are often assumed to be more fluent in English than non-White
migrants, creating a feedback loop in which they receive more
opportunities to practise and improve. Although legal protections
prohibit exclusion on the basis of race, nationality, or ethnic
origin, language frequently serves as a socially acceptable proxy
through which access to employment is denied. The stories of Asian and
Black participants, even those who are already Australian citizens,
are particularly harrowing, to the point that the amount of “Othering,
exclusion, discrimination, and racism” is simply “exhausting” (p. 97).
The final chapter shifts the book from a narrative perspective to a
more activist stance. It critiques Australian migrant policies,
particularly those which apply in the workforce, that fail to help
migrants transition into their new lives. The authors advocate for a
context-dependent view of language proficiency, one that recognises
the specific communicative demands of different roles and the
multilingual resources that migrants bring with them. The book
concludes with a call for the Australian government “to better
understand its sociocultural identity and how its dominant
constructions of language proficiency and competence, as well as
employability skills, needs to be updated to build a more inclusive,
tolerant, and egalitarian 21st century society” (p. 127).
EVALUATION
The book offers a refreshing and immersive glimpse into the lives of
migrants. Its narrative approach makes it accessible to a broad
readership, and the inclusion of discussion questions and chapter
summaries at the end makes the book suitable for teaching
environments. While it is easy to dismiss migrants’ language
challenges by urging them simply to ‘learn the language’, this book
presents a sobering account of the persistent difficulties faced by
language learners and the complexities of being perpetually viewed as
an imperfect speaker. Although written by multiple authors, the book
maintains a clear thematic coherence, with chapters that reinforce and
build upon one another.
One of the notable contributions of the book is its ethnographic
approach to a topic that is often examined through a quantitative
lens. As the authors describe, fieldwork was conducted in “adult
education centres, community language schools, and workplaces” (p.
11). In practice, however, much of the material appears to be based on
in-depth interviews and participants’ personal narratives, with a
relatively limited inclusion of field notes and observations. While
the final chapter foregrounds the value of ethnographic methods for
capturing lived experience, the book’s primary focus rests on
migrants’ accounts rather than the social and institutional settings
in which those experiences unfold. There are some references to
fieldwork, for example when the authors talk about the participant
Mamuna and her involvement in the community (p. 114), which seems to
be partly based on participant observation, but these are the
exception rather than the rule. A more explicit engagement with the
ethnographic process, including how interviews and fieldwork informed
one another, could have further strengthened the book’s methodological
contribution. Given that the final chapter positions the study as a
“model” and “framework” for future research (p. 119), a separate
methodological chapter might have clarified the collaborative process
behind the study, the challenges encountered, and how others might
adopt or adapt a similar approach to linguistic ethnography.
In addition, the book uses the concept ‘lived experience’ to discuss
not only language but also “how language intersects with what it means
to be a citizen, a worker, or a parent” (pp. 10-11). This perspective
works well with the topic of migration, as it shifts the focus from a
purely linguistic dimension to a more all-encompassing description of
the migrant’s experience. However, embedding the discussion more
explicitly in existing methodological literature on the lived
experience of language, such as that of Busch (2017), might have
further deepened this conceptual framing. By using this concept, the
authors might have also been able to strengthen their discussion of
the affective dimensions in their data: for example, in Chapter 4,
(‘Finding a Voice in a New Language’), which deals with a range of
emotions such as language anxiety, embarrassment and shame. While the
book draws on relevant research (e.g. Liyanage & Canagarajah, 2019;
Horwitz, 2010) dialogue with work on affect (e.g. Ahmed, 2004;
Wetherell, 2013) might have enhanced the analytical approach.
Chapter 7, with its focus on (multiple) belongings and processes of
self-making, offers an insightful look into the emotional labour of
building a new identity in a new country. It stands out as the most
grounded in fieldwork, but simultaneously, also the least focused on
language. Although it touches on how language shapes identity – for
instance, the idea that speaking another language brings on a new
identity – the chapter leans more heavily on the social and emotional
dimensions of migration. These are valuable contributions in
themselves, but a more sustained analysis of the role of language in
identity formation could have added further depth to the discussion,
particularly given the book’s overarching focus.
To conclude, Life in a New Language offers a rich and valuable account
of what it means to migrate and live in another language – an account
which is generalisable not only to  the Australian context but to
contexts where migrants face similar social and institutional
barriers. The book demonstrates how learning a new language, and
speaking and living in it, are complex processes, particularly when
shaped by exclusionary policies and social prejudice. It challenges
the simplistic notion that language acquisition guarantees
integration, instead foregrounding the broader structural and
ideological obstacles that migrants face. The book offers a valuable
resource for scholars examining the intersections of language and
migration, educators wishing to include a migrant perspective of
language learning, and policymakers aiming to develop more inclusive,
contextually-informed approaches.
REFERENCES
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York & Oxford:
Routledge.
Busch, B. (2017). Expanding the notion of the linguistic repertoire:
On the concept of Spracherleben – the lived experience of language.
Applied Linguistics 38(3), 340-358.
Horwitz, E. (2010). Foreign and second language anxiety. Language
Teaching, 43(2), 154-167.
Liyanage, I., & Canagarajah, S. (2019). Shame in English language
teaching: Desirable pedagogical possibilities for Kiribati in
neoliberal times. TESOL Quarterly, 53(2), 430-455.
Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and discourse– What’s the problem? From
affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity, 6.
349-368.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Elise Alberts is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University and the
Protestant Theological University. In her research, she is
investigating the effect of multilingualism on faith experience. In
particular, she is examining how language attitudes and ideologies
influence the way that multilingual Christians perceive their faith,
and to what extent different languages can affect their lived
theology. Her research is conducted within transnational church
communities in the Netherlands.



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