Recently, I had occasion to visit a toy store in Isfahan to buy a present for my seven-year-old cousin, who had invited me to his birthday party. Grand, impressive and…
“What is the meaning of the choice of English in the slogan on this car?” That was one of the questions I asked the participants in the 2nd Language-on-the-Move Workshop…
According to a Persian saying Isfahan is nesf-e jahan (‘Half the World’). As some of our regular readers might recall, I visited ‘Half the World’ as part of the Language-on-the-Move…
In the past three decades attention has shifted from communicative competence to discourse as a frame for understanding the challenges faced by language learners. Yet, the question of how stereotyping…
One of the most bizarre experiences I had during my stay in Australia was being asked by a European housemate whether it was difficult to ride a donkey. Huh?! How…
In the past thirty years, Iran’s population has exploded from about 40 million to more than 72 million. Such rapid growth has resulted in the vast majority of the population…
Recently, the British royal wedding made international front-page news. It was globally portrayed as an auspicious occasion for the world to remember; much like a well-written fairy-tale. The outcome was record-breaking:…
Amoo ('Uncle') Poorang Persian version of my recent post about "Ridiculing accents" Translated by Behnam Keimasi (بهنام کیماسی) آیا مایه گذاشتن از اقلیتهای زبانی برای سرگرم کردن کودکان کار درستی…
Amoo ('Uncle') Poorang Is it ok to entertain children at the expense of linguistic minorities? That was the question I asked myself a couple of months ago when I was…
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…
The Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani has a routine about the stereotypical views of Iranians as fanatics often presented in the Western media: Every time they show us on TV they…
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…
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…
Divine linguistic diversity I’ve spent the past two days convening the first-ever Language-on-the-Move workshop at the University of Tehran. The idea was to explore language contact and multilingualism in the…
This is the first in a series of blog posts about my experiences undertaking an ongoing research project. In this series I will be detailing some of the methodological challenges…