Australia as a White nation has deep roots: the aim of this 1914 board game was literally "to get the Coloured Men out and the White men in" (Image credit:…
Image credit: Chris Montgomery via Unsplash Language plays a central role in legal settings. The way linguistic diversity is conceptualized and accommodated can affect access to justice in a myriad…
Malinche mediating between the Spanish and the Americans (Source: Lienzo de Tlaxcala, mid 16th c) We live in an age of crisis, as humanity confronts an ever-escalating climate and environmental…
The Sumerian Empire under King Shulgi (2094 to 2046 BCE) (Image Credit: Wikipedia) Do you know in which language the Sumerians started the written chronicle of humanity? It is a…
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…
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.…
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…
(Image credit: Psychology Today) Device use is a major contemporary education challenge for parents and teachers alike. In our family, we have fairly strict rules around the use of internet-connected…
For one of my postgraduate courses in Applied Linguistics, I was asked to write an assignment about my language learning history. Recalling all the phases I went through to learn…
Hamburg Central Library welcomes patrons in many languages and offers free wifi Since I was 19, I’ve often thought about a student who I’ve never met and whose name I…
Students of Beijing Normal University who were part of the May Fourth Movement (Image credit: Wikipedia) This month marks the 100th anniversary of China’s May 4 Movement. This intellectual and…
In my work with multilingual families, reading in the home language raises its head on so many levels. It is viewed as a shared family activity in a way that…
This story was authored by Antra Kalnins and first published at Macquarie University's The Lighthouse. It is reproduced here with permission. *** If the question in the headline makes you…
Sociolinguistics needs to center Africa Minority language maintenance and revitalization is a sub-discipline of sociolinguistics that I mostly stay away from. My discomfort with most of the research in that…
Unpublished manuscripts from the estate of Hans Natonek (Source: Arts in exile) On International Women’s Day I explored why female academics publish less than their male peers. Academic journal submissions…