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…
The house of the English high school teacher in the village in Sulawesi where Pasassung conducted his fieldwork In a recent post, I reviewed language policy research that shows how…
Ad for a private English language school in Taiwan: the normalization of American English is obvious in the name and imagery There is no denying the fact that English has…
Multilingual Hong Kong (Katherine Chen and Gray Carper, 2005-2007) During our visit to Hong Kong, Kimie and I met Katherine Chen, who introduced us to a sociolinguistic film she has…
Bangladeshi manager speaking English and subtitled in British educational video "How fair is fashion?" The other day I watched a show about global textile production. How fair is fashion? by…
I’m one of the comparatively unlucky few swimming against the global linguistic tide. I’m a mother tongue speaker of English, “the” global language. That means if I want to become…
English belongs to everyone? The claim that “English belongs to everyone who uses it” has continued to gain more and more cultural cache, at least in global (English) academic circles.…
“PR” is probably one of the abbreviations I have heard most since coming to Australia. Despite the fact that PR – “permanent residence” for the non-initiated - is the much-coveted…
Pakistan Swat Valley 2009 Ingrid briefly mentioned Zubeida Mustafa’s new book Tyranny of Language in Education: The Problem and its solution recently. Since then, we’ve had numerous enquiries about the…
Japanese stop sign The current global orthodoxy holds that learning English is good: individuals who know English are supposed to have an advantage in the job market and countries with…
The United Arab Emirates are celebrating their 39th national day this month. Trucial Oman, as it was then known, became independent from their semi-colonial relationship with Britain in December 1971…
Lotus Pond (part of Shinobazu Pond) in Ueno Park “There are so many stupid Japanese women around, huh? Many Westerners are coming to our country and the stupid women love…
Some Language-on-the-Movers based here in Sydney had the opportunity to attend Professor Masaki Oda’s lecture about the current state of the English language in Japan yesterday. With major Japanese companies…
In Japan, “English as official language policy” (英語公用語化) is currently trending on social networking sites. Two large Japanese corporations, Rakuten and Uniqlo, recently announced the adoption of English as their…
Multilingual sign in Namtso (Image Credit: Wikipedia) Italian version of my blog post about Chinglish. Translated by Emanuela Moretto Per un attimo provate a pensare che il New York Times abbia…