As a non-speaker and non-reader of Japanese I went to Japan fully expecting to be confused. However, the only confusing moment I experienced had nothing to do with anything Japanese:…
I had been led to believe that Japan was a very monolingual place interspersed with Engrish ads, commercial signage and T-shirts. Well, that has turned out to be just another…
Working women on the move The International Gender and Language Association conference at Tsuda College, Tokyo, kicked off yesterday with a panel about Working Women on the Move organized by…
I can only speak Pashto ABC News yesterday broke a whistleblower report that US army interpreters deployed in Afghanistan often don’t speak the local languages. ABC News reports that up…
Persian version of my blog post about language evolution Translated by Anna Mirzaiyan (آنا ميرزاييان) آخرهفته سری به سایت ای بِی زدم، اما به جای وسيله ای كه دنبالش می…
In the past couple of years, I have been a passenger in Sydney taxis driven, inter alia, by an agricultural engineer from India, a civil engineer from Somalia, a surgeon…
I’ve just run a search for the terms “multilingual” and “multilingualism” in the National Library of Australia’s archive of Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803-1954. In the process, I have learnt that…
Persian version of my blog post about transliterated brand names Translated by Setareh Felfelian (ستاره فلفلیان) London Dairy ad on a building in Abu Dhabi, UAE Igloo ad on truck…
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…
The social networking market research site Inside Facebook has some intriguing language stats. In July, the fastest-growing languages on Facebook were Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and French. The Portuguese growth rate…
Yesterday, the New York Times carried a heart-breaking story about an exceptional school principal forced from her position under No-Child-Left-Behind legislation in order for the school district to obtain federal…
English-Only at Bon Secours From what I read, there is a nursing shortage in the Global North. From North America to Japan and from Europe to the Gulf countries, rich…
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…
Persian version of my recent blog post about the (over-)consumption of English language learning. Translated by زهره قرایی (Zohreh Gharaei) حدود ده سال پیش یک دانشجوی خارجی که از کره ی…
In 2009, I contributed a chapter about the social inclusion of migrants in Australia to an edited book about immigration policy published in Japanese in Japan. The book is doing…
When I lived in Abu Dhabi, I once visited a university in another Middle Eastern country. As part of the visit I did a guest lecture about my research, I…