Heinrich Zille, "Die Original Australier" auf dem Rummel, ca. 1900 One of the central arguments of my book Intercultural Communication is that, even today, much intercultural communication is approached from…
A couple of years ago, I mused here on Language on the Move what linguistic theory would look like if its dominant cultural ideas had not been shaped in 1950s…
Piller, I. (Ed.) (2016) Language and Migration. London: Routledge. Humans are a migratory species. Although in modern society the dominant imagery we have created about ourselves is that it is…
Last week I was fortunate to be able to attend the 2016 annual conference of the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. In my…
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,…
Demand action from our politicians to make a LOTE compulsory! The state of language learning in Australian schools is dire. This weekend the Sydney Morning Herald carried an article entitled “Why students are…
Teacher expectations produce self-fulfilling prophecies in student performance: high teacher expectations result in students’ higher academic performance and low teacher expectations result in students’ lower academic performance. The positive effect…
I recently pointed out that the widespread belief that migrants refuse to learn the language of their new country does not stack up against the realities of adult language learning.…
Albanian-Greek border crossing at Kakavijë (Source: greece.com) Our understanding of the role of language in social life suffers from a particularly intractable problem: the terms we use to speak about…
Asylum seekers practicing German (Source: Schwaebische.de) Germany has discovered a new social type that is causing grief in modern diverse societies: the “Integrationsverweigerer;” literally someone who refuses to integrate, a…
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) Some contemporary sociolinguists love to hate an 18th century educator, philosopher, theologian, translator and general polymath by the name of Herder. Hardly a week goes by…
January 26, Australia Day: whether you are celebrating depends on your perspective (Source: news.com.au) Here in Australia we celebrated our national holiday yesterday. Australia Day marks the end of the…
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…
Nizaqete Bislimi (Source: DuMont Verlag / Franz Brück) Some of the most striking images from the refugees who have been trekking across Europe are of families and children. Beyond the…
Condemned to consume My migration newsfeed in the past few weeks has been dominated by news about the Syrian refugee crisis and the various European and international responses. But there…
Trial by fire depicted in a medieval manuscript (Source: Wikipedia) In the Middle Ages those suspected of witchcraft were often subjected to a ‘trial by fire’ to prove their innocence…