Yesterday I spoke with a study agent here in the UAE and he told me that Australian universities trying to attract students from the GCC region just didn’t get the…
I love public libraries. Here in Sydney, our family regularly spends time in our local public library and in the Persian library in Parramatta. We treat public libraries a bit…
Persian version of my recent blog post about the magic of English Translated by Behnam Keimasi (بهنام کیماسی) در چند هفته ی آینده دانشجویان من در درس مبانیِ جامعه…
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…
As a non-speaker and non-reader of Japanese I went to Japan fully expecting to be confused. However, the only confusing moment I experienced had nothing to do with anything Japanese:…
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…
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…
Multilingual sign in Namtso (Image Credit: Wikipedia) Persian version of my recent blog post about Chinglish Translated by Tahmineh Tayebi (تهمینه طیبی) & Vahid Parvaresh (وحید پرورش) تصور کنید که…
As someone who is concerned about Australia’s monolingual mindset and the damage it does to individuals and our society as a whole, I probably should have been pleased to discover…
Multilingual sign in Namtso (Image Credit: Wikipedia) Korean version of my recent blog post about Chinglish Translated by Sun-Young Chung (정선영) 뉴욕타임즈가 독자들로부터 그들의 재미난 금발머리 농담이나 유색인종 사람과 관련된 배꼽…
Installment #7 in the mini-series on multilingual signage When I lived in Basel in Switzerland, my then-preschool child was just learning to make sense of the alphabet and to sound…
Installment #5 in the mini-series on multilingual signage Signage not only appears in public space. Through our consumption of all kinds of products, we bring a multiplicity of signs into…
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 #2 in the mini-series on multilingual signage Much of the signage that can be found in contemporary public spaces is commercial. It is a form of advertising, and language…
Over the next few weeks my introductory sociolinguistics students are doing a group work task in which they explore the linguistic landscape in their suburb and relate the visibility of…