Australia: The White Man's Land (Source: NLA) Australia has a proud national narrative of migration and multiculturalism. It also has an equally prevalent history of exclusionary and discriminatory migration policy.…
Rashid al-Din Monument in Soltaniyeh, Iran (Source: Wikipedia) Recently, I signed a contract for a revised second edition of my 2011 book Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction to be published…
Who is a real refugee? The refugee crisis in Europe has caught a lot of global media attention. Countries at the entry points and their official actions, as well civil…
Annastacia Palaszczuk and members of her family (Source: Couriermail) Would Kirk Douglas be a Hollywood legend if he had kept his birth name Issur Danielovitch? Would Bob Dylan have achieved…
Hutatma Smarak (Martyrs's Memorial) on Flora Square in Mumbai constructed in the memory of 106 people killed during the agitation for the creation of Unified Maharashtra. The two individuals in…
This tweet says: "CSU issues correction: its proposal was translated into German incorrectly" Germany is currently witnessing a delightful language ideological farce. It all started when the conservative Christian Social…
Excerpt from "The Haunted Lotus" by Australian-Hazara artist Khadim Ali (Source: Milani Gallery) An objection that is commonly raised against Esperanto and other auxiliary languages is that they are “invented.”…
Bilingual Swedish-Finnish monument in Helsinki commenmorating globally beloved children's author Tove Jansson, a Swedish-speaking Finn (Source: vanderkrogt.net) 50,000 people have signed a petition against mandatory Swedish classes in Finnish schools,…
In today’s immigration countries, adherents of the “one nation, one language” idea face a unique ideological problem: to claim that the national language is a sign of national loyalty and…
Speak English, people! says British politician Ed Miliband (Source: msn.com) Every ten years the UK government conducts a census, which every British resident is obliged by law to take part…
Australia in Asia (Source: unitingworld.org.au) Since starting a PhD in February in a different field to my previous work, I’ve been running a weekly alert with the words “language” and…
WSB TV report: Apple discriminates against Persian-speaking customers I’ve just found an e-mail from Apple in my spam folder with a ‘personal’ invitation to attend one of their new store…
I was so grateful to read Ingrid Piller’s in-depth critical post on German language politics, where she offered a profound analysis of the assumptions underlying the campaign “Ich spreche Deutsch”.…
Ads for a campaign to speak German are currently all over Germany. The campaign is called “Ich spreche Deutsch” (I speak German) and aims to convince migrant youths to learn…
If you read English-language news, you could be forgiven for thinking that Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel recently came out strongly against multiculturalism and immigration. You could be forgiven, but you'd…