I’m chatting in English to a medical student from Germany who is visiting Sydney, Australia, and we’ve already talked about how I lived in Germany for a while and speak…
Those of us in the broad area of TESOL often labor under the assumption of the invincibility of English hegemony. Whether they deplore it or exult in it, many people…
One’s name is one of the most salient features for one’s identity. Some parents suffer from extraordinary indecisiveness when giving their newborn a wonderfully auspicious and proper name, all with…
Many of the people close to my heart are transnationals such as myself. Belonging is a frequently discussed topic in my circles, and often a topic that is surrounded by…
Yoshiko Nakano's essay in Yomiuri Newspaper “Young people in Japan no longer want to go abroad.” This news reached me in Australia last year and formed part of the background…
Space challenged Shinjuku, Tokyo (September 2010): Photo by Kimie Takahashi Tokyo is getting more and more linguistically diverse every time I go back there. During this trip, I was really…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Installment #4 in the mini-series on multilingual signage Toilets as an object of sociolinguistic research?! Not likely?! Think again! Today, I am going to discuss toilet signage as an indicator…
Installment #3 in the mini-series on multilingual signage The lovers of English poetry among you will recall how the phrase “Betreten verboten” (“No trespassing”) encapsulates his alienation from Berlin and…
If you could choose to learn a foreign language, which one would it be? And why? Such choices are usually constrained by what is on offer. However, someone must choose…
I took a picture of this sign during a family holiday in Cairns. My then-six-year-old daughter noticed the German “Achtung” and so asked why it didn’t say “Warning” in her…