Burmese:
A Lesson on Hate Speech
How would you define hate speech?
Should hate speech be banned or curtailed on social media?
How can you prevent hate speech on social media without infringing on free speech?
These are the thorny questions my students wrestled with in my Spring 2021 Intermediate Burmese (100B) class at UC Berkeley.
Why focus on something as controversial as hate speech? Why not have them write or talk about, say, a memorable trip or a novel? These conventional themes have served language teachers and learners quite well, but I suspect, in the era of Black Lives Matter and MeToo revelations, my students would rather be discussing the murder of George Floyd and the trial of Harvey Weinstein, even if the attempt might ultimately fail due to their limited vocabulary.
For Burmese learners, hate speech is a particularly timely subject. In its August 2018 report, Reuters issued dire warnings about the spread of hate speech on Burmese social media. ("Why Facebook is Losing the War on Hate Speech in Myanmar," August 15, 2018) So hate speech, I feel, is precisely what we ought to address head-on in a language class.
Is Burmese Difficult to Learn?
The short answer is, yes -- for English speakers. For a more complete answer, we should turn to the language difficulty chart published by the Foreign Service Institute (FS), responsible for training many of the diplomats destined for their foreign postings. FSI ranks Burmese as Category III, requiring approximately 44 weeks (1,100 class hours). Category III also includes Farsi, Khmer, Thai, Tibetan, and Urdu.
Compare them to Category I languages like Spanish, Italian, or Dutch, which only requires 24-30 weeks (600-750 class hours). In grammar, sentence construction, written script, and pronunciation, Category III languages like Burmese are a departure from English. Therefore, the learning curve is steep.
The culture gap between the English-speaking western societies and Burma also makes the Burmese learner's journey much more strenuous. Those at home in Biblical references and Shakespearean phrases may find themselves drowning in expressions drawn from Buddhist parables and Pali texts.
For English speakers learning a Category III language like Burmese, language immersion itself is not enough. It also requires cultural immersion. That means, an unflinching look at the country's history, politics, and beliefs, warts and all.
Words as Weapon
This February, the Burmese Military once again resorted to a coup d’état to hold on to its grip on power, detaining the civilian government leaders and activists.
For many of my students, Burma is more than a scholarly curiosity. For the heritage students of Burmese descent, this is their ancestral home, with relatives now facing the horrors of military rule. For researchers, this is the place where they learned to play a classical musical instrument, attended and given workshops to the locals, and held the stone tablets and palm leaf manuscripts that sing of 600-year-old battles.
Understandably, my students could longer focus on their language lessons and exercises. Facebook posts about the growing anti-coup protests and casualties became a preoccupation. So I decided to revise my lesson plan.
Instead of studying a contemporary poem, we spent considerable time studying the viral memes mocking the junta and calling for civil disobedience. The deliberate misspellings and the puns in them show how the protesters, facing the Military's use of lethal force, responded by using words as weapons, designed to shame, hurt, and undermine the powerful.
Alas, words can also be used against the powerless, as hate speech shows.
The Murky Waters of Hate
As their final assignment, I asked my students to interview native Burmese speakers and collect their thoughts on hate speech, from its definition to possible ways to restrict or regulate it. Part of the challenge with this assignment, was to adequately prepare my students for the answers they might get. Memorizing and posing the assigned questions in Burmese is the easy part. But would they understand the complex, unscripted answers from their interview subjects: native Burmese speakers with a much broader vocabulary?
To prepare them, I had them watch many Burmese YouTube clips and news reports on hate speech (for example: a series of interviews on hate speech recorded by SOAS University of London). Most of these materials are beyond my intermediate students' comprehension level, so the goal was not to dissect the clips but merely to expose the students to the Burmese words and phrases they would likely encounter in their own interviews: words like လူတစ်အုပ်စုကိုဦးတည်တယ် (to target a specific group), ဘာသာရေးအရ၊ လူမျိုးရေးအရ နှိမ်တယ် (to put down someone based on religion or race), ခွဲခြားဆက်ဆံတယ် (to discriminate), and so on.
While many speakers had trouble coming up with a workable definition of hate speech, some cited the word ကုလား (kalar), which describes a dark-skinned person of Indian descent, in their examples.
Most of the speakers are not in favor of regulatory measures to limit hate speech on social media; instead, they favor education as a countermeasure. For more, listen to the English and Burmese podcasts with excerpts from my students' interviews, and their own analyses at the top of the page.
Respectful Language
The exploration of hate speech serves two specific purposes. First, the pedagogical benefit: the interview format nudges the students to engage with native Burmese speakers in spontaneous, unscripted exchanges, think on their feet, and cope with communication hiccups that are a normal part of difficult conversations. The second is perhaps the more important benefit: It gives my students a greater awareness of the type of speech that might offend or hurt, even if unintended.
This project is part of my Lecturer Teaching Fellowship, supported by UC Berkeley's Center for Teaching and Learning. Carmen Acevedo Butcher, a fellow Fellow (how's that for a pun?) in the same batch, focuses on "inclusive language." She writes, "I implore people to stop asking for the list of words to memorize and instead, think of inclusive language as an approach and an ongoing practice."
My students' interviews on hate speech and their own reflections taught me that, hate speech is not confined to a series of words or phrases, which is why it's nearly impossible to define. Combating hate speech is not about shunning or banning certain words; it's about making a concerted effort to respect people from different backgrounds in our use of language.
For more on using social media as a language teaching tool, also check out my project partner Karen Llagas’s page here.