Ingrid Piller

Ingrid Piller is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, and also at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, UAE, where she currently resides. At Macquarie University she directed the Adult Migrant English Program Research Centre (AMEP RC) from 2007 to 2008. Other universities she has been affiliated with include the University of Basel, Switzerland, where she held the Chair of English Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of English as a Global Language, the University of Sydney, Hamburg University, and Ithaca College. Ingrid holds a PhD in English Linguistics from the Technical University Dresden, Germany.

Ingrid’s research interests are in intercultural communication, language learning, multilingualism, and how they intersect with social inclusion and justice. The overarching question of her work is how the social order is produced and reproduced through linguistic practices and ideologies. She is currently writing a textbook on Intercultural Communication for Edinburgh University Press, which aims to provide a critical introduction to the field from a sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic perspective.

高橋 君江

高橋　君江 [Kimie Takahashi] is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She received a BA in Psychology (1997) and an MA in Applied Linguistics (1999) from Griffith University, and a PhD in Education from the University of Sydney (2006). The main areas of Kimie’s research interests are bilingualism and second language learning and use in transnational contexts. She is particularly interested in the link between gender, race and language learning, which she addresses in her new book Language Desire: Gender, Sexuality and Second Language Learning (Multilingual Matters).

Ingrid & Kimie have been working together since 2000, when they met at an afternoon tea party hosted by the Linguistics Department at the University of Sydney and disagreed about whether children who grow up bilingually are more intelligent than monolingual kids. Kimie thought they were and Ingrid thought they weren’t. Ingrid hasn’t changed her opinion (see my review of The Bilingual Edge). Ingrid went on to become one of the supervisors of Kimie’s PhD on Language Desire: A Critical Ethnography of Japanese Women Learning English in Australia. Since Kimie completed her PhD, we have been collaborating on a research project about language use in the Australian tourism industry and are currently co-editing a special issue dedicated to “Multilingualism and Social Inclusion” for the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

Kimie characterizes our relationship as one where Ingrid is Obi Wan Kenobi and Kimie is Luke Skywalker. Ingrid, however, has never seen Star Wars and wouldn’t even understand the comparison if it were not for Wikipedia.

How many languages do we speak? English is our shared language and the language in which we work. English is an additional language for both of us. Ingrid’s mother tongue is Bavarian, a dialect of Southern Germany, and Kimie’s mother tongue is the Yokohama/Tokyo dialect of Japan. Our partners have brought Persian (Ingrid) and Polish (Kimie) into our lives and we dabble in a range of other languages. We’ll share more details of our linguistic autobiographies and our thoughts on counting languages on My Language on the Move some time soon.

Why did we create this portal? As we have become more interested in multilingualism and social inclusion, the accessibility of our work has become a key concern for us and so we wanted to find a way to share the research we are passionate about with more people. Plus, we both like to play on the Internet and Kimie’s partner Marcin is a web designer, who generously helped us to set this up :)

How did we come up with the name Language on the Move? We were looking for a domain name that had not yet been taken (major challenge!) and that suggested language and communication issues in multicultural and transnational contexts. The inspiration came to us while we had dinner with our families in our favourite Persian restaurant in Sydney, Anahita, and watched a beautifully moving and fluid belly dancing show.

Jie Zhang, PhD candidate
Status: Forum Junior Moderator for Language on the Move
Location: Sydney, Australia

Jie Zhang (aka Jenny) is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, where she is doing a sociolinguistic ethnographic study of English ideologies in the identity construction of Beijing as an Olympic host city. She is also a lecturer in the English Department, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, China. Under the supervision of, and with tremendous support from, Ingrid and Kimie, she is steadily developing into a sociolinguist who has passion for life and research. Jie is honored to be the Forum Junior Moderator (and an obsessed commentator) for Language on the Move. In fact, she enjoys being a “junior” among all the other wonderful members in Ingrid and Kimie’s family.


Emily Farrell, PhD
Status: Twitter Officer for Language on the Move
Location: Berlin, Germany

Emily Farrell is a DAAD fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin, where she is studying multilingual practices in the ever-growing transnational art and music community in Berlin. She received her doctorate in linguistics from Macquarie University in 2009, under the fine supervision of Ingrid and Kimie. Her dissertation focused on migration narratives and social positioning of highly proficient adult second language users of English in Australia. She is interested in further exploring these intersections of migration, transnationalism and language use. She has lectured and tutored at the University of Sydney and the University of New England, Armidale. Emily is pleased to be the 'twitter officer' for Language on the Move. She also moonlights as a musician.