I went onto e-bay this weekend and, instead of the gadget I was after, found some non-standard uses of English negation: “We not ship to Russia” or “We not use…
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…
The current global order has thrown up yet another bewildering language problem: the monolingual sniffer dog! I glean the following from a recent NYT article about Rabbis in Montana: with…
Some people just can’t win it seems. Second language speakers are in that category. I can’t even begin to count how many people who have read a fraction of the…
For the last so many years I have been feeling sorry for Tourism Australia. Since their Paul Hogan (our one and only Crocodile Dundee) mega hit tourism campaign in the…
Muslims around the world were celebrating the holy month of Ramadan recently and the greeting de jour here in Abu Dhabi was Ramadan Kareem!, which literally translates as “Ramadan is generous.” Ramadan…
You know you live in a truly multilingual and multicultural place when your local church does not only advertise their times of worship but also the languages in which the…