One of the Nowruz traditions involves leaping over bonfires to rid oneself of pain and sorrow (Image credit: Borna News) As people in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, India, Iran, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan,…
Shiva Motaghi TabariMarch 18, 2024
Prepositions are the unnoticed and underappreciated workhorses of language. They are "grammar words" that indicate relationships. Essentially, their job is to connect other words with bigger and more important meanings.…
Ingrid PillerDecember 12, 2022
Memorial for Kian Pirfalak at Isfahan University (Source: Twitter) In the Name of the God of the Rainbow, let’s today think about bilingual double vision. Double vision is a condition…
Ingrid PillerNovember 21, 2022
"Jin, Jiyan, Azadi" banner displayed by Bayern Munich soccer fans (Image credit: Archie Rhind-Tutt) Some recent images from around the globe: protest rally in Rome with a banner featuring the…
Ingrid PillerOctober 4, 2022
Figure 1: Bilingual Squamish and English placard in West Vancouver’s Park Royal shopping village As the Covid-19 pandemic heads toward its third year, with the Omicron variant in full swing,…
Sarah HopkynsJanuary 24, 2022
The translator of the Persian version of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice, Dr Saeed Rezaei The Persian translation of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice (2016, Oxford University Press) has just…
Ingrid PillerMay 15, 2019
Native and non-native teachers at Lord Harris' School, Royapett, Madras, 1865 (Source: British Library) For some time now, a debate has been raging in TESOL about the relative merits of…
Ingrid PillerMay 31, 2018
Multilingual "Welcome" sign in a shopping mall in Munich, Germany Have you recently seen a “welcome” sign? They constitute a strange genre: ever more ubiquitous on the one hand, yet…
Ingrid PillerOctober 31, 2017
Fliers for Persian community events (Persian Library Parramatta, Nov 2010) Editor’s note: In the second instalment in our series “Explorations in Language Shaming”, Dr Shiva Motaghi-Tabari examines children’s attitudes towards…
Shiva Motaghi TabariOctober 5, 2017
Our newest PhD, Dr Shiva Motaghi Tabari (3rd from left) The Language on the Move team is proud to announce another freshly-minted PhD in our midst! Dr Shiva Motaghi Tabari…
Lg_on_the_moveApril 27, 2017
One way of looking at the outcome of the British referendum is to understand it as an act of self-sabotage: "...and in the end, Britain, which had colonized the world,…
Ingrid PillerJune 25, 2016
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…
Ingrid PillerNovember 25, 2015
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken (Source: quotesnpoems.com) It is not unusual for bilingual parents to experience a sense of bewilderment when it comes to language choice in the family.…
Shiva Motaghi TabariDecember 5, 2014
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…
Ingrid PillerJuly 7, 2014
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.”…
Ingrid PillerFebruary 13, 2014
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