A most amazing book has just landed on my desk: Do you speak Swiss, edited by Walter Haas, is the final report on a Swiss National Research Project devoted to…
Ingrid PillerFebruary 14, 2011
Condoms in translation It’s been impossible to escape this week’s media coverage of the pope’s comments about condoms and male prostitutes. There has been a lot of debate about what…
Ingrid PillerNovember 28, 2010
Joe Hill front cover Today 105 years ago, on November 19, 1905, Joe Hill was executed in Utah. Although his name is rather forgotten today, Joe Hill was arguably one…
Ingrid PillerNovember 19, 2010
Language in the catfish war I’ve just read False Economy and in addition to learning many new intriguing things about economic history, I’ve also learnt that the catfish war, was,…
Ingrid PillerNovember 13, 2010
Earlier this term I intercepted a note my 7-year-old had written to her teacher: “Ger Ger Ger; Don’t be so rude.” She was objecting to a reading comprehension exercise about…
Ingrid PillerNovember 6, 2010
Commemorative stamp, German Federal Post, 1989: 300 years French School Berlin I’ve been teaching about bilingualism for more than a decade and when I speak about bilingual education and dual-immersion…
Ingrid PillerOctober 26, 2010
Persian version of my recent blog post about the magic of English Translated by Behnam Keimasi (بهنام کیماسی) در چند هفته ی آینده دانشجویان من در درس مبانیِ جامعه…
Ingrid PillerOctober 24, 2010
I had been led to believe that Japan was a very monolingual place interspersed with Engrish ads, commercial signage and T-shirts. Well, that has turned out to be just another…
Ingrid PillerSeptember 28, 2010
Persian version of my blog post about language evolution Translated by Anna Mirzaiyan (آنا ميرزاييان) آخرهفته سری به سایت ای بِی زدم، اما به جای وسيله ای كه دنبالش می…
Ingrid PillerAugust 31, 2010
I am currently a visiting scholar from Isfahan, Iran, in Sydney, Australia. Therefore, I speak English most of the time. I use English with my colleagues at work although, interestingly,…
Vahid ParvareshAugust 25, 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
In 2009, I contributed a chapter about the social inclusion of migrants in Australia to an edited book about immigration policy published in Japanese in Japan. The book is doing…
Ingrid PillerJuly 11, 2010
This is the story of a young Pakistani man, let’s call him Reza. Reza spent his early years in what was then East-Pakistan and what is today a different country,…
Muhammad Ali KhanJune 10, 2010
Installment #4 in the mini-series on multilingual signage Toilets as an object of sociolinguistic research?! Not likely?! Think again! Today, I am going to discuss toilet signage as an indicator…
Ingrid PillerMay 7, 2010
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