A restaurant sign featuring both Tibetan and Chinese, in a village where the Tibetan residents speak Ngandehua, one of Tibet's minority languages (Image: Gerald Roche) As elsewhere in High Asia,…
Before starting my PhD in sociolinguistics at Macquarie University, I had the great privilege of being involved in a research project that was run out of Sydney Law School at…
The challenges of providing equitable services in linguistically diverse societies A few years ago, emergency service provision to speakers of languages other than English in Australia came under scrutiny when…
When are immigrant linguistic and cultural rights tolerable? (Source: demotix.com) Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University presents Questioning Tolerance: When Are Immigrant Linguistic and Cultural Rights Tolerable? When: Friday, November 08, 12:00-1:00pm…
The 2011 Report Freedom of Religion and Belief in 21st Century Australia released this week by the Australian Human Rights Commission notes “high levels of unprompted expressions of concern about…
In his recent post “Accent and History,” Khan asked whether it’s possible to escape the prison of our accent and our language. Looking at the civil war and humanitarian disaster…
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,…
Non-English speakers’ access to emergency services in Australia is in the news again as a Melbourne man has been convicted of the murder of his wife. What makes the case…
Must-read post by Dennis Baron over at the Web of Language! A US university student who majors in Middle Eastern Studies was detained at Philadelphia Airport for carrying Arabic language…
Deborah Cameron noted in 1995 that “linguistic bigotry is among the last publicly expressible prejudices left to members of the Western intelligentsia.” In the same vein, one could point out…
I’ve been wondering what would be an appropriate Christmas post for the Language on the Move blog. Seeing that I’m deeply skeptical about all those claims about the wonderful advantages…
Some people just can’t win it seems. Second language speakers are in that category. I can’t even begin to count how many people who have read a fraction of the…