Language-on-the-Move is a sociolinguistics research site devoted to multilingualism, language learning and intercultural communication in a transnational world. Our focus is on the way in which language intersects with consumerism, family life, globalization, tourism, identity, migration and social justice . Language-on-the-Move makes a contribution to our understanding of these intersections both through making our peer-reviewed research available (“Resources”) and through our research-blogging.
Language-on-the-Move is the brainchild of Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi. Our approach to sociolinguistics centers around questions of the intersections between language and social inclusion. Consequently, 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.
Ingrid and 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.
We often get asked how many languages 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.
While most of the content on this site has been created by Ingrid and Kimie, kudos for the design are due to our web-designer Marcin Debski from Espider Graphic & Web Design. If you think that we do sociolinguistics in style, it is because of him!
