In 2006 and 2007 I was doing my MA at the University of Tehran, about 450 kilometers away from my hometown, Isfahan. For this reason, I was a regular passenger…
Ingrid Piller's keynote lecture at the International Gender and Language Association conference in September 2010 is now available on video and so is another guest lecture she conducted during our…
Persian version of my blog post about English as the non-language of globalization. Translated by Niloufar Behrooz (نیلوفر بهروز) (نوشتار شماره ٢ در مجموعه نوشتار های کوتاه درباره ی…
The world in Arabia I spent my last day in the Middle East at Dubai Mall, the self-proclaimed “Centre of Now.” The mall guide has the heading “Welcome to Everything.”…
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,…
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…
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…
As a non-speaker and non-reader of Japanese I went to Japan fully expecting to be confused. However, the only confusing moment I experienced had nothing to do with anything Japanese:…
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…
Working women on the move The International Gender and Language Association conference at Tsuda College, Tokyo, kicked off yesterday with a panel about Working Women on the Move organized by…
The latest issue of Cross-Cultural Studies (published by the Center for Cross Cultural Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea) includes an article about the dark side of TESOL authored by Ingrid Piller,…
Wiley has just launched its new Handbook of Language and Globalization, edited by Nikolas Coupland. The Handbook consists of 28 chapters by well-known sociolinguists, including our very own Ingrid Piller and Kimie…
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…
Language-on-the-Move's recent blog post Orientalism and Tourism engages with the way ethnic minority people in China are represented in the West (and also by the Han majority in China). Not only…
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…
In Japan, “English as official language policy” (英語公用語化) is currently trending on social networking sites. Two large Japanese corporations, Rakuten and Uniqlo, recently announced the adoption of English as their…