The South Asian presence in colonised Australia is on the rise. I say colonised Australia because, in discussing linguistic diversity in this country, I acknowledge the diverse Aboriginal and Torres…
Mis dos voces (Image credit: Rayon Verde) Imagine this: you go out to a fast-food restaurant and order a burger. While you wait for your order to be filled, you…
Chinese signage on churches is increasingly prominent in Sydney’s linguistic landscape. These signs are surprising because they are bilingual in a predominantly English monolingual linguistic landscape. They are also surprising…
Australia Day Parade Melboure (Image credit: Mitchell Luo on Unsplash) In October 2020, the Australian government outlined budgetary plans to create language requirements for migrant partners seeking to remain in…
Professor Katrijn Maryns explains the linguistic transformations that turn "undocumented migrants" into "genuine" or "bogus refugees" Language is the inescapable medium through which we live our lives. Access to social…
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…
One of the consequences of the recent upsurge in nationalist politics around the world has been a rise in attacks on the idea of linguistic diversity. As national language ideologies…
Miriam's mother arrived as a refugee in New Zealand in 1939. She still remembers the kindness her family was shown. Like many other Western countries, Australia is currently grappling with…
The current global political climate regarding refugees, while always dynamic and complex, has become particularly charged in the last two years as the Syrian civil war and other events in…
As we prepare for the “Bridging Language Barriers” Symposium to be hosted at Macquarie University next week on March 16, we take a step back and ask how language barriers…
Who of the three women in this image do you think German employers are most likely to consider as a potential employee and call for a job interview? Obviously, the…
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…
From inside Jaume Plensa's House of Knowledge, Bordeaux, France (Photo by Shirley Yeung) In much of Western and Northern Europe, we find ourselves in the wake of a widespread retreat…
Kifibin’s workplace was a big event centre, which was open to the public only once a week Let me at once introduce you to the main character of this blog…
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…