Alexander von Humboldt was born on 14 September 1769, and the Australian Association of von Humboldt Fellows celebrates its namesake’s birthday annually, normally with dinners of Fellows in capital cities…
Gabrielle McMullenSeptember 16, 2020
Martha Sif Karrebæk and Solvej Helleshøj Sørensen, University of Copenhagen *** Editor’s note: Covid-19 has exposed fractures in the social and linguistic fabric in many contexts internationally, as we have…
Language on the MoveSeptember 9, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed language barriers in societies around the world. It has become obvious that the fact of linguistic diversity had not been incorporated systematically into emergency…
Ingrid PillerSeptember 4, 2020
Readability scores of the two selected public service information texts by the NSW Government This morning I googled “nsw corona/covid restrictions”. The top hits all refer to NSW Government websites,…
Ingrid PillerSeptember 1, 2020
A herder guards the Mongolian script (Image credit: Ayin) As the danger of life-threatening Covid-19 has subsided, Mongols in Inner Mongolia, a region of northern China, have faced a new…
Gegentuul BaioudAugust 30, 2020
Diagram of the ‘radial definition routes’ of Panoptic Conjugation (Ogden 1930: 12) A fascinating turn in recent Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) scholarship is the development of 'Minimal English', an international…
James McElvennyAugust 28, 2020
The NSW Federation of Community Language Schools offers an online master class about "Literacy in heritage language maintenance" as part of its community language teacher training development series. This series…
Language on the MoveAugust 25, 2020
https://vimeo.com/440477672 Besides meetings, webinars, and classes, another traditionally face-to-face event organized this year via Zoom is the 3-minute thesis (3MT) competition. This yearly academic contest, which challenges students to explain…
Pia TenederoAugust 20, 2020
Few people have ever heard about a fascinating form of visual communication used by Indigenous Australians: message sticks. When I teach about the invention of writing, I usually mention them…
Ingrid PillerAugust 18, 2020
Editor’s note: The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a renewed focus on linguistic diversity and the way it intersects with social inclusion. In this latest contribution to our series of language…
Vasiliki VitaAugust 12, 2020
One of countless internet memes about crazy English spelling (Source: angmohdan.com) During a dreary German winter in the 1980s, I would get up early each Friday morning, wrap myself up…
Ingrid PillerAugust 10, 2020
Editor’s note: The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a renewed focus on linguistic diversity and the way it intersects with social inclusion. In this latest contribution to our series of language…
Pierpaolo di CarloAugust 6, 2020
The Phoenician abjad - the ancestor of almost all scripts in use today (Image credit: Wikipedia) Today, literacy has become near universal with the global literacy rate around 85 percent.…
Ingrid PillerAugust 4, 2020
Editor’s note: The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a renewed focus on linguistic diversity and the way it intersects with social inclusion. In this latest contribution to our series of language…
Anna WierzbickaJuly 28, 2020
My "audience" as I was recording the first online lecture for the new term Yesterday, I spent six hours pre-recording a puny little lecture of 15 minutes for the postgraduate…
Ingrid PillerJuly 27, 2020
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