German International School Sydney It is one of the great narratives of our time that the market will fix everything. In education this means that parental choice is assumed to…
Auburn parking ticket (left: quadrilingual on back; right: city logo on front) In Australia with its persistent monolingual mindset coming across any kind of official institutional multilingual communication always feels…
Website of the German Club Montevideo, founded in 1866 The current issue of Begegnung (“Encounter”), the magazine of German International Schools, has a feature about the German School in Montevideo,…
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…
Losing their heritage language decreases the earning potential of 2nd-generation migrants In most countries of immigration, linguistic diversity is by and large ignored by policy makers. If there are language-related…
Two events exploring diversity, including linguistic diversity, in a multicultural society are coming up in Sydney next week. Cultural Diversity @ Work This one-day symposium is organized by the Cultural…
"Speak English or Die!" Vilification on a Melbourne bus caught on camera About a year ago, a video of a language-related altercation on a Melbourne bus was widely reported in…
“Have you heard that young Japanese have stopped having sex? Have you read the recent BBC article? Young men are having virtual girlfriends on smart phones. How weird! Not really…
Carnatic singer Prema Anandakrishnan and her accompanists performing for the monthly Sydney Music Circle concert An important element of language relates to its aesthetic use, in other words, how we…
Yasemin Yildiz (2012) Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham University Press. This book review was originally published in Language in Society 42 (4), 463-466. Access pdf version of…
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,…
Barely legible today but evidence of 'super-diversity' in the 9th century: Runic graffiti in Hagia Sophia On a parapet in Hagia Sophia’s gallery there is an obscure little graffiti written…
Polish refugee section of the Catholic cemetery in Tehran When Kimie Takahashi and myself interviewed participants for Japanese on the Move, our video exhibition of transnational life-stories, one of our…
The front cover of the tourist map of multilingual Macau Last week I had the privilege of visiting the University of Macau and in Macau I discovered yet another unique…
Is this Arabic or English? Or is that asking the wrong question? (Transliteration: sbaisi tinisi tshikn and shrmb*) I’ve often wondered what linguistic theory would look like if its foundations…
TADIT - Teachers Against Discrimination in Taiwan Imagine yourself on the shores of your ancestral homeland, where your parents and grandparents grew up, where the stories you heard as a…