Bilingual kids are more resilient October is Mental Health month here in New South Wales. The campaign runs under the slogan “Celebrate, connect, grow” and includes some fantastic tips how…
Australia in Asia (Source: unitingworld.org.au) Since starting a PhD in February in a different field to my previous work, I’ve been running a weekly alert with the words “language” and…
Gunbalanya School in West Arnhem Land (Source: abc.net.au) Last week, the results of the 2012 National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) were published. As has been the case…
Michael Clyne, Australia's Language Potential. UNSW Press, 2005. ***Update 03/10: Program and all details now available at https://www.languageonthemove.com/linguistic-diversity-social-inclusion**** ***Update 25/09: RSVPs are now open. Attendance is free but you have…
Eierlaufen (egg-and-spoon race) at German Camp, USA My two daughters – whom my wife and I are raising as English-German bilinguals in the USA – have been going to German…
Percentage of Europeans who speak three or more languages (2012 Eurobarometer 'Europeans and their Languages', p. 14) The 2012 Eurobarometer Report “Europeans and their languages” was published last month and…
Mehrsprachige Buecher - multilingual books - ketabhaye chand zabane The release of the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011 Census of Population data is an invitation to reflect on the composition…
Saul Tello Jr., Orestimba High Valedictorian 2012 (Source: CBS Sacramento) When US high schools make international headlines, it’s usually because of a school shooting. But Orestimba High in Newman, a…
Inspired by Quantum Cloud, Younghyung Chung, 2004 (Source: risknfun.com) I don’t like the word 'choice.' So, when I recently asked someone I know well to consider an action that would…
International symbol for deafness from Redeafined Bilingualism has been a media darling of late, and considering the intense focus of the current scientific community on bilingual brains and the breakneck…
Salvador Dali, Gestalt As members of the Language-on-the-Move community know, I was the lucky guest of Ingrid at Macquarie last Wednesday and then the theme of her blog posting. As a…
The high price of multilingualism When society doesn’t value something you, as an individual, do, you, the individual, end up paying for society’s lack of valuation. That’s the case with…
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…
I’ve written before that I’ve never had an experience in which someone responded negatively to me when I speak German to my daughters in public here in the United States.…
Cabramatta, Australia Last week an email was sent around my office about our upcoming Harmony Day celebration on 21 March. The email suggested that to mark the occasion, interested staff could…
I’m not a big fan of what I call “breathless academic postmodernism,” or what I view as the often naïve valorization of, among other things, hybridization, creolization, liminality, polysemy, multiplicity,…