Livia and her classmates at a crossroads the year before entering (or not) Gymnasium (Switzerland, 2004) Secondary education as a monolingual fork in the road Let me bust a prevalent…
PASCH Schools: Partners for the future Last week I was privileged to attend the 3rd Conference of School Principals of PASCH Schools in Southeast Asia. A ‘PASCH school’ is a regular…
The researcher wearing a Zhuang employee's work uniform at the Black Clothes Zhuang House in the Ethnic Minorities Village, Nanning, China, 2014 I was surprised, frankly, during my recent fieldwork…
A locutorio shop front in Barcelona (Source: El Periodico) There is now a well-established body of work exploring the language work provided by service workers in call centres and tourist…
Linguistic diversity in Sydney (Source: Sydney Morning Herald) The media in Anglophone countries regularly engage in a bit of a bragfest about the linguistic diversity of their cities. In Sydney,…
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…
Language needs in the hospitality sector in Pallars Sobirà, Catalonia (Source: paddleinspain.com) Multilingualism means business. The more foreign language skills are availalble to a company, the better it will be…
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…
Sydney Language Festival 2014 The Sydney Language Festival will take place in Redfern on Saturday 5th July. For details visit here. What is a language festival? A language festival is…
Schneider, Britta. 2014. Salsa, Language and Transnationalism. Multilingual Matters. In my post on English in Berlin, I wondered what is required for a language to become ‘local’, and about the…
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,…
4月9日刊行予定『異文化コミュニケーションを問いなおす』イングリッド・ピラー カバー・帯写真:渡邊リカルドWe are thrilled to announce that the Japanese translation of Ingrid Piller’s bestselling book Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction will be published by Sogensha (創元社) on the 9th of April,…
Trilingual signage at the Muse checkpoint on the China-Myanmar border Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University presents Multilingualism at the China-Myanmar border: fieldwork experiences When: Wednesday, March 26, 1:00-2:00pm Where: Macquarie…
Many people would agree that English is the language of globalization. English is almost always adopted as the official language of international events, including the Olympic Games. It does not…
Japan Store near the University of Yangon “Welcome to the Golden Guest Inn, Ms Takahashi! We've been expecting you!” A Chinese-Burmese man warmly welcomed me on my arrival at his…
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.”…