Churchill Square Shopping Mall, Brighton, UK (Source: Wikipedia) In a shopping mall in the city of Brighton, UK, a tourist was arrested on terrorism charges last week for taking a…
Ingrid PillerJuly 8, 2015
Auburn parking ticket (left: quadrilingual on back; right: city logo on front) In Australia with its persistent monolingual mindset coming across any kind of official institutional multilingual communication always feels…
Ingrid PillerJuly 7, 2014
Barely legible today but evidence of 'super-diversity' in the 9th century: Runic graffiti in Hagia Sophia On a parapet in Hagia Sophia’s gallery there is an obscure little graffiti written…
Ingrid PillerJune 21, 2013
Polish refugee section of the Catholic cemetery in Tehran When Kimie Takahashi and myself interviewed participants for Japanese on the Move, our video exhibition of transnational life-stories, one of our…
Ingrid PillerJune 3, 2013
Is this Arabic or English? Or is that asking the wrong question? (Transliteration: sbaisi tinisi tshikn and shrmb*) I’ve often wondered what linguistic theory would look like if its foundations…
Ingrid PillerApril 17, 2013
Constructing language learning as global choice on melale.ir Persian version of Vahid Parvaresh, "Supermarket Language Learning"; translated by Behnam Keimasi (بهنام کیماسی) در ایران، همانند بسیار دیگری از کشورها، دولت به…
Vahid ParvareshJanuary 16, 2013
Constructing language learning as global choice on melale.ir In Iran, as in many other countries, the state has traditionally been a very powerful actor in the field of second language…
Vahid ParvareshDecember 10, 2012
Those of us in the broad area of TESOL often labor under the assumption of the invincibility of English hegemony. Whether they deplore it or exult in it, many people…
Ingrid PillerJanuary 17, 2012
Sir John Bagot Glubb (1897-1986) Many people tend to think that multilingual and intercultural communication skills are not only useful skills to have but are also somehow morally superior. Multilingual…
Ingrid PillerJuly 16, 2011
During my recent lecture about “Teaching language, teaching culture” at the Fujairah Women’s College, I spoke about English language teaching materials in Japan and the ways in which they constructed…
Ingrid PillerJanuary 15, 2011
I visited Persepolis today. Persepolis proved to be a great way to end the year and to reflect on the passage of time. More unexpectedly, Persepolis also proved to be…
Ingrid PillerJanuary 1, 2011
Even a casual observer of the linguistic landscape in Iran will have to conclude that Iranians have a collective fetish for English. Almost all public signage is bilingual in English…
Ingrid PillerDecember 30, 2010
The United Arab Emirates are celebrating their 39th national day this month. Trucial Oman, as it was then known, became independent from their semi-colonial relationship with Britain in December 1971…
Ingrid PillerDecember 5, 2010
Persian version of my blog post about transliterated brand names Translated by Setareh Felfelian (ستاره فلفلیان) London Dairy ad on a building in Abu Dhabi, UAE Igloo ad on truck…
Ingrid PillerAugust 12, 2010
The social networking market research site Inside Facebook has some intriguing language stats. In July, the fastest-growing languages on Facebook were Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and French. The Portuguese growth rate…
Ingrid PillerAugust 2, 2010
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