Metrolingual multitasking and differential inclusion: Singapore’s Chinese languages in shared spaces

Migrant labour and diversity

Singapore’s current multilingual environment has been shaped by migration-led diversity, markedly through the linguistic abilities of Chinese labour migrants, well before the inception of the Republic of Singapore in 1965 (Yen, 1986: 116–120; Yeoh and Lin, 2013: 33–34). The history of Singapore is one of migration-led diversity, starting with ‘a Malay milieu into which there were Thai, Javanese, Portuguese, Dutch, and British intrusions’, with sustained influence from ‘Chinese, Arab and Persian merchants, as well as traders from the Indian subcontinent’ (Lim Joo-Jock, 1991: 13–14). Developed under British colonialism for most of the 19th century, Singapore was the first free port in the region, which attracted traders from East, South and South-east Asia, as well as from Europe, to form a multi-ethnic society composed notably of Cantonese, Hokkien, Bugis, Indian, Armenian, Arab and European migrant groups (Turnbull, 1977: 13–15). Since the 18th century, systematic Chinese migration to the region has resulted in the development of a complex migratory, economic and social infrastructure of Chinese organisations to support the integration of Chinese newcomers, including dialect-based Chinese clan associations monopolising particular occupations (Yen, 1986: 1–4, 116–120). Under British colonialism, Singapore evolved as a multi-ethnic and multilingual society, markedly owing to the labour of Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Foo-Chow, Hainanese and Hakka migrants (Goh and Tan, 2007: 395).

With post-colonial state authorities encouraging the development of a bilingual society within the parameters of its CMIO framework, the linguistic terms of integration have been officially set for new arrivals, while migration-driven diversification became more stratified based on skills and occupations. Foreigners currently make up 33% of the total workforce in Singapore, numbering 1,427,500 in total in December 2019 (Ministry of Manpower, 2019). This modern diversification process is based on sustained migration-led demographic growth and produces increasingly diffuse geographies of new arrivals (Lai et al., 2013). There is social and economic stratification amongst these newcomers between low-waged male and female transient labour migrants (NPTD, 2019) – who form the majority of newcomers – and high-status economic migrants, transnational marriage migrants and university students. Differentiated inclusion is institutionalised by the issuance of a range of work passes, permits and social visit passes that determine economic migrants’ access to rights and entitlements. These passes are mainly differentiated by skills status, by income and by the perceived desirability of these skills for the achievement of national goals (Ye, 2016; Yeoh and Lin, 2013). The uneven incorporation of foreigners is highly monitored and structured according to the perceived needs of the economy. The growing complexity in Singaporean society is constituted through the continued salience of racial categories, alongside an increasing hierarchy of skills-based organisation of society. The resulting linguistic landscape is not only structured by Singapore’s official language policy, but also reflects and follows this growing diversification of the city. Singapore’s current multilingual environment symbolises the non-remarkable ways in which new arrivals – in particular, new Chinese migrants – adapt to everyday shared spaces through language at the intersection of their background and collective expectations, be they state or society driven.

Differential inclusion and Chinese linguistic forms

These state-contoured, migration-led diversification patterns in Singapore have led to an evolving interplay between inclusion, exclusion and belonging (Ye, 2019). Measures of inclusion carry out the political work of management that structures what form belonging takes and, consequently, stratify who belongs and who does not. In other words, measures of inclusion shape what form integration takes and who has access to integration. Rather than being intrinsically open or opposed to exclusion, the aggregate processes of ‘incorporation’ subject people to particular imaginaries of diversity and situate how different migrants ‘ought’ to be. This perspective builds on Ye’s (2016) emphasis on ‘modes of civility and incivility’ to differentiate migrants and locals, as well as who is seen as the ‘integrated migrant’ and who has yet to be integrated. Understood as ‘broad, overarching principles that guide – rather than coerce – everyday encounters in public through practices of inclusion and exclusion’, these norms serve as implicit rules by which migrant incorporation is shaped (Ye, 2019: 489). Integrating into shared spaces in the city is hence premised upon one’s ability to adapt to locally accepted norms of behaviour (Ye, 2016). It is the violation, the transgression of these norms that highlights the non-integration of the transgressor, rather than when rules are followed. In this view, integration can be understood as a stratified continuum of belonging, specific to the norms and expectations of the context in which the incorporation takes place. Many have pointed out the challenges of defining integration in practice (Gilmartin and Migge, 2015; Olwig, 2011; Wills et al., 2009). Much of this work, however, speaks from and to European contexts that privilege long-term migration. New arrivals to Singapore are mainly short-term workers, hence constituting a different milieu of diversification. Both longer-term (as are many of the respondents included here) and shorter-term migrants are a part of this milieu. The meaning and conceptualisation of integration are therefore different when taking our data into consideration.

In the Singaporean context, integration can be understood through the linguistic dimension of differential inclusion, which emerges through the complex relationships between the local coexistence and use of Chinese linguistic forms and a national context in which post-colonial state authorities have used Mandarin as a language management tool for integration and social cohesion purposes. The state designs in the institutionalising of Mandarin since 1965 are fraught with scripts of inclusion and exclusion. Whereas it was first used until 1979 to reduce and simplify intra-ethnic differences domestically, Mandarin then became a tool to re-ethnicise the local Chinese community in opposition to a perceived threat of Westernisation and, starting in 1990, state authorities promoted Mandarin to benefit from its increasing role as a global language (Ang, 2017: 108–109; Montsion, 2014: 1492). In this context, differential inclusion has constantly involved state directives limiting the use of Chinese languages other than Mandarin, because they were not considered languages that would help Chinese Singaporeans economically and culturally (Chong, 2011: 888–889; Tan and Goh, 2011: 614). With measures prohibiting the use of these languages in television and in schools (Tan and Goh, 2011: 615), Singapore’s language policy resulted in the steady decline of dialect use: from 64% in 1980 to approximately 50% in 1990 and approximately 30% in 2000 (Montsion, 2014: 1492). In contrast, ‘[t]he percentage of Singaporean Chinese who reported speaking Mandarin in the home environment jumped from 10.2 per cent in 1980 to 45.1 per cent in 2000’ (Goh and Tan, 2007: 396). The decline has continued since then, with only 14.3% of people speaking a dialect at home in 2010 and 12.2% in 2015 (Department of Statistics of Singapore, 2016: 5). This is the result of state-driven initiatives and related social norms guiding Chinese Singaporeans and new migrants alike to participate in ‘a particular and politicized logic of diversification’ (Ye, 2019: 490).

However, Chinese languages other than Mandarin are still part of the fabric of multiracial Singaporean society today and have re-emerged periodically as markers of differential inclusion, notably during shifts in migration-driven diversification patterns. For instance, throughout the 2000s, films have used Chinese languages other than Mandarin and celebrated the ‘heartlander’ figure, a stereotypical working-class Chinese Singaporean speaking Chinese languages other than Mandarin. In this view, these languages became associated in local imaginary with local forms of authenticity, often in contrast to the celebration of cosmopolitan Chinese Singaporeans or in reaction to increasing numbers of new Mainland Chinese arrivals (Chong, 2011; Tan and Goh, 2011). During the SARS and COVID-19 public health crises, state-sponsored media also started to use Chinese languages other than Mandarin to communicate key public service announcements and health measures to all Chinese Singaporeans (Goh and Tan, 2007; Koon, 2020). As with other facets of daily life where Chinese languages other than Mandarin are heard, their presence and cultural distinctiveness became more tolerated by state authorities, along with a carefully designed strategy of differential inclusion that layers and structures Singapore’s multilingual diversity (Goh and Tan, 2007; Montsion, 2014). Their enduring use and existence in specific locales of the city-state highlight well how ‘urban inhabitants are themselves organizing and normalizing particular contours of differentiation’ (Ye, 2019: 491). This reveals how integration occurs in everyday life.

Recognising and using local linguistic scripts

Adapting to the multilingual environment of Singapore’s everyday life is seen as a norm against which people of various backgrounds, personal histories and encounters have to position themselves. One participant represents well the perspective of notably middle-class, English-educated Chinese Singaporeans on multilingualism (Chua, 2003: 73):

When I was growing up, I could speak my own Teochew, I could speak Hokkien because it is widely spoken. I speak Cantonese as well. And then you pick up Malay as well, so it’s very common to speak these dialects well. But if you belong to the minorities, like Hainanese or Hakka, you pick up even more, because you’ll hear the other dominant ones more.

In this view, by focusing on how shared spaces, linguistic practices and activities intersect in daily interactions, the need to adapt to a multilingual environment does not emerge from an individual decision, the mastery of specific languages or the ability to code-switch from one language to another; it is more about the necessity to recognise how linguistic practices occur daily and about a will to participate (Blommaert et al., 2005). As one younger Chinese Singaporean explains, Singapore’s multilingual environment is more about people defining each other based on language groups than about being fluent in these languages:

In the bigger environment, we have all the different groups of people, dialects speaking group of people, Cantonese, Hokkien and we mix with that, very naturally from young to the old. I have friends who are in all different dialect groups, we mingle, and we make fun of each other’s dialect and we try to sing in each other’s dialect. I think it’s about the environment that you are being exposed to that helps to accept each other’s culture and respect each other’s culture.

Even if this awareness of Singapore’s multilingualism is well recognised, not all can speak the different Chinese languages fluently and Singapore’s de facto bilingual requirement for integrating society remains significant, notably amongst new Chinese migrants. As this participant says,

At home, we will be more insistent in speaking Mandarin. Because [we] hope that [our] children will have a good foundation for Mandarin. So, basically [we] use Mandarin to communicate at home. Then when at school, besides [my] lessons, because I teach Chinese classes, so I will also use Mandarin. But, in other school settings [I will] use English… when I go out, it depends on the situation, I guess. But, [it] seems like [I am] more used to using English. It seems like when others [see] me, the first instinct for them is to speak to me in English. They may feel that I look more like a Malay. So, if they used English first, then I would use English already.

Whether it is for multilingual or bilingual individuals, metrolingual multitasking relates here to how diversity-in-practice is lived by both Chinese Singaporeans and new Mainland Chinese arrivals, while Singapore’s multilingual environment serves as the framework through which the use of linguistic resources as spatial practices is legitimised. In light of Thrift’s (2007) associational view of space, metrolingual multitasking shows how individuals, objects and languages intersect to form the communicative activity within spaces. Singapore’s local multilingual environment sets the stage for revealing these spatial practices and the everyday encounters ‘shaping and remaking the linguistic landscapes of shared places, using an array of linguistic resources’ (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014: 168).

Whereas new Chinese migrants at first adapt to the linguistic environment by speaking English in recognition of Singapore’s diversity, which includes non-Chinese Singaporeans, Chinese Singaporeans have a firmer grasp of the linguistic scripts used to navigate particular everyday activities of specific shared spaces. Speaking of Singapore’s food stalls and traditional food courts known as hawker centres, one local participant explains,

So the general situation is, to be safe, you use Mandarin, but you look at the store and if they sell Teochew food, so you should speak to them in Teochew, and they would be very happy … So you go into the hawker centres and you see ‘Hokkien Fried Prawn Mee’, and if you talk about the roast meats, mostly the Cantonese, and the Teochew fishballs, mostly the Teochews.

In line with previous research on the socioeconomic and linguistic profile of Chinese Singaporeans as being able to make such observations, notably English-educated middle-class populations, linguistic clues exist in shared spaces but are not necessarily visible, known or useful to all (Chua, 2003: 73). A new migrant from Jiangsu indicates,

I am now working at the kindergarten, I know how to speak a little. Because [I have been there] for long. I worked for three to four years, ah slightly more than four years, [so I] know how to speak a little of Singapore English … Beyond my work, I cannot communicate. Only know how to listen. Listen also not entirely [comprehensible], you know, but still ok. I mostly speak Jiangsu dialect at home.

Highlighting well the inner workings of differential inclusion, some new arrivals cannot at first engage. Integration here results in new Chinese migrants drawing upon their linguistic resources and skills to learn about and navigate difference, hence reproducing the polyglot repertoire of diversifying shared spaces.

Differential inclusion is notably seen through the rewards that come with the uses of these scripts, hence reflecting how metrolingual multitasking is socially reproduced. As one Chinese Singaporean youth who speaks Teochew fluently mentions,

So when you speak to a coffee shop [worker in ‘dialect’], [the] auntie ³ gives you discounts, you get more food that kind of thing … I love my kuih [a Malaysian-style breakfast pastry], so me and my friend, so we went down. The auntie knows that I like kuih a lot, so my friend goes down before me and the auntie asked my friend, so what do you want? He said the kuih, then she said ‘there’s no more kuih, you take the bread set’. Then I came and she gave me the kuih, and he felt so cheated and angry. He doesn’t speak Teochew and the auntie wasn’t even Teochew. But she understands Teochew, so I guess, as long as you speak a dialect, you will feel it.

For this participant, his metrolingual multitasking is recognised and rewarded by people able or not to use the same linguistic forms and resources, hence indicating how such a practice is elevated in the collective social imaginary.

The valuing of these local linguistic scripts highlights how Singapore’s urban shared spaces are constructed as sites of conviviality where people are ‘enjoying and engaging in casual diversities’ and ‘celebrating the diverse environments in which they work’ (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015: 89–90). Building on the works of Gilroy (2004) and Wise (2009), metrolingual multitasking sheds light on the need and desire to accommodate, connect and interact across cultural lines in dense urban settings where diversity is driven by migration. As one participant notes,

I had a Hong Kong colleague who came about say six years ago, and we had an exchange and she told me one day ‘do you speak Cantonese at all?’ I said ‘no, I don’t’ and she said ‘you teach me Teochew and I can teach you Cantonese’ and I said ‘fair deal!’ so we did … I think many Singaporeans go through the same thing.

No matter if one completely masters such a Chinese language or not, the common willingness to utilise various linguistic forms and resources as an act of getting closer to someone in such a diverse urban locale speaks to Wise’s notion of quotidian transversality, which describes ‘how individuals in everyday spaces use particular modes of sociality to produce or smooth inter-relations across cultural difference, whether or not this difference is a conscious one’ (2009: 23).

Consistent with older waves of migrants to Singapore, new Chinese migrants are also learning how metrolingual multitasking becomes a way of life linked to an ethos of accommodating others from different backgrounds and a continuous practice of language learning while sharing the same urban space. As one indicates,

[In] China we don’t have such an environment so we only study English for the sake of studying. Then, when I came to Singapore then I realized, this is a language that I have to continuously improve on. Like when I am selling clothes [and] I meet Malay or Indian [customers], minimally you should know the basics from your line of work, like colour, size, or pattern [… I used to experience] language barriers, but after [I] kept using it, it became natural. And I am also from Fujian, then the Fookian is actually similar to our dialect. If you listen closely, it is just that our dialect is stronger, the Hokkien in Singapore is lighter. So, I also know how to speak a little of Singaporean Hokkien now.

This awareness of multiple linguistic forms and resources, the willingness of newcomers to learn various linguistic scripts and the normalising of living in a multilingual urban environment are all steps towards the socialisation and integration of new Chinese migrants into an ever-diversifying city. This highlights the continuity of integration parameters that take place in banal ways, even if older and newer waves of new arrivals were administered differently in Singapore.

Being linguistically competent in the city

Linguistic competence is the ability to navigate urban diversity by using situational knowledge to succeed at achieving specific daily tasks. Based on their backgrounds and positionality, Singaporean multilingual speakers use vocabulary creatively and other linguistic resources pragmatically – without necessarily being fluent in these languages – to achieve specific tasks and fulfil societal functions such as selling or buying food items. As one participant who studies Singapore languages notes, linguistic competence in Singapore is complex and contextually situated, as it is defined in relation to broad structural and historical trends:

We have what we call a really multilingual generation in a way, is not that old, an example of this, where older Singaporeans will know English at this particular moment, the famous Ai-mee-Singh, her father is Indian, her mother is Chinese, therefore she speaks English, Hindi, Cantonese, and now she says she speaks Mandarin … If we go one or two generations down, we have bilingual class generation, where in your 30s, you have to be fluent in English to be able to function in Singapore, job-wise especially, but they still know some of the vernaculars, they are also now fluent in Mandarin. If we jump into the next generation, which are sort of these young people in university at the moment, we see different Chinese Singaporeans where their best language is English, they know Mandarin. I cross out the vernaculars completely but maybe I should dot the lines instead cross it out, because there is still people who learn some, enough to get by for proficiency.

The contours of one’s linguistic competence are generally linked to one’s social position and relationship to others in the city.

For new arrivals, not only are the linguistic profiles different, they have distinct goals in their integration into Singaporean society. This is reflected in the position taken by a new migrant from Shandong:

I feel that definitely, in terms of communication [using English] or finding a job, it is a huge help. I feel that [in] Singapore’s society, Mandarin is very important [… At] my work, there are some parents [whose] English is not that good, or some seniors who came to pick up or send their kids. It is very convenient for us to communicate [using Mandarin], but of course [being proficient in] English is way better, the school mainly uses English as its primary language of communication. During our meeting, regardless if you are a Mandarin teacher or an English teacher, you still have to use English to join in the meeting and discussions. So, I feel that for [work] it is more convenient.

Partially owing to the evolution of state language policy, the choice of linguistic resources will vary between Chinese Singaporeans and new Chinese migrants, to the extent that the historical variety of Chinese languages other than Mandarin is less visible and even less significant for younger generations. Complementing the official status given to Mandarin and English in structuring the city-state linguistically, our data highlight how daily activities in Singapore’s shared spaces reveal metrolingual multitasking as a praxis that builds on the enduring legacies of migration-driven diversity. This is unfolding through the ongoing coexistence of various Chinese language forms and resources, used in combination with one another by Chinese Singaporeans and new Chinese arrivals alike, when conducting similar daily tasks in unremarkable ways.

Achieving daily pragmatic communications is one of the norms of metrolingual multitasking, because it highlights the value given to the banality of negotiating, changing and adjusting the use of linguistic resources. A local student shared a recent encounter while sharing a taxi ride with a friend:

We got in a cab, and we were surprised because we were speaking in English first, and then changed to Mandarin, and then the driver was like, ‘you know how to speak Mandarin?’ Then, later, we changed to speaking Teochew, and the driver was like, ‘you also know how to speak Teochew?’ He asked us why we knew how to speak all these languages, and we said because we are Teochew Singaporeans. So then he charged us cheaper for the cab fare. That kind of thing. I guess there’s a certain value with that.

One normative facet of metrolingual multitasking is found in the value given to maintaining an environment that enables ‘creative linguistic conditions’ for everyday interactions and activities to be conducted (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014: 163). As one participant well versed in the history of languages in Singapore explains further,

So what is really interesting is … how easy Singaporeans find it to switch, whether you’re speaking English, Mandarin Chinese, they switch … it’s a kind of key feature of very bilingual, or highly bilingual, multilingual place, where it’s seamless, people just move, and when you have shared, neutral languages, so people would move sort of seamlessly from one language to another, some linguists don’t even call it code-switching, they call it translanguaging.

Although framed as a negotiation between Singapore’s official languages, a similar effort to find common linguistic resources to communicate pragmatically is found with new migrants from Mainland China, as the following exchange shows:

The context of daily exchanges may require creativity in ‘getting things done’ beyond words, with metrolingual multitasking including non-verbal gestures (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015: 3). Participants in such exchanges have grown accustomed to combining verbal and non-verbal gestures to communicate in a diversifying urban setting and, through their actions, they highlight how differential inclusion is practised. As Goodwin argues, ‘gesture is not simply a way to display meaning but an activity with distinctive temporal, spatial, and social properties that participants not only recognise but actively use in the organisation of their interaction’ (1986/2009: 47). In this view, metrolingual multitasking as urban and linguistic competence is not about the perfect communicative practice, as often assumed in language policy, but about finding creative ways to have pragmatic interactions. In migration-led diverse settings, metrolingual multitasking does not solely rely on shared linguistic resources to enable interactions. In spaces such as markets, social semiotic codes supporting pragmatic communication are used creatively. They include non-linguistic resources combined and deployed amid a multi-sensory, multi-modal and multi-functional environment (Hua et al., 2017). These are part of the tactics of everyday integration, where linguistic forms and resources are used for pragmatic, unromantic reasons, amongst other aspects of the environment where the interactions occur.

The downside to migration-led linguistic diversity

Such coexistence with difference comes with moments of struggle, compromise and frustration, especially for shop keepers and customers who choose how to deploy it, or not, to fit the goal of their interaction. The lived experience of multilingualism can also bring about tension between people who are ethnically proximate to each other, especially in a diverse society historically shaped by various waves of migration. One Singaporean participant explains,

So I was going vegetable shopping in a market, and the vegetable seller was speaking Teochew to two women who were speaking Teochew in return and they were having a lively conversation, really great fun. The two women end up getting a lot of free deals like free chilis and recipes on how to cook them … So I went up to that guy and I started my conversation by speaking Teochew to him … So he went on and gave me the cold shoulder and didn’t want to respond to me in Teochew at all, and then decided that he had to do my business, so he switched and he used Mandarin, so I stood there really confused … So I spoke Mandarin to him because I didn’t want to be rude since he responded in Mandarin so I spoke Mandarin to him, and he upped the game by then not responding in Mandarin to my response in Mandarin, but spoke in English. So we exchanged a deal, I paid him and he didn’t give me free chilis nor free recipes but we ended the conversation in English.

The choice of whether or not to engage with someone and the refusal to adapt linguistically to find the best way to communicate for various reasons is the flip side of metrolingual multitasking as a normative framework for everyday integration.

This everyday exclusionary script is experienced by both Chinese Singaporeans and new migrants from Mainland China. As one new arrival explains,

[With] Singaporean Chinese [who …] only learns English and only speaks English, if they stop to speak to you in Chinese, after a sentence or two, [I realize I] don’t want to [interact] with them … Because of the pride in their hearts, they don’t want to speak Chinese. If you talk to them, if you think they are Chinese and you speak Chinese with them, they will feel ‘oh no, I don’t speak Chinese’. I don’t want to talk to people like them. I have met such a person once [… They] just didn’t want to talk to me.

As much as metrolingual multitasking enables people to engage across difference, linguistic forms also function as markers of distinction and boundaries. Differential inclusion is found in the effort not to force the assimilation of newcomers into specific forms but rather to find common ground to communicate with others across cultural differences. The limits of inclusion are not only reproduced by long-time residents but can be enacted by new Chinese migrants as well. Indeed, integration also entails learning and practising boundary-making work. This is especially significant to ground everyday negotiations of citizenship towards newcomers in a migration-led diversifying city and ‘to locate the faint possibilities of cosmopolitan solidarity and “quotidian transversality” between and among citizens and non-citizens’ (Khoo, 2014: 792).

It is important to note that such exclusionary practices are not necessarily the result of ill will. Metrolingual multitasking can be disorienting, because it builds on communicative practices that are found on a spectrum of compatibility and disconnect between parties amid shifting migration-led urban diversity. With a priority given to ‘creating spaces for language-making, where rules and boundaries are crossed and changed’ come various feelings of being inadequate or of it being simply wrong for people using various linguistic resources and combinations to engage in creative communication (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015: 16). As one participant explains,

For those of us who are not very good in Hokkien or very good in Mandarin, so many they use two languages to express certain things, so some of the essence of that dialect, or meaning or Mandarin is lost. The struggle is about not being able to articulate our feelings sometimes … I guess when we say half-baked: I can understand Hokkien when someone speaks it or uses the language, but for me to actually speak fully in Hokkien, I can’t do it. I will have different vocabulary to help express, use that in English or Mandarin. So half-baked is talking about that language that all of us employs for our daily usage, so it has become another language on its own. Just like how you feel about Singlish, I think Singlish has become another language actually. For the Chinese ethnic group in Singapore, this ‘half-baked’ there is no negative or positive connotation, but it describes how we use the language and what we are actually.

Whether it is codified as Singlish or just a random combination of linguistic resources from different languages to best describe one’s thoughts, metrolingual multitasking privileges the local conditions in which linguistic resources are deployed over broader international linguistic standards, in order for all – including newcomers – to have a chance to communicate pragmatically (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014).

Some new migrants from Mainland China have realised this praxis, if only in their effort to adapt to the local ways of speaking, even if they do not make sense based on linguistic standards. As one notes,

For example, [there are expressions] we don’t use, but here [when people speak] Mandarin, [they might mix in English words such as] ‘but’, or ‘so’. Maybe we might get influenced: ‘Eh I tell you ah’ then when speaking [midway], then [they add] ‘but’, or ‘so’, then [we react:] what is this? Maybe we will mix some into Mandarin … some basic Singaporean-English.

Accepting these local linguistic idiosyncrasies is intertwined with ongoing language improvisation. As migration-led diversification increases combinations of linguistic resources, it also comes with an awareness of international standards for specific languages, an increased proximity to difference in speaking a shared linguistic form and a self-conscious sense of not being up to par; hence making this tension a key facet to understanding how metrolingual multitasking operates. Integrating into a new society is marked by these tensions. Rather than discounting how integrated or not a new arrival is based on such international standards, the tension found here in improvising communications demonstrates that integration cannot be easily quantified and must be understood as a highly dynamic, heterogeneous process.