Language on the Move

Islam in English

Tazin Abdullah — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:02:57 +0000

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Oludamini Oguannaike, Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia.

Tazin and Oludamini talk about how English is used to express concepts that originate from onto-epistemic perspectives that are not historically associated with the English language. They discuss his 2019 article “Islam in English,” which he co-authored with Dr. Mohammed Rustom. They also speak about his book of poetry called The Book of Clouds.

The conversation considers how the distinctive philosophical and metaphysical concepts associated with Islam collide with the use of English as a result of the global dominance of English. Tazin and Oludamini discuss how he has used his research and knowledge of historical religious thought to express these concepts in his English-language poetry.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

References

Ogunnaike, O. (2024). The Book of Clouds. Fons Vitae of Kentucky.

Ogunnaike, O., & Rustom, M. (2019). Islam in English. American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 36(2), 102-111.

Transcript

Tazin: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Tazin Abdullah, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Oludamani Ogunnaike.

Oludamini is Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. His research examines the philosophical and artistic dimensions of post-colonial, colonial, and pre-colonial Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa. Oludamini’s recent projects focus on poetry, poetic knowledge, decolonial thought, and praxis.

On this episode, we will do something quite interesting that I have not previously done with a guest. We will talk about Oludamani’s work from two very different genres. We will find out about his article, Islam in English, which he co-authored with Dr. Mohammed Rustom, and then about his recent book of poetry called The Book of Clouds.

Our listeners may wonder, of course, what the connection is. I am going to quote Joshua Fishman, a pioneer in the field of sociolinguistics, who wrote: “I feel strongly that there is more ‘out there’ (even more to the sociology of language) than science can grasp, and I have a personal need for poets, artists, mystics and philosophers too for a deeper understanding of all that puzzles me.” In that spirit, my conversation today with Oludamini will venture into what more is out there to understand about language use in religious contexts.

Oludamini, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today!

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Tazin: To begin with, can you tell us a bit about yourself, your research, and how you came to be interested in linguistic expressions relating to religions, and then, of course, Islam?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, so I think this, first started…my undergrad degree was actually in cognitive neuroscience. And I worked in a lab that, uh…was the lab that developed this Implicit Association Test, which I’m not sure if you’ve… people have seen before, it’s like a sorting task that you use. And they were gathering data on people from around the world, testing them in different languages, but usually they would test people in, like, India in English, right, because they had the…

And so, I was also majoring in African Studies, and so I had to do something that would combine cognitive neuroscience and African studies. So I was like, alright, I can take this implicit association test to, West Africa, maybe, and test people there. And I was testing… I initially did a short little run where I, like, tested people in Nigeria in English and Senegal in French.

But then I was like, oh, I wonder if it’s going to be different for the same person if you switch languages. Most of the people I was interacting with there were bilingual, trilingual, quadrilingual, and I was wondering if the associations we were measuring between different linguistic concepts would be different if we changed languages.

So, my undergrad thesis was precisely about this. It measured, took the Implicit Association test to Morocco, and to Arabic-French bilinguals. And then in the US did it with Spanish, English bilinguals, and found the same person, same exact test, but you switch the language, and you get very different, scores. So I kind of, in undergrad, I’d been interested in these issues of the relationship between language and thought and affect for a while.

Then, in grad school, I moved on to work in religious studies, particularly African religions, and just spent a ton of time translating things. A ton of them trying to learn, Arabic and improve my knowledge of Yoruba. And, um, studied a few other languages along the way, to a little bit Persian and Bamana, and, yeah, I just spent so much time translating and thinking about… If you spend time, a lot of time reading texts, particularly poetry and sometimes religious texts in another language, you are acutely aware of how much is changed and transformed in translation. And so this really got me thinking, even in another way, about the relationship between language and thought. And because most of what I study is Islam on the African continent, a lot of this had to do with expressions of Islam in Arabic, in African languages, but then also in English and French. A lot of Africans, myself included, my father included, have English or other European languages as a mother tongue.

In addition to all the cool patois and creoles and pidgins and things like that…that we speak, and a lot of the debates and discussions about, political, religious, intellectual, philosophical matters aren’t just taking place in academic English. They’re taking place in pidgin English, they’re taking place in Yoruba, they’re taking place in Arabic, in Hausa, and all of these different linguistic registers. So that’s kind of how I got into it.

Tazin: Oh gosh, that’s fascinating! And in your article, Islam in English, you note that, owing to the global dominance of English, Muslims worldwide use English, but the majority of English speakers do not… are not Muslim. So, you know, when you think of an English speaker, you don’t think of a Muslim.

And, you know, when we hear and we see Muslims speaking English in movies or the media, we do see the framing and the social identities associated with Muslims – the problematic stereotypes, you know, terrorists, oppressors, etc. In everyday lives, people make assumptions about Muslims who speak English. But your work does not so much focus on Muslims speaking in English. It talks about Islam expressed in English. What is the difference? And what do you mean when you say Islam in English?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ll start, kind of, where you started. I think there are a lot more… we think about the large number of English speakers in Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, especially who are Muslim. There are a lot more Muslims who speak English on a daily basis than a lot of people think. But as you said, you know, people don’t think of English as an Islamic language. Even though there is a kind of Muslim English, which is one of the things we kind of talk about a little bit in the…If you say, I have never come across or seen in anything published in the 20th century…the terms ablution, circumambulation, outside of a Muslim context. There are certain…as well as, you know, interesting things Muslims do with Arabic and other languages in their English. But what I was really interested in this article was kind of two things. How Islamic, Islamic, Quranic, worldviews are being expressed in English, And then how that is necessarily transforming the English language, even as the English language is transforming and having an effect on those, ideas, expressions. So that was… that’s one, this kind of connection between language and thought.

And then the other one, kind of drawing on the example of the Han Kitab in China,

which was this major translation of… a very creative translation of works of Islamic philosophy and mysticism and other texts into Chinese. But it wasn’t just a straightforward translation, because you’re translating into a new conceptual vocabulary, developing a new conceptual vocabulary. So having…having Islam… in English, being the…the creation in English of new categories that correspond to Islamic categories, but also are legible and accessible to contemporary English speakers, who are growing up with different idioms, different frames of reference, different metaphors, all of those different things.

Because it’s one thing to have footnotes explaining, let’s say, a metaphor in Arabic or Persian. It’s quite another thing to creatively translate that to another metaphor that will work in a similar way for contemporary English speakers. And so those are the kind of two things…how that we’re kind of, trying to talk about how to…transform English to express, Islamic ideas, concepts for which there’s sometimes not a good equivalent or translation in English. And then the other one is how to make these terms, ideas, worldview, accessible to English speakers. They’re related, but they’re slightly different. And that’s kind of what the two parts of the article are about.

Tazin: You also highlight that, English carries with it the markers of many historical and contemporary ideologies, understandably those associated with Europe. Despite its worldwide dominance, English is neither a neutral nor a universalizing language. For example, you know, you noted that colonialism finds expression in our everyday and literary expressions of English. How does this make translation of Islamic concepts problematic? Can concepts just be translated by picking out, you know, English words?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: I mean, yeah, you can do that, that’s kind of the plug-and-chug…

Tazin: What happens, yeah!

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: model, that’s, you know, that’s what often happens, but I think to do good translations, you have to really understand the language, the history of the etymology of the words, and as, yeah, as you’re saying, the English language, like every other language, carries with it its whole accumulated history of terms, metaphors that people use, which they’ve even forgotten what the original metaphor referred to, but we just use it. There’s a great scene in the autobiography of Malcolm X, both the book and the movie, where he goes through the dictionary, looks at everything black.

Everything black is bad, sinful, this, that, that. And then white, pure, holy, righteous, this, all of these, all of these associations. That’s just one very obvious example of the different associations. That different terms, different words, different images, different concepts will have. But English language bears all of these, because English is a wild language. Like, it’s, you know, you’ve got Greek, you’ve got Latin, you’ve got, you know, Saxon, Anglo-Saxon stuff, Germanic, and then…With the colonial things, you get things from Urdu, and then you’re getting things from Arabic, and you get… it’s just… it’s a wild language with all kinds of different things, and because it was really, like, a kind of trade pirate language for a while, it just… it picked up a lot of interesting things and structure, so it has…it has a lot of these… I forget who said language is like an amber, which carries all of these things that got stuck in it. And so English has a lot of these heritages. The issue…

Tazin: I like your categorization of English as a wild language.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, yeah, it’s a… it’s a really…

And it’s… we don’t really… I mean, we have the Oxford English Dictionary, we don’t have anything like the Académie Française, you know, that’s really regulating English very, you know, very tightly, we don’t have…tremendously old traditions of English philology and, like they do in Arabic and other traditions. So it’s a… it’s an interesting kind of language. But the…um…because of this, you can’t just immediately translate, okay, prayer, for example. In Arabic, you have salat and dua.

You translate them both as prayer? They’re very different things in Arabic.

Very different things you do with your body, very different kinds of prayer, but…in English, okay, that’s prayer. Okay, maybe we say petitionary prayer, but how do you translate salat?

I run into this all the time when I translate poems, and it’s like, Allahumma Salli Alah or Sallahu Alika

May God… what is Salli here? God pray on the Prophet? God bless the Prophet? God…

What are… this… there’s not, there’s not really an exact…term. Even the English bless is a really fascinating word. It comes from this old…I think Germanic route, which you put blood from a sacrifice on something, and that’s… you put a kind of sacred quality on that. But then that gets transformed to its Christian meaning, and then… So, these translations are not a simple plug-and-chug, one-to-one. The…the terms… very rarely can you just do the kind of flashcard thing. Just replace one word with another one. Because the words are different, the concepts are different, the linguistic and conceptual universes that they belong to are different. So you have to be creative.

There’s no way around, being creative in some way, and finding ways to make it make sense to an Anglophone audience. And oftentimes, as you’ll see in other Islamic languages, where there’s not such a easy translation, they’ll just keep the Arabic word. Let’s say if they’re translating from Arabic. Right, so languages that a lot of Muslims have spoken for a long time, you will see lots of Arabic loanwords in there, particularly related to religious things, or related to the Qur’an, where there’s often not an equivalent. But where there are equivalents, you’ll find people use both words. So, like, in Persian and Urdu and things like that, people will say, Khuda Hafez or Allah Hafez, right? Khuda was close enough.

That’s, you know, it has a kind of coexistence, along that… along those lines. Yeah, so this… I don’t think you can translate concepts just by picking out English words. You can pick out an English word. And then, through its usage, you know, you pay, alright, I’m gonna use this English word for this, let’s say, Arabic word. And then through the way in which you use it, you can actually transform the usage of that, the meaning of that word in English. So, William Chittick is a kind of master of this in his translations. He has a very strict translation policy in which if he’s translating a word from Arabic, he will use the same English word or if, you know, a word derived from the same root, you’ll use a variant of that English word in the exact same way. So that English word then starts behaving in his translations like the Arabic word, not like the English word that it, you know, originally referred to.

And like I mentioned earlier, you can kind of already see this with ablution. I’m sure there are other people who talk about it. Use the term ablution and write about ablution, but the only time I’ve seen ablution, you know, in my life is Wudu, as a translation of Wudu.

Tazin: Yes, it’s not used in any other context except the Muslim context.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: that I’ve come across. I’m sure there are other contexts, but, you know.

Tazin: Context words used, yes, but in English, yes.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: In my experience of English, that’s, you know, I’ve only ever seen it as a translation of Wudu. I’ve only ever seen circumambulation as a translation of Tawaf. And so the Arabic uses of those words are now, you know, at least in my English circle, my idiolect, determining the, they’re determining the range, the role that those words play in English.

Tazin: And just for our listeners, ablution is the ritual purification before prayer for Muslims, and Tawaf that you referred to is the circumambulation, which is also the only way I’ve ever.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah.

Tazin: Around the Kaaba that Muslims perform, and it is very interesting how it’s so difficult to actually get those words out, out in English. So how… how can you make English speak Islam, and Islam speak English?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, this is a question. So I was… I tried to, kind of, Islam… Islam speaking English. I’ll start with English speaking Islam.

If English speaking Islam is… you have a form of English, whether it’s in academic articles, treatises, poetry, not books, creative works, whatever, just people on the corner talking. That expresses fluently an Islamic kind of worldview – Weltanschauung. And it’s not one thing, but it does have certain principles, and those are informed by the Qur’an and the hadith, and then the tradition. That’s… that’s past those things. And so, this has been the case with, Islamic languages all throughout history, all throughout the world. Islam comes to a place, usually the language that people speak there, especially the Muslims there

transforms under the influence of the Qur’an, under the influence of poetry, under the influence of translations of the Qur’an, of poetry, of hadith, of other things, in khutbahs, in lessons, in things like that. And it starts to transform the language in.

Tazin: And Oludamani, may I ask you, in the spirit of this conversation, for our listeners, would you translate khutbah and hadith? Because our listeners may actually not know.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, yeah…sorry, sorry.

Tazin: You have slipped into your Arabic terms.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Khutbah is, to give a rough translation, like a kind of Friday sermon. It’s something that the Imam, the person who’s leading the Friday prayers, it’s kind of like a sermon that they’ll give right before the prayers.

And a hadith is a saying or tradition about the Prophet Muhammad. Usually it’s something that he said or did, recorded in a narration that’s then passed down through a chain of transmission. Yeah, so that’s…

Tazin: And two excellent examples of how… of the complexity of trying to express.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Exactly.

Tazin: these concepts in English.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Because a khutbah is like, let’s say, a Protestant sermon or a homily. In some ways, but it’s also not in other ways. The genre’s different, you know, you gotta sit down in the middle, different formulas, it’s much shorter than… if you go to a Nigerian church, those sermons go on for a very long time, it’s not like the…It’s a different, it’s a different kind of genre, but close enough. So these, these…the expressions of these ideas, this worldview, these ways of being, of imagining and speaking about the world, really come into English, and they… they necessarily transform the English. The English then comes to speak Islam.

So if you can speak in a way about… and oftentimes this will come from having loan words, like khutbah, like, you know, like zakat, for example. One word I know a lot of, at least in my circles, Muslims don’t translate zakat. I’ve never said to anybody, oh, I gotta pay my poor tithe.

Tazin: Poor tax!

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, I’ve got to pay my poor tax, or I’ve got to pay my… no, I’ve got to pay my zakat, because the translations are too… feel too clumsy. And so, I think of this as kind of…I think it was Wade Davis who said something like, language is like a forest, and the usages are like paths that people have cut through. And so as, Muslims, but not just Muslims, other people speaking about Islam, cut a path through the forest of English, trying to express these notions. And just like a path in the forest, that path gets influenced by the terrain that’s already there, even as you are shaping that terrain as well. So that’s Islam speaking English. That’s… or, yeah, that’s Islam speaking English.

I think I thought, I’m hoping I didn’t get it.

Tazin: No, no, no, that’s beautiful, and it’s actually a perfect, segue to my next question, where I was going to talk about…um…I was going to read a small excerpt from your book of poetry, the Book of Clouds. And as I was explaining to our listeners, I chose this because it’s so great to see this connection between your academic research and then your literary work. Your book is a beautiful articulation of the ideas you introduce in your article, and in your book, you express very significant Islamic concepts, but in English.

And I chose a little excerpt from your poem “The Wine Odes”, where you write:

This life’s too hard to live sober
so drink and try to die a drunk
For heaven’s but a hangover
for those who drink from your mouth’s cup

My question, as would be, you know, the question of many others – wine, drinking, hangover, how is this Islam expressed in English?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, good, good, good question.

So, yeah, this, this can be… if you are not familiar with, traditions of Arabic and really broader Islamic and Islamicate poetry, this sounds blasphemous, maybe. And that’s… that’s part of the point, but…the… there’s a very, very long tradition, from the earliest days of Islam of, I guess you could call them mystics or spiritual people, speaking about the remembrance of God, love of God, the experience of love and remembrance of God, being in the presence of God, in terms of wine.

And this kind of has Qur’anic precedent. The Qur’an talks about the Sharabun Tahurun, the pure wine that people drink in paradise. So, down here, you’re not supposed to drink wine. Up in paradise, no problem.

And so… And I teach my students about the Islamic poetic tradition, I like to say that, especially Sufi poetry, this kind of mystical poetry, it’s always speaking in three dimensions. It’s speaking about things on the macrocosmic level, out there in the world, you know, so a cup of wine. On the microcosmic dimension, things inside of you, the feeling of intoxication, from… could be remembering God, feeling in love, states of meditation and intimacy with God, and then the metacosmic, with God or in paradise, you know, this…this, wine. So when they’re speaking about wine, they’re using it as a symbol and a metaphor, but for the Sufis in particular, the real wine is the wine of paradise.

The wine down here is just a reflection… the, you know, the stuff you make from grapes is just a reflection of…that higher reality. So Ibn al-Farid is probably the most famous, influential Arabic mystical poet has a very famous poem where he says,

شربنا على ذكر الحبيب مدامة
سكرنا بها من قبل أن يخلق الكرم

(Sharabna ‘ala dhikril habibi mudamatan
Sakirna biha min qabli an yukhlaqal karmu)

We drank a wine in remembrance of the beloved.
We were drunk with it before the vine was even created.

So, it’s like, just letting you know, I’m not talking about the… the grape stuff.

Tazin: I was gonna say!

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, so, but… I mean, I…But he’s talking about drunkenness.

So this… this life’s too hard to live sober. You can’t live without love. Try to live without remembering God, or try to live without love. It’s too hard. It’s too hard. Most of us couldn’t make it a day, I think. So drink and try to die drunk. Ibn al-Farid and lots of others, Hafez, even Rumi, say things like this, so, you know, remember God, be in love, fall in love, and try to die, try to die to yourself, to your ego, try to experience that, in… don’t stop, keep going. Keep going so far in love that you… that you lose yourself.

For heaven’s but a hangover for those who drink from your mouth’s cup. So this is a famous kind of saying in Sufism that you seek the gardener, not the garden. That paradise is often called, in Arabic, Al Jannah, which means the garden. So, you don’t want paradise just for the…the wine and the good stuff there. What you’re really seeking is… is God, is the Beloved. So, heaven’s just but a hangover. And also, heaven is the result of… if you do a lot of the Sufi-style drinking down here, a lot of remembrance of God, a lot of loving God down here, then heaven’s just a hangover of that. And what you really want is the drink from the beloved’s mouth cup, which is a kind of standard image in Arabic and Persian, for kissing. And, yeah, so if you… if you are fortunate enough to have that kind of intimacy with… with God, Heaven’s kind of a hangover.

Yeah, so that’s… it’s a… it was an attempt to express in English, in meter, in rhyme, slant rhyme, at least. The ethos, a lot of the ideas, some of the images, even some of the jokes that you find in Arabic poetry, Persian poetry, Urdu poetry, Turkish poetry, Hausa poetry, Swahili poetry, kind of…Javanese poetry. Almost everywhere, every language, Islamic language, a language that has a lot of… a lot of Muslim speakers for a long time, that has a poetic tradition, I see images like this. So, I was trying to do something like that in English in a way that didn’t sound corny.

Tazin: Well, it sounds beautiful, and I think it’s an excellent example of what we were talking about, is that, you know, the use of language that is familiar to us in English to express a concept that comes from Islam, and you’ve done that so beautifully. And, you know, I would like to ask, especially, you know, in the current… the two things in the current context. One is, of course, migration, with so many Muslims coming to English-dominant countries, where we are interacting. You know, I myself am a Muslim, come from a Muslim immigrant family, right, where we’ve had to interact with English in different ways. And that’s the story of many, many, many Muslim immigrants. And, of course, the onset of AI, where you have these plugins, where you have words just put into machines and coming out. What, you know, as a sociolinguist myself, and for those interested in language use, what can we glean from your work? In English-dominant societies, where English use is tied to socially ascribed identities, how do all these varied speakers of English lay claim to their chosen representation?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, my favorite, analysis of this actually comes not from the, my studies of Islam but from my studies of Yoruba, Yoruba linguistics, and. So Wole Soyinka is our most famous, Nobel Prize-winning author. And one of the, he actually just passed away. I was kind of, almost like an uncle of mine, Biodun Jeyifo, who was a great scholar of Wole Soyinka and comparative literature.

And he called what Soyinka’s English – Big English. He called it Oguntoyinbo. It would take a long time to explain what Oguntoyinbo, but it… the name Oguntoyinbo means…Ogun, who’s the Orisha, the kind of god of iron war in traditional Yoruba language, is equal to the Oyinbo, is equal to the foreigner, is equal to the European. And he said, what Soyinka did with English was he made it it’s his own. And he did things in the language that surpassed what even the supposed owner of the language ever could have imagined doing in it. And what… he quoted one review that was an Irish… I think it was an Irish…reviewer who reviewed one of Soyinka’s plays and said, Wole Soyinka is waking up the napping English language to its kind of magical and metaphysical possibilities inherent in the language, which we’ve forgotten since Spencer or things like that. But, Uncle BJ, as I called him, Jeyifo said. he’s not just waking up the napping English language and taking it back somewhere for the sake of Englishmen and English women, but rather he’s taking it to places that people have never imagined before. Based on his, in Soyinka’s case, his mastery of the Yoruba language. He was growing up steeped in, a lot of beautiful Yoruba oratory traditions. He then brings that to English and transforms and does things in English that you couldn’t imagine doing before.

Because it’s something that’s just ordinary in Yoruba playing with tonalities, or a long string of alliterations, or something like that. He brings it to English, and wow, it’s fireworks! But it’s something that is kind of unprecedented. So this, this is what I think, it’s hard because of, relationships of power, relationships of prejudice, and, and these kinds of things. But people who are sensitive or who have the good sense to appreciate the tremendous gift that people who are coming into English Bring with them. They’re bringing a tremendous gift, they’re enriching and enlivening the English language with new vocabulary, new idioms, new phrases, all of these things. When the language stops growing and adding new phrases, new words, and things, it’s dead. That’s when it’s… that’s when it’s dead. Now, it’s not like everything new that is added is great, you know, there’s a process, you know, usually if it’s…If it speaks to people, if it fills a need in some way, it’ll catch on, and if it doesn’t, it’ll fall by the wayside. How many new words Shakespeare credited with just coming up with himself? English is alive and, you know, fertile and bubbling. Then, and, you know, got a little stultified, and I think now with this wave of people coming in from all over the world, bringing all these different languages… I mean, there’s so many, so many new phrases get added to the OED every year from, let’s say, like, Nigerian English. So, like, “next tomorrow” has been added. And I think also, I didn’t even know this was in Nigerianism, Ember months. So the Ember months are those at the end of the… do you say this in Australia, too? No? No? No? Ember months are…

Tazin: What, you mean the autumn months? Is that what you’re…

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Well, so it’s, it’s the months of the year that end in Ember. September, November.

Tazin: Oh, right, sorry, sorry.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: But it also has big… but it, you know, it also has that, like, an embers, like the, you know, the end of a fire. Yes. So it just, it works perfectly. So, Nigerian English, they call it the ember months, you know, from September onward, those are the ember months.

Tazin: We won’t have that in the Southern Hemisphere, because that’s when it starts to get warm for us.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: It’ll be the opposite, it would be the opposite. But it’s the end of the end of the year, right? So it’s the, you know, just if the year is a fire, as it goes out, you have the embers. But so all of these things are being added to the language, and Islam and Muslims are adding so much. I mean, our poetic traditions have influenced English for hundreds of years. From the Transcendentalists all the way back to probably the sonnet form itself, which was developed in Sicily, probably as, under the influence of the Arabic Ghazal tradition. So, our languages and our literatures in the Islamic world have been influencing English for a very long time, indirectly, and now, English gets the benefit from direct infusion of energy, new concepts, metaphors, and things like that.

In fact, it’s almost like the King James Bible brought a lot of Hebraisms. Things from Hebrew into English, like Song of Songs, Holy of Holies. That’s a construction that you find in Semitic languages. And then, you know, it was brought into Latin, and then from there into English. And that made beautiful English. And now, too, we’re having things… we’re getting infusion of all kinds of different possibilities that can make for a really beautiful and dynamic English. If we can get over some of the narrow prejudices, racial, cultural, otherwise, that close people off to experiencing, things like that.

Tazin: What a wonderful, you know, thought to leave this with – that English is enriched by all the contributions that people from around the world and from different traditions make to it. So, thank you for that. That’s really wonderful. My final question to you is, what is next for you and your work? What other research projects are you working on now?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, so I’m finishing up a book. Well, I sent it to the press, but I’m sure I’ll have corrections and things on, Layla poetry, poetry about the figure of Layla in a particular North African Sufi order, mystical order, called the Shadhiliya. So, Layla is this, kind of the Arab or OG Romeo and Juliet. Layla is the Juliet’s. Her name means night, or technically intoxication, and her Majnoon, a young man named Qais, fell in love with her and became Majnoon, which means crazy. He’s usually known as Majnun Leila.

And so the Sufi tradition, or this particular Sufi tradition, whenever they want to talk about the divine essence, that which is beyond language, they very often turn to writing poetry about Layla to talk about that which is beyond speech. So the book’s an attempt to figure out what’s going on here, why are they using poetry about Layla to eff the ineffable? What is it about poetry, and what is it about this kind of genre of poetry in particular that makes it, felicitous, for that kind of thing?

Yeah, and I’m still trying to write Qasidas and Ghazals in English. Qasida is a kind of long… tends to be longer, monorhyme, form, and the Ghazal is, a kind of shorter, poetic form with its own rules, but, yeah, I really love writing them, and yeah, I continue to write them, and maybe there’ll be another collection of poetry, in a few years, Insha’Allah.

Tazin: That’s wonderful, and thank you for your time today, and we look forward, actually, to reading more of your work.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Thank you so much, this was really fascinating. Appreciate you. Thanks.

Tazin: And thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time.

Romani Grassroots Language Learning

Emily Pacheco — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:06:28 +0000

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Dr Santiago Betancor Falcón (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) about his 2025 paper, Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain. The conversation focuses on minoritised languages, autonomous language learning, language activism, and, of course, Romani.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Reference

Betancor-Falcon, S. (2025). Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 44(6), 647-662. https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2025.2486831

Learning Languages on Social Media

Brynn Quick — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:59:00 +0000

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Yeong Ju Lee about her new book Social Media and Language Learning: Using TikTok and Instagram.

This book explores creative uses of social media for informal language learning. It focuses on the underexplored area of how informal language learning adapts to technological innovations in two multimodal media-sharing platforms: TikTok and Instagram.

Drawing on ecological perspectives of language learning and spatial understandings of digital technology and learning, the research reported in this book unpacks how social media technologies are used for language learning. It presents insights from a dual-level qualitative methodological design: a comparative study of public online data of social media posts collected from TikTok and Instagram, and a multiple case study based on ethnographic narrative data gathered from participants’ journal entries, stimulated recall interviews, and social media posts. This book reveals the dynamic landscape of digital language learning that is being integrated into learners’ everyday lives through multimodal content creation and networking.

This book enriches readers’ understanding of social media’s role in language learning, and offers pedagogical strategies for teachers to integrate newer technologies and multimodal materials into language classrooms to enhance students’ learning experiences.

Reference

Lee, Y. J. (2025). Social Media and Language Learning: Using TikTok and Instagram. Taylor & Francis.

Transcript (added 02/06/2026)

BRYNN: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Yeong Ju Lee.

Yeong Ju is an academic in the Department of Linguistics and the School of Education at Macquarie University. Her research interests include digital language learning and teaching with a focus on digital literacy, multimodality, digital spaces, social media, and AI. Today, Yeong Ju and I will be discussing her 2026 book, Social Media and Language Learning, Using TikTok and Instagram, published by Routledge.

Yeong Ju, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today. At the very beginning of your book, you write, “This book explores language learners’ creative uses of social media for informal language learning, that is not for formal institutional and instructional purposes.” Talk to us about the difference between learning a language formally versus informally, and what got you interested in studying this contrast.

YEONG JU LEE: Formal learning is usually like the traditional concept of language learning. So usually classroom-based, structured, curriculum-based, and usually teacher-led and assessment-driven. Whereas informal language learning is self-directed, everyday activities, and it includes resources like social media, digital platforms like video games and VR.

They’re not usually designed to be used as teaching materials. So, it’s not designed for learning, it’s more for recreational social purposes. So actually, everything started during COVID time when everybody was at home, right?

So, I just realized that everybody was doing a lot of social media things. And then I think that was the time when TikTok kind of made a huge hit, huge success over the world. So, people doing different trends all over the world that try to copy what other people do, right?

So, I just realized that people are doing a lot of creative content creation. And then at that time also I was interested in, okay, what’s going on in TikTok? And I started using it.

And I realized that, okay, there is a lot of language learning going on, right? So, I think at this point, we have to define what learning is, but it’s more like learning acquisition, like awareness of language used on TikTok or social media, right? So, I just realized that people do engage language used on social media, and they do exchange, so language exchange as well.

And then people like to comment on there about their digital content, things like that. So, I felt that, okay, so at that time, now it’s a bit different time. At that time, I felt like institutional spaces kind of shifted to everyday digital spaces and learners actually use and propose social media.

They’re not designed for language learning, for their own language learning spaces. And I observed interactions and participation of those users. And I see that this is multimodal.

This is multimodal communication. This is how people communicate in digital spaces. And language use and learning can occur in that area.

So that’s how I started. That’s how I started my PhD degree on social media, focusing on Instagram and TikTok, trying to approach to more younger generations.

BRYNN: With you talking about social media, and especially TikTok during COVID, I feel like that just gave me flashbacks that I kind of hadn’t thought about in a while. Like, do you remember during the beginning of COVID when we would see people doing duets and people from all different parts of the world doing these dance trends because they were all stuck inside? So, you’re right that that was really a time period where there was this huge boom of TikTok and this huge shift into the digital world because we kind of had to shift into the digital world.

YEONG JU LEE: But it’s a bit different time now that we don’t have to shift into the digital time because COVID is not around anymore. So, but then I think ever since that, like people kind of learned that we can use the digital spaces more actively. So now I realize that learners, they use social media within their daily lives.

So, it’s embedded within their lives. So social media use and learning through social media are embedded within their lives.

BRYNN: Well, and that brings me to my next question because when we talk about learning another language, we often discuss the idea of this word affordances. So, in our sphere, an affordance is essentially how a particular language learning tactic allows or doesn’t allow us to learn. So, what did you find are the affordances of language learning on these social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok?

And how do these affordances differ from affordances offered by a more traditional classroom learning environment?

YEONG JU LEE: So, affordances refer to what technologies enable or promote learners to do. And social media affordances, for example, we have multimodality that we can use text, video, audio, images, we have also instant access. So, we have like search features or algorithmic discovery.

We just open the phone, right? And then we just scroll down and it’s immediate. It’s immediate.

Like we don’t even have to actually do anything. So, like as if like social media actually have prepared something for us, right? And then once you start searching something like algorithm just starts working, right?

So, it’s all like depending on how you design your language learning spaces. So, if you search like, let’s say Korean, then algorithm will show you Korean content. And there’s interaction, there’s like comments and feedback people share.

And it’s all global participation, everyone in the globe. But the differences between TikTok and Instagram that I’ve realized that like depends on how people use them. So, TikTok, for example, when it comes to language learning, people often use it for pronunciation or speaking practice, because it’s a short form video.

That’s how the videos can demonstrate. Instagram, people often use it for grammar explanation, vocabulary, visual explanations, and like using the carousel learning post, where there you can post many images in one post. But then I actually Instagram does have video sharing format as well.

So, it’s quite different ways of interpreting the social media platform use. So, I think it’s when it comes to affordances, technologies are there, features are there. It depends on the users, how they perceive them, how they act upon them.

So, because even the technologies and features are there, if you don’t recognize them, if you don’t utilize them for your own ways, they are just there and you don’t get to use them. Compared to classroom, so classroom I believe it’s more structured. However, it may have a bit limited interactional patterns unless teachers intentionally put some engaging activities, but there are some limits depending on the classroom size, especially if it’s a large class, it’s quite limited when it comes to organizing engaging activities.

However, social media as we said, it’s spontaneous, it’s very immediate, and it’s very learner-driven, like user-driven, right? So, you can actually design your social media platform in a way that you want. So, your TikTok and your TikTok main page might be different from my TikTok main page, right?

So, depending on you and it’s very multimodal learning. So, you can use videos, images, texts, anything, just very multimodal and actively engaging with such multimodal elements.

BRYNN: And do you think that it’s that multimodality that maybe a traditional classroom is lacking in?

YEONG JU LEE: I guess that it’s more, I think there is a multimodality within the classroom of traditional classroom as well. Like, for example, like teacher talking, students talking with peers and group activity. Maybe like they have like fun activities, roam around the classroom as well.

However, social media, I think it’s a bit in a different way. So, it has a bit of less pressure and less organized, less organized and less teacher led. So, it’s depending on the learner, I guess that learner can actually decide the degree of multimodality as well.

So, if they want to include more, if they want to include less, it depends on them.

BRYNN: And that’s a good point that these learners, because of these affordances, they maybe have a bit more agency than they would in a traditional classroom. And this is a big theme that you identified in your data, was that language learners really appreciated this ability to have more agency through learning via Instagram and TikTok. So why do you think learners’ sense of agency was so important to your participants, but to learners in general?

And how did these social media platforms allow for this agency in ways that other learning methods might not?

YEONG JU LEE: Learner agency is learners’ control or manage their learning, and it’s up to the learners’ motivation. So, like motivation, autonomy, personalized learning path, that’s all important for agency, right? But I guess that for my participants, they were really interested in learning English.

They wanted to improve their English to live in Australia, so their agency was really strong. Their agency was really strong. So, they started following language creators, and they started save useful posts, and they replay videos, and they tried to like copy and mimic what the other Australians actually sound, and they tried to create their own content.

But this case is for those who have strong agency. But that’s the point of using social media, because social media are not designed for learning. So, people mostly use social media for their social and recreational purposes.

For those who don’t want to use social media, they can’t use social media, because it’s not designed for learning. So, you must actually exercise your agency to utilize the affordances and feature opportunities in social media. And I guess in general, agency is important in like not just social media, but in just general in your learning, right?

Because like motivated students usually have a higher level of proficiency or performance. And it’s motivation and confidence, and it’s kind of drives your learning all the way, because it’s a lifelong journey, right? So, it’s the agency that initiates your learning, and then it’s the agency that makes you continue your learning.

So, agency is important, I guess, in general, not just about social media.

BRYNN: I kind of want to go back to something that you mentioned before, which was, and you just talked about the idea of confidence in a learner. And a few questions ago, you had mentioned something about learners maybe not feeling as much pressure when they’re learning English or language through something like social media. Do you think that, because I honestly hadn’t really thought about that before, that people would potentially feel that intense scrutiny or that pressure in a traditional classroom environment, and that maybe learning through something like TikTok or Instagram is less pressure because you’re on your own?

Like you said, you are creating your own algorithm. You’re seeing what you want to see. Do you feel like the idea of a learner having less pressure on them is something that drew your participants to social media?

YEONG JU LEE: Yes. I think one of my participants might be a very good example for this. He emphasized that he’s a very introverted person.

It’s his word. He said, I’m a very introverted person. I don’t know what to do because that was probably just one month or two months after he arrived in Australia.

He said he’s very introverted. He doesn’t know how to approach people.

He doesn’t know how to explore Australia. But he really was motivated to improve his English. He really was motivated to leave and stay in Australia.

However, he got so much pressure and so much stress in the classroom. Nothing wrong with teachers or peers. It’s just the pressure that’s giving him that you have to perform well.

Because he also mentioned that he’s from a country and culture, where making mistakes is not really allowed. And then I told him, have you ever used TikTok or Instagram, social media? Just do whatever you want.

I didn’t really ask him what to do either. And then he just explored and he came back to me, this is crazy, this is amazing, because he started following these Australian creators and just picked up these daily life expressions. Daily life expressions like feeling like, I feel under the weather, for example.

Those expressions he never had to come across before. And then he just, I think one week, two weeks, he was just using the social media just by himself, just scrolling down, looking into the content and maybe picked up some vocabulary and expressions. And then one day, he felt that maybe I’m confident enough to say a word.

And then he used those expressions with his peers in the classroom with his teacher. And then also he just went to like a restaurant or cafe and then tried to like use expressions that he learned from the prank videos and like fun videos on TikTok. And then he said, this game is so much confidence.

That’s how that’s the one good example of using social media. And I think people may think about the intellectual depth when it comes to social media. Maybe it’s a surface level learning.

Maybe for some learners, yes, because it’s very short form video platform, but for learners who actually are in need, in need of that level of learning that works. And I think intellectual depth also depends on how you actually use that content. Do you maybe just scroll down that content and just like, just consume it?

Or do you actually maybe try to listen to it and then try to listen to it again and again, try to maybe copy the pronunciation or accent? Or do you maybe search in like Google Dictionary or ChatGPT to look for other definitions or examples that like maybe even like practical examples that you might be using in your daily life. So that’s the intellectual depth.

So, the learning in digital space, it doesn’t end in one space. It’s cross-platform language learning and it’s the connection between digital and physical spaces. So, you maybe pick up one vocabulary or expression from TikTok and that may end of your learning.

And we can kind of criticize where is the intellectual depth, where it’s learning, is it actually learning? However, for those students who have a strong agency, strong motivation, that person might explore the definition in Google Dictionary, as for examples in the Wikipedia, for example, or maybe even go to like ChatGPT and then say, can you maybe give some examples that are situations that I can use the expressions, or maybe can we do role play with the voice feature with ChatGPT? So that’s where we can discuss the intellectual depth of using different digital spaces.

BRYNN: Well, and it’s a really good point that not every language lesson needs to have intellectual depth because-

YEONG JU LEE: That’s also a good point.

BRYNN: Because it’s just as important, like you were saying, for a learner to gain enough everyday phrases and words that they feel comfortable enough to go approach people in a shop, in a cafe, whatever, and start to use the language. And then little by little, they’ll get more and more and more confident and then they can go into more, you know, “intellectual depth”.

YEONG JU LEE: Right. So like, I think there was a time people were really interested in using gaming or music, and maybe even play some movies in the classroom. That was all for that.

That was all for fun activities to make students be interested in more and more. Be confident, be motivated, so that when students have motivation and confidence, they can do something else. That’s all the sparks.

BRYNN: Some of the… Because my second language is Spanish, and so some of the phrases in Spanish that I remember most are from when I learned them by watching a movie in class, you know, or by listening to a song in class. So, you’re right that videos on social media, any type of social media, can encourage our learners, and that’s what every teacher wants anyway, for the learners to feel encouraged.

And another theme that emerged from your data was the idea of transnational collaboration while learning, which I thought was so interesting, especially in this case, while learning English. So, in the book, you describe how the comment sections of language-related posts would be full of learners from all over the world asking questions and seeking feedback. Why do you think this participatory element is so important to language learners who are reacting in the comment sections?

YEONG JU LEE: In traditional classroom learning, it’s important to participate. So, teacher and students, it’s two ways. So, teacher may deliver the knowledge, but it’s the students, up to students who participate, try to transfer that knowledge into their own, right?

So that’s what’s happening in TikTok as well. So maybe one creator post like multi-modal content in their post, and then other people comment on their section. Maybe those people just like, maybe they didn’t have to, like they could just scroll down and move on, right?

But they instead comment, which means that there was a curiosity, there was interest, there was a little bit of motivation of learning further, right? So, it’s very global interaction spaces, and all the people, all the speakers of different languages, they gather in one space. So, it’s a multilingual communication, people from different countries, and it’s also interesting when someone posts, they also like to comment each other.

So, commenters, they like to comment each other, and then they like to solve the problem together. So maybe one person asks a question, but then other commenter actually answer that. So, it’s very interesting dynamics in the comment section.

Also, they like to ask for clarification of pronunciation vocabulary. So, is that how you say? Is this correct?

Can I use this expression in this situation? Things like, so is it a bit rude, or is it appropriate to use in my work context? Things like this.

They like to have a clarification. So learning and social media is on your own. So, there’s no teacher, right?

That’s why I think they seek for clarification. Like, am I understanding correctly? Can I use this in my life?

So that’s what was happening in comment. And I think TikTok is just interesting. For example, it has its own feature of promoting interaction, like Duet, for example.

So, it actually made a feature called Duet, encouraging users to respond to another person’s post directly just by clicking one icon. So, this platform is actually designed to interact. And while interacting, we learn.

We absolutely learn through interacting.

And that’s the same for Classroom as well.

BRYNN: Well, and that, I think, is a really good point because I’ve taught English before. And I think any language teacher especially knows that in a classroom, because I taught adults, in a classroom, you’re going to have some students who are so ready to participate and are so ready to speak. They’re ready to go up to the whiteboard, you know, with a whiteboard marker.

And they’re ready to make mistakes in front of you, the teacher, and also their classroom peers. But like you said, there are also going to be students in the classroom who are not okay with making a mistake in front of other people. And they don’t necessarily want to ask a question that they really want to know the answer to because they’re afraid of maybe looking foolish or being wrong.

And so that’s why I thought that the point that you made about the comments section is so important because that’s almost a way for those students who feel a bit too nervous to make these mistakes in class, to seek clarification, to ask questions, and to be able to get their questions answered.

YEONG JU LEE: So, I think for classroom, it depends on how the lesson is designed. Of course, teachers will look into individuals’ learning needs and interests. It’s really hard for teachers and for students as well to make the classroom that satisfy everyone’s needs, right?

So, there will be people who are very motivated, they’re very outgoing, they like to participate and ask questions. They’re also students who are a bit less motivated in doing in that way.

BRYNN: And they’re maybe more introverted.

YEONG JU LEE: Yeah, that’s right. But then good thing about social media or any other digital space that you can use on your own is you can do on your own, at your pace, whatever you want.

And with a little bit more anonymity as well.

If you’re more active, actually, you might create your own content. But if you’re less active, you might just, you don’t create your own content, but you rather look at other people’s content and maybe comment there and go to other platforms like dictionary, Google dictionary or AI, just to explore your own ways of learning. It depends on individuals.

BRYNN: Yes, that’s right. You’ve got your choice. Exactly. And so, on that, in chapter four of the book, you write, quote, students frequently use the search feature on Instagram and TikTok to quickly find linguistic information on new words and expressions they encountered in real-life interactions. This helped them to overcome language barriers and to build confidence, to use new vocabulary while engaging in in-place interactions, end quote.

So, kind of what we were just talking about. And I think that anyone who has tried to learn a new language knows this feeling of encountering words and phrases in the wild and wanting to know their meanings and usages right away. And 4,000 years ago, back in my day, when I was learning Spanish, all I had access to were paper dictionaries, like no phones with internet yet.

So, I had to really ask Spanish speakers to define new words and phrases for me when I heard them. And like we were just talking about, this meant having to overcome feeling embarrassed about how much I didn’t know, and I had to be okay with making lots of mistakes in front of people. And so, kind of what we were just saying, I think that you described these learners appreciating, some of the learners appreciating the ability to be more anonymous about their language questions.

And did they find that they didn’t really have to ask people for clarification because they could just find their answers online? And if they did like being anonymous in this social media space, what might that mean for language teachers and learners who are in traditional classrooms?

YEONG JU LEE: Actually, my participants, their main purpose was using social media or any kinds of resources to assist their language learning. They want to use them in real life. That was the purpose.

Their purpose is, I want to improve my English so I can speak with my friends, and I speak with teachers and speak with Australians in Australia to stay and live in Australia. So, I think none of them actually wanted to just stay within digital spaces. So, like I said, now we live in a world where digital and physical spaces are just interconnected.

BRYNN: They are intertwined. It’s not just like, we already have long passed the time when we had to open the laptop to access the digital space. We live in digital space.

YEONG JU LEE: Yeah, it’s connected, it’s intertwined. So, when they hear some words that they were confusing, they just open their phone and then just search something, and then they would get definitions and examples. And the one good thing about social media is it’s very quick.

So, you could just see how it’s actually used in their practical and real life. And then when you actually encounter such real life in your life, you can use that. So that’s how they use search feature for seeking for clarification of what they encounter in their life.

And then actually the interaction happened vice versa. So, they see something on social media, and then they try to use that in their daily life as well. But obviously, like I said, social media is not designed for learning.

It’s not designed for education. It’s not also designed for language learning, right? So, when it comes to the social media content, is it accurate?

Like accuracy, it’s also up to users, right? So, like I said, some of my participants, they would explore different platforms, like including Google Dictionary, or ChatGPT. And some of them actually ask teachers for clarification as well, ask peers for discussion of to seek for clarification.

All these learning processes, right? But social media content definitely needs the clarification of accuracy because it’s designed for recreational purpose. So, some of the content might be leading to inaccurate use of language.

So, in such cases, yes, they need to. Actually, one of my participants, I found it very cute, but I think it was very stressful situation for her. She saw this TikTok video and then she learned that you have to say, “chill”, to calm down the situation when everybody was a bit like, you know.

BRYNN: But that’s very informal.

YEONG JU LEE: Yeah, that’s very informal because that’s what’s happening on social media, right? So, it’s informal language use and conversational language use. However, she learned that and then she used it to her teacher.

When her teacher was a bit upset, and then teacher was apparently mad, right? But however, teacher, she explained that during the lunch break, again, this is how I learned, and maybe it was a bit inappropriate, and then teacher actually had a further explanation of how chill should be used, and what’s the alternative expression that she could use in the classroom, right? And she told me that it was a bit stressful, but she also told me that after a week or so, she kind of thought of it, and then she realized that that’s her learning, right?

She now realized that something that she’s seen in social media, maybe she would look for more research, more explanations or examples. So, she learned that, okay, social media is really good because it’s giving me different expressions and vocabulary that I can use in my life because it’s very informal, very conversational and communicative.

It’s very useful. However, maybe those are the expressions that I might use with my friends more. And if there is anything that I’m not clear on, I can use other digital resources and even I can ask my teacher for clarification.

That’s whole learning process. How amazing is that, right? That she realized that experience.

BRYNN: And you’re right that that is a lesson in and of itself. That is language learning in and of itself. I mean, any of us who have learned another language, we’ve all made those mistakes before.

YEONG JU LEE: And also, she mentioned that, okay, that’s the one way of using the social media TikTok that is made in daily lives. But she also found that there are some teachers on social media. There are some teachers who upload teaching content, which is more appropriate because those teachers intentionally make that social media account and intentionally upload teaching account to teach and deliver the knowledge to students.

So, she follows some of the Australian English teachers and learned the more formal ways of language use as well. So, there are different ways of using social media.

BRYNN: And that means, like you said, that it’s up to each individual learner to check and to seek clarification. And you mentioned a little bit about, you know, ChatGPT as well, and how the learners have to check to make sure that what ChatGPT is saying is correct. Because we know that it is not always correct.

YEONG JU LEE: We’re talking about social media platforms, so maybe we focus on learning from social media, but there are people who learn from AI first. So maybe ChatGPT might be the first place where they access the knowledge. And are you, like those students, will they stop there or will they continue to explore further?

BRYNN: That brings me to my last question for you. Where do you see the future of language learning and teaching headed in this age of learning through social media or AI or these other digital ways of learning?

YEONG JU LEE: So, I think we live in a digital era with the AI as well. I think we’re at the time that we can’t really avoid. But as teachers, we guide students to use them effectively, ethically, and more appropriately.

I think that’s our job. Because even if we say, don’t use AI for these, like all these black points, and use AI only for these, all these black points, the same goes to social media. We actually don’t know whether students follow our instruction or not.

So, we try to guide them to use them more effective way, an ethical way, and instead of telling them what to do and what not to do, we actually try to include activities in using such technologies within our classroom, and so that students actually get exposed to effective and ethical ways of using. Students have more experience, more and more of using it more ethical way. Students will learn how to use ethical way, because giving them the list of what to do and what not to do, that’s not enough anymore, and that’s same for social media and AI as well.

That’s what we have to do in our education as teachers. Also, when it comes to social media ban in Australia, social media is banned for our children. My point of, like my whole this entire work, including this book, it’s not about promoting the social media platforms, but it’s about recognizing the realities of learners, the digital era that we live in, and try to engage with them critically and ethically.

For the primary classroom, for example, we would get the idea, take the idea of multimodal content and bring that into the classroom. It’s not like teachers or students have to make Instagram account or TikTok account. It’s not like they have to interact within that platform.

We got the idea from these platforms, and we take advantage from that idea to make our classroom more engaging and more multimodal. So that’s the whole point of this work, and I think same goes to AI as well.

BRYNN: I like that final thought of take what is good, take what learners seem to really be responding to, which is that multimodality, potentially that anonymity for the people who feel more introverted or scared, and making sure that teachers in real classroom environments know about these things that learners want as well, because then the teachers can bring those lessons into their classrooms and, like you said, tailor their lessons more for these students.

YEONG JU LEE: So, instead of downloading TikTok or Instagram, because we’ve already got the idea from those platforms, then maybe just a group of students, they would film their own videos in playground, in like corner of the classroom. And maybe like corner of the classroom can be like flower shop, cafe. And then they would like do role play of barista and customer like try to order coffee.

And that’s the practice of ordering coffee in English, for example. So, you can kind of mimic the environment of the digital platforms in your classroom, in your school. It can be outside in the playground as well.

You can do something fun for engaging for students. And that can be fun and engaging at the same time, educational as well.

BRYNN: Excellent. Well, thank you so much again, Yeong Ju. Thank you for speaking to us today.

YEONG JU LEE: Thank you very much for having me.

BRYNN: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time.

The cost of language juggling

Language on the Move — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:11:17 +0000

***
Adolfo M. García, Agustina Birba, Edinson Muñoz, Isabelle Chou
***

How interpreting drains the bilingual mind

Simultaneous interpreting is often described as one of the most cognitively demanding language activities humans perform. Interpreters must listen to a rapidly unfolding speech in one language while almost instantly reformulating it in another—accurately, fluently, and without the luxury of pauses. This constant overlap of listening, remembering, and speaking places extraordinary demands on the brain.

A new study on Chinese–English bilinguals helps clarify what this pressure means in cognitive terms. The findings suggest that even a brief session of simultaneous interpreting can temporarily drain working memory, a core mental resource, reducing the brain’s ability to benefit from immediate practice.

Working memory, working hard

Working memory is the brain’s mental “scratchpad.” It allows us to briefly hold information in mind, manipulate it, and integrate it with other inputs. You rely on it when remembering a phone number long enough to dial it, following multi-step instructions, or holding the beginning of a sentence in mind while reading the end.

For interpreters, working memory is indispensable. They must comprehend incoming words, track meaning, reorganize syntax, and produce speech—all while more input keeps arriving. The system is under constant pressure.

The long-standing assumption in interpreting research has been that this intense mental juggling taxes working memory heavily. Yet most evidence so far has been indirect, based on brain imaging, pupil dilation, or comparisons between trained interpreters and non-interpreters. What has been missing is a clear causal test: does interpreting itself immediately affect working memory performance?

Putting the question to the test

The research design (Image credit: Chou et al., 2026)

To answer this, we recruited 50 Chinese–English bilinguals enrolled in a master’s program in translation and interpreting. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group spent ten minutes performing simultaneous interpreting from Chinese (their first language) into English. The other group completed a control task: listening to the same speech and answering comprehension questions afterward. Crucially, everyone completed a series of cognitive tests both before and immediately after the task, namely:

A working memory task that measured how well participants could remember and integrate visual information.
A classic Stroop task to assess inhibitory control.
Verbal fluency tasks to measure how easily people could retrieve words.

Because the working memory test was non-verbal, it avoided confounding language proficiency with memory performance. And because it was administered right before and right after the interpreting or listening task, the researchers could isolate the immediate effects of cognitive exertion.

The key finding: interpreting blocks learning gains

Here is where things get interesting. Participants in the control group—those who only listened and answered questions—showed a clear improvement in working memory accuracy the second time they took the test. This is a well-known practice effect: people often get better simply by repeating a task.

Conversely, the interpreting group did not show this improvement. After interpreting, their working memory performance stayed flat. They did not get worse—but they also did not benefit from practice. In other words, simultaneous interpreting seemed to block the normal learning-related boost that appeared in the control group.

Importantly, this effect emerged only in the most demanding version of the working memory task—the one that required integrating multiple features at once. A simpler memory condition showed no such difference. This pattern suggests that interpreting does not drain working memory across the board. Instead, it selectively interferes with high-load, integration-heavy processes—the very kind that interpreters rely on most.

What about other cognitive skills?

The results (Image credit: Chou et al., 2026)

If interpreting is so demanding, does it also affect other executive functions, like inhibition or verbal fluency? In the present study, it did not. Performance on the Stroop task and the fluency tests improved slightly from pre- to post-task in both groups, regardless of whether participants had interpreted or just listened. There were no interpreting-specific costs.

This selectivity matters. It shows that simultaneous interpreting does not simply “wear out” the brain in a general way. Instead, it targets specific cognitive systems—particularly working memory mechanisms involved in binding and integration.

Implications understanding interpreting and cognition at large

These findings help reconcile two seemingly contradictory ideas about interpreting. On the one hand, experienced interpreters often show long-term advantages in working memory compared to other bilinguals. On the other hand, interpreting feels exhausting, and professionals are advised not to interpret for more than 20–30 minutes at a time. The new results are compatible with both observations.

In the short term, interpreting can temporarily deplete working memory resources, preventing immediate gains from practice. Over the long term, however, repeated exposure to this intense demand may strengthen the system, much like strenuous exercise builds muscle—after recovery. This “use it, drain it, then build it” dynamic offers a more nuanced picture of how cognitive skills adapt to extreme language use.

The study also speaks to a broader issue in psychology: how mental effort affects learning. Cognitive exertion paradigms—where performance is measured before and after a demanding task—have been used to study self-control, emotion regulation, and learning. Applying this approach to bilingual language use shows how specific real-world activities can selectively tax particular mental systems. In this case, interpreting didn’t cause a dramatic drop in performance. Instead, it quietly erased a benefit that others enjoyed. That subtlety may explain why cognitive fatigue is so easy to underestimate—and so hard to measure without careful experimental design.

Further questions and a takeaway

Several questions remain unanswered. Would longer interpreting sessions produce stronger or longer-lasting effects? Do professional interpreters show faster recovery? Can targeted training or breaks reduce working memory depletion? Answering these questions could have practical implications for interpreter training, scheduling, and well-being. More broadly, they could help us understand how the brain copes with extreme multitasking in everyday life.

Overall, the takeaway is clear: simultaneous interpreting places a unique and immediate strain on working memory. Even when performance does not visibly collapse, the cognitive system is working at full stretch—sometimes too stretched to learn in the moment. That invisible cost may be the price of making communication flow seamlessly across languages.

Reference

Chou, I., Birba, A., Hu, J., Muñoz, E., Kwon, G., & García, A. M. (2026). Working memory exertion after simultaneous interpreting in bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728925100898

Author bios

Dr. Adolfo M. García. Adolfo García is Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Center (UdeSA, Argentina), Senior Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute (UCSF, US), and Associate Researcher at Universidad de Santiago de Chile. He is also co-founder of Include, a global network for crosslinguistic research on brain health; and creator of TELL, a speech testing app. He has obtained funds from the National Institutes of Health (US), the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Swiss National Science Foundation. He has authored over 200 publications and offered 350 presentations. His science communication milestones include two TED talks and featured articles in Scientific American and Le Monde. His contributions have been recognized by the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires and the Alzheimer’s Association, and by Harvard’s Ig Nobel award, the Early Career Award from the Society for the Neurobiology of Language, and the UpLink Top Innovator Award from the World Economic Forum.

Dr. Agustina Birba. Agustina Birba is a cognitive neuroscientist specialized in neurolinguistics, neuroimaging, and non-invasive brain stimulation. She obtained her PhD from the University of Buenos Aires and completed postdoctoral training through multiple competitive international fellowships and grants across institutions in Chile, Spain, the United States, Switzerland, and China. Her research investigates the neurocognitive, neurophysiological, and neuroanatomical bases of language and social cognition in both healthy individuals and clinical populations with neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. She teaches across undergraduate and graduate programs in Argentina, Colombia, and Spain, and has authored over 50 publications in leading journals.

Prof. Edinson Muñoz. Edinson Muñoz is Director of the Interdisciplinary Experimental Research Program in Communication and Cognition and of the Department of Linguistics and Literature, both at the School of Humanities of Universidad de Santiago de Chile. His work focuses on cognitive linguistics, contrastive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics, with an emphasis on bilingualism and language assessment in neurodegenerative conditions. His multiple papers have appeared in journals like Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Perspectives, International Journal of Bilingualism, and Neurobiology of Aging.

Dr. Isabelle Chou. Isabelle CHOU joined the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures (Sichuan University, China) as is Research Professor in 2025. From 2021 to 2025 she worked as Dean of the Translation Department at University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Her research interests center on empirical and experimental studies focuses on cognitive process in translation and interpreting, translation process/product interface, corpus-based translation and interpreting studies. Her research can be found in numerous journals, including Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Target, Lingua, and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Dialoguing through prohibitions and transgressions

Rami Luisto — Tue, 12 May 2026 14:28:53 +0000

Editor’s note: Mathematicians, such as the present author, continue to use the academic “we,” even if there is only one author. As regular readers will know, that’s not how we usually do things here on Language on the Move. So, I asked Rami to change first person plural in this post to first person singular throughout. Rami offered to add his cat as a co-author instead … and that’s how I learned that there is, indeed, a famous physics author who was a cat: F.D.C. Willard.

Monument to Yuri Knorosov, and his cat Asya (Image credit: Yodigo via Wikipedia)

The story goes that physicist Jack Hetherington was going to submit a paper to Physical Review Letters in 1975. When told that he would need to change the academic “we” to “I” throughout or add a co-author, he chose to invent one, his Siamese cat Chester (sired by Willard). And, for legitimacy, he added two more initials, F.D. (for Felis domesticus).

When I mentioned this bizarre story to the mathematician in my family, I was surprised to learn that, actually, the most famous cat co-authorship story is not in the natural sciences but our very own discipline, linguistics!

Yuri Knorozov, the Soviet linguist who deciphered the Mayan glyphs, took so much inspiration from his cat Asya that he considered her as co-author but the editors of his papers kept removing her name prior to publication.

The academic intrigues behind the decipherment of Mayan glyphs – after their near-complete destruction during colonization – are for another day. Now, I let you get on with Rami’s examination of the disembodied communications between between the authors of prohibition signs and graffiti.

***

In this work we observe the semiotic aftermath of an apparent strife between trespassers and the deontic sign authority connected to an abandoned industrial complex.

Introduction

This essay is a reflection on observations on the signage around an abandoned industrial complex in southern Finland. What started as a simple interest on the choice of signs to ward off people turned into something more complex as the year went on and we started to pay attention to the dynamic nature of sign posting and other semiotic actions.

The abandoned industrial complex in question seems to be a popular spot for graffiti work and urban exploration. This creates tensions since the owners of the complex wish to discourage trespassers, presumably for reasons of liability and property damage. This has given rise to a sort of dialogue that happens through the addition of new forbidding signs on the one hand, and graffiti or other transgressive actions on the other.

Besides fitting in the general area of linguistic landscapes, we feel that this ties to the work of Karlander (2019), in particular. Karlander discusses their topic through the lens of graffiti and its removal by “the anti-graffiti regime”. Even though we do not discuss here graffiti erasure specifically, we feel that there is in play a similar back-and-forth interaction where the effects of behavior seen as transgressive are acted upon. Inspired by Karlander, we refer to the two sides of the dialogue transpiring here as “the trespassers” and “the anti-trespassing regime”.

We find it fascinating that even though neither “the trespassers” nor “the anti-trespassing regime” are individuals, nor presumably even permanent or stable groups of people, we still naturally conceptualize the dynamic events here as a dialogue. We acknowledge that the anthropomorphising of such vague groups into distinct actors might be colouring our reading of the events here.

The first observations

Figure 1: PRIVATE AREA No loitering, Spring 2024 (Image credit: Rami Luisto)

We started to pay attention to the signage in the spring of 2024. Figure 1 shows a standard “PRIVATE AREA No Loitering” sign outside the complex (literally, “Asiaton oleskelu kielletty” might be translated as “No hanging around unless you have reasonable business here”). The sign is attached to a worn-down fence, and in the background we can see a partial justification for the sign in the form of a graffiti.

We used to walk by the complex on a roughly weekly basis, and started to pay attention to these signs more and more starting from 2024. We have no images prior to the spring of 2024, but based on various streetview imagery there seems to be no signs nor graffiti on October 2022, while in August 2023 we already see the sign in Figure 1 and some graffiti as well.

A commanding tone appears

Figure 2: “No trespassing”, Summer 2024 (Image credit: Rami Luisto)

In the Summer of 2024, things escalated a bit. In Figure 2 we see not only a new sign, but also a fresh piece of graffiti on a building wall, and on the right a clearly fixed hole in the chain-link fence. Note how the new sign is a lot more “aggressive” than the previous one with this one having pa ictorial component of someone actively holding up a hand to stop the addressee. The text says “No trespassing”, though the literal translation from Finnish would be “No through-going”, which we find amusing since the fence shows signs of repair after someone having literally gone through it.

Here Figure 2 feels like a static moment reflecting a dynamical event, again similarly to what is discussed by Karlander. More trespassing and transgressions have occurred, and the reaction from the anti-trespassing regime has been to fix the hole and add a more strongly forbidding sign. Several more such signs were posted on the fence surrounding the complex, all of them having the more directly forbidding pictorial symbol, and then variations on texts like “No trespassers” / “No loitering” / “No unauthorized personnel”.

Figure 3: “No unauthorized people”, June and August 2024 (Image credit: Rami Luisto)

The reaction to these signs was quite swift. In a few months some of the new signs had already been defaced or tagged, presumably to challenge the authority of the signs and the anti-trespassing regime; see Figure 3. We also note that for someone who wishes to send a signal through the medium of graffiti, a chain link fence is a very challenging canvas. It surely can be painted, but the result might not be very visible. A sign attached on the fence, however, immediately affords painting as a flat surface. And thus in this case a sign from the deontic sign authority is the very thing that enables a countersign to be created.

From commands to warnings

Figure 4: Four signs from late 2024 to 2025. Clockwise from top left: “Beware of danger”, “Dangerous building might collapse”, “Mortal danger, beware of objects falling from above”, “Mortal danger” (Image credit: Rami Luisto)

Soon after the escalation of the messages, the strategy of the anti-trespassing regime seemed to change a bit. Figure 4 shows various signs that appeared between the Fall of 2024 and the Fall of 2025. They were usually placed close to “No trespassing” signs, and this part of their function was probably to augment their effect. But they also focused very much on warning instead of forbidding. In particular, the focus seemed to shift more towards explaining why the restrictions are in effect.

Are they a sign of a more polite approach with an explanatory undertone? “Please don’t trespass here as the place is hazardous and we don’t want you to get hurt.” Or are they a veiled threat? “I can’t actually threaten you with direct violence, but if you come here then this inanimate building might cause you direct bodily harm.” Perhaps it is both?

The dialogue continues

Figure 5: The dialogue continues, Fall 2025 (Image credit: Rami Luisto)

The “discussion” between the trespassers and the anti-trespassing authority has not stopped. Some more recent observations can be found in Figure 5. These are from a corner somewhat less visible to the nearest streets that seems to be favoured for transgressive entry. There is evidence of repeated penetration of the fence, followed by fixing the hole with a piece of plywood. We also find a very strongly disfigured prohibition sign next to a fresh hole in the fence, again clearly sending a message to the anti-trespassing regime.

We also note here that just like graffiti can be hard to completely remove, fixing a chain link fence without leaving a clear trace is more or less impossible. And to quote Karlander:

An attempt at erasure – failed or not – will accentuate the transgressiveness and undesirability of graffiti in the space where the attempt was enacted.

Reference

Karlander, D. (2019). A semiotics of nonexistence? Erasure and erased writing under anti-graffiti regimes. Linguistic Landscape, 5(2), 198-216.

Bilingual writers and corpus analysis

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 05 May 2026 09:50:25 +0000

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Professor David Palfreyman (United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain) about his 2023 book Bilingual writers and corpus analysis.

Bilingual writers and corpus analysis is one of the first to represent the usage of bilingual writers in both their languages, offering insight into language corpora as extremely valuable tools in contemporary applied linguistics research, and in turn, into how much of the world’s population operate daily.

This book discusses one of the first examples of a bilingual writer corpus, the Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC), which includes writing by hundreds of students in two languages, with additional information about the writers and the texts. The result is a rich resource for research in multilingual use and learning of language. The book takes the reader through the design and use of such a corpus and illustrates the potential of this type of corpus with detailed studies that show how assessment, vocabulary, and discourse work across two very different languages.

This volume will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, and educators in bilingualism, plurilingualism, language education, corpus design, and natural language processing.

References

Palfreyman, D. M., & Habash, N. (2023). Bilingual writers and corpus analysis. Routledge.
Mehrsprachigkeitsentwicklung im Zeitverlauf (MEZ)
Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC)

Transcript (coming soon)

“Broken Arabic” between mockery and commercialization

Rizwan Ahmad — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:06:24 +0000

***
By Rizwan Ahmad, Salma Dhailia, and Mahla Almeraikhi
***

Es fi: ‘Broken’ Arabic in the Gulf

Screenshot from a Omar-Jamsheid TikTok video

When you walk through the streets of any Gulf country, you may hear a language that is neither Arabic nor English but a mix of Arabic, English, and words from migrant languages. This is a grammatically simplified form of Arabic that emerged as a contact language to solve the problem of communication between the Arabic-speaking locals and the migrant workers. Arabs refer to the language as arabi mukassar, ‘broken Arabic’. This language is also used among non-Arabs who do not share a common language, for example between a Malayalam-speaking Indian and his Bangladeshi co-worker.

Pidgin as a contact language

In linguistic studies, this form of communication is called pidgin. Historically pidgins have emerged during the colonial expansions between the colonizers speaking English, French, and Spanish and the native people. For example, Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Petit Nègre in West Africa, and Butler English in South Asia. An important characteristic of a pidgin is that it is not spoken natively by anyone. Key linguistic features of a pidgin are its reduced grammar, for example, lack of distinction between the present and past tense, masculine and feminine gender, etc. and a limited vocabulary.

Gulf Pidgin Arabic: Evolution and Transformation

Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA) is widely spoken in the oil rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states of Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, KSA, and Oman. It emerged as a contact language between Arabic-speaking Gulf nationals and the large numbers of migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia, who came to the GCC speaking a plethora of languages unrelated to Arabic. According to a statistic, the number of non-Arabs in the GCC exceeds 50%. Given the large numbers of non-Arabs in the GCC, it is not surprising to hear GPA spoken widely.

GPA shows several simplified linguistic features typical of a pidgin. Andrei Avram, among other scholars, notes that many sounds of Arabic spoken in the GCC are either substituted or lost in GPA. For example, the ‘emphatic’ voiceless stop /ṭ/ <ط>, ‘emphatic’ voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ṣ/ <ص>, and the voiceless velar fricative / <ح>are replaced with /t/, /s/, and /h/ respectively. Avram further notes that in GPA, articles, prepositions, tense markers, and subordinate clauses are frequently omitted.

GPA has been present in the traditional media long before the rise of social media during the last decade. From the early 1990s through 2000s, GPA appeared in Kuwaiti theatres, Saudi television comedy programs, often in the portrayals of South Asian blue-collar workers. In the Saudi TV series Tash Ma Tash (1998), a Saudi actor plays a character of an Indian driver who speaks this form of pidgin. One recurrent utterance in the series is es fī, “what’s wrong?”. The ‘sh’ in the Arabic word ‘esh’ ‘what’ is replaced with /s/ in the GPA. This utterance is stylized and exaggerated as part of a parodic performance of a migrant language, where linguistic limitation itself becomes the object of humor.

GPA as a Tool in Entertainment and Commercialization

Screenshot from a Saifuldin Instagram video

GPA in recent years has now gone beyond communication. Many Arabic-speaking content creators on social media use features of GPA, often in exaggerated or stylized ways, to produce comedy videos for an Arab audience. Similarly, small businesses have now started to use GPA in marketing to make their advertisements catchier and more appealing. We show these new functions through an analysis of videos of Omar Al-Muraisi, a Yemeni Arab content creator based in the UAE and those of Saifuldin a Bangladeshi worker living in Qatar. Omar Al-Muraisi, with over 2.2 million followers on TikTok, produces funny videos using GPA, in which he plays the dual characters of Jamsheid, a Pakistani worker, and an Arab living in the Gulf. He (through Jamsheid) speaks an exaggerated form of GPA often showing exaggerated negative behaviors and personality traits associated with fictionalized GPA speakers from South Asia.

In a TikTok video, Omar, the Arab, is sitting on a chair sipping tea when he sees Jamsheid, wearing a Pakistani outfit, getting ready to pray. He asks ‘are you going to pray?’ to which Jamsheid in an angry tone replies that of course he is going to pray; he is not Aladdin getting ready to fly. Jamshed continues his outburst with questions like where do you want me to fly? This direction or that direction? Omar, the Arab, is portrayed as calm and respectful in his tone and demeanor. Omar through Jamsheid, pronounces yitīr, ‘he flies’ substituting the sound /ṭ/ <ط> with /t/ <ت>. Omar, also uses syntactic features typical of GPA, for example, he says ana yisīr dākhil ḥammām ‘I go inside bathroom’ omitting the definite article, preposition, and tense marker.

Jamsheid is presented as a man who is always angry and ready to pick a fight. Regardless of what he is told or asked, the character consistently responds in an angry voice, raised pitch, and emphatic gestures, creating the impression of an unnecessarily angry man. Anger becomes a key performative strategy through which comedy is created, reinforcing GPA as a stylized register associated with heightened affect rather than a resource for communication in a situation where the interactants do not share a language. In other videos, Jamsheid is portrayed as ‘dumb’, ‘aggressive’, ‘illogical’, and ‘ignorant’. While many Arabs find these portrayals funny, they may contribute to the creation and reinforcements of stereotypes in the popular media about speakers of GPA and lead to their further marginalization.

By contrast, Saifuldin, a Bangladeshi working in Qatar, uses GPA, which is how he is likely to speak, for commercials. His videos typically feature him advertising for restaurants, gyms, and other service-related products. What is interesting is that his videos promote relatively expensive products targeting upper middle class rich clients, mostly Arabic-speaking Qataris and other Arabs. Clearly, the use of GPA is not for communication but for attracting clients, who see GPA as funny making it catchy and attractive. An example of this is a video in which he promotes a perfume brand called eighty-eight, which is described as “a luxurious fragrance blending elegance and sophistication” available in high-end malls such as Al-Hazm and West Walk. He uses the GPA incorporating Gulf proverbs and culturally resonant expressions to connect with his audience. His speech in this video moves beyond basic transactional language, drawing on locally understood phrases to describe the perfume and appeal of the products while situating himself within the host community.

GPA between mockery and commercialization

This pragmatic use of GPA demonstrates how migrant speakers can leverage linguistic resources to participate in local cultural practices and communicative routines, illustrating a functional dimension of GPA that contrasts with stylized performances found in comedic skits.

Figure 3: Saifuldin using GPA in a promotional video for a perfume shop

In contrast with the “funny” videos, advertisements tend to present GPA as engaging, relatable, and effective in connecting with Arab audiences. It shows that GPA, which was once seen as a broken language used for communication between people who do not share Arabic or English is now used across diverse contexts such as humor and marketing.

The use of GPA for comedy with undertones of negative stereotypes of GPA speakers, such as low status and aggressiveness may become normalized hiding the elements of inequality and marginalization of the GPA speakers. Several research on mock language show the role of humour in shaping public attitudes, and sentiments toward marginalized groups (Calhan, 2010; Santa Ana, 2009).

When combined, these examples demonstrate the variety of ways in which Gulf Pidgin Arabic is used in Gulf media, ranging from stylized, performative representations in humorous content to practical, communicative use in everyday situations. While use of GPA by creators like Omar Al-Muraisi shows how it is used for humor with undertones of negative stereotypes Saifuldin’s videos show how the stigmatized GPA can be simultaneously used for commercial purposes in marketing products. The variety of functions of GPA shows its complexity in the sociolinguistic landscape of the GCC, and more studies are needed to uncover the multifaceted social and cultural meanings of the ‘broken’ Arabic.

The (un)imagined work of linguistic inclusion

Emily Pacheco — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:46:44 +0000

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with PhD candidate Brynn Quick (Macquarie University, Australia) about her 2025 paper, The (un)imagined work of determining patients’ English language proficiency. The conversation focuses on language policies in healthcare, the monolingual logic, and language access.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

References

Quick, B., & Piller, I. (2026). Hospital practices for determining patient language proficiency: A systematic review. Australian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 9, 103359. https://doi.org/10.29140/ajal.2026.103359
Quick, B., Piller, I., & Lising, L. (2025). The (un)imagined work of determining patients’ English language proficiency. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2025.2594462

Transcript

My guest today is a fellow linguistics PhD candidate at Macquarie, a familiar voice to many of our listeners, co-producer and frequent host of this podcast, Brynn Quick!

Hospital reception area (Image credit: Eriel Ezequiel Reyes via Unsplash)

Brynn, an American-Australian, holds a Master of Applied Linguistics and a Master of Research from Macquarie University. In her current PhD candidature, she is investigating how language barriers are bridged between patients and staff in Australian healthcare contexts. Her linguistic interests are many and varied, and include sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, sociophonetics and historical linguistics, particularly the history of English.

Today we are going to talk in general about language policies in healthcare, and in particular about a recently published 2025 paper that Brynn wrote entitled, “The (un)imagined work of determining patients’ English language proficiency”.

Brynn, a warm welcome to the show, and thank you so much for being on the other side of this interview today!

Brynn: Thanks so much, Emily. It feels weird, but also really exciting to be in the guest seat today.

Emily: Yeah, I’m thrilled to be able to interview you! And so, Brynn, our listeners may have learned a bit about you already through your other podcast episodes that you’ve hosted, but I would love it if you could tell us a bit more about yourself and how you decided to pursue a PhD in linguistics.

Brynn: So, I, um, am what we call a mature age student, and I like to refer to myself as a geriatric PhD candidate. I’m 41. Um, and I’m in my second year of my PhD candidature, so my journey to my PhD was not linear, uh, like it is for maybe a lot of other younger people, such as yourself, when you’re doing this, um, in your 20s.

So, I got my undergraduate degree in 2007, um, in America, and I did a double major. One of my majors was Spanish, which like, makes sense. And then the other major was theatre, so I’m a trained actor, uh, actually. And, so I did that, then I graduated right into the global financial crisis, or in America, as we tend to refer to it ‘the recession’, um, of ‘07- ‘08. I had gone to become a teacher in Spain. I had travelled to Spain, I got my, um, CELTA certificate, so it’s the Cambridge English Language Teaching to Adults certificate there. Um, and then I became an English teacher to adults in Spain, worked there for a while, And, um, loved it. So, travelled around to different corporations in Madrid, and taught in corporations, basically, like, business English.

Um, but then I came back to the States, and all of a sudden, jobs were nowhere to be seen. I did work at an English language school for a while, um, both as a teacher and then as a director. And that was in the Washington, D.C. area. Then, my husband and I decided to move to Australia for a year. I worked as, like, a student services officer, in another English language school here. Then went back to the States for 5 years, and that’s when I left, um, the workforce and had my kids. And I was a stay-at-home mom with them, um, for many years, and then it wasn’t until we moved back here to Australia in 2017, um, that it was, like, in the next year or so, my kids were old enough that they were either in school or daycare, at least part-time, and I thought, like, I really miss working, I miss teaching, um, I’d really like to go back into it, and so I kind of had to start again. I started from scratch.

I had to re-enter school, and I got my graduate certificate in TESOL, so teaching English as a Second Language through Macquarie. And then COVID hit, and I was trying to work during COVID, and also homeschool my kids, and I think any parent listening to this probably, like, shudders when they think back to that time, because it was really, really hard. And that was in 2020, and I realized, like, mmm, I don’t think this is gonna end in 2020. I bet we’re gonna have another lockdown. And I can’t try to work from home and homeschool at the same time, so I decided to go get a master’s degree, and so that’s what I did.

And then I kind of went from there, you know, got my first master’s, um, through Macquarie. That went on to become a Master of Research, and then that led into the PhD. Um, I just really fell in love with linguistics as a field, and especially sociolinguistics. And whenever anyone asks me, like, oh, okay, what is linguistics? What do you do? And I and, you know, of course, I’m sure you’ve gotten this before, how many languages do you speak? And I’ll say, like, well, two, but, um, that parts not important. The important thing is, is that I’m doing sociolinguistics, so I talk and learn about how culture influences language, and how language influences culture. And so that’s what I really enjoy doing. Um, and so that’s what’s taken me here.

If you had asked me when I was in my 20s, you know, are you gonna go get a PhD one day? That was never, ever a thought in my mind. So, um, hopefully that can help anybody who is a mature age, student like me, uh, who might be thinking, oh no, I left it too long, I waited too long, I can’t believe I’m doing this in my middle age. It’s something that we all, when we come to a PhD, I think we all have to get there in our own time, and I’m glad that I got there now.

Emily: Yeah, that’s a lovely story, Brynn. Thanks for sharing, and of course, I’m biased and very thankful that your paths or your journey led you to Macquarie, and um, you’re a great addition to our team and our PhD candidates’ group, and I can’t imagine it without you, so, I think that’s very lovely. So, um, and it also was funny, like, you know, people say, like, oh, you’re doing linguistics, how many languages do you speak? I get that all the time, and I always say, oh, I actually do sign language, and they’re like, oh! So um, yeah.

Brynn: Right. They don’t realize, like, that’s part of it as well. Yep, so it’s a huge field, and we’ve all got our big subdivisions, and little cliques within it, yeah.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, to start to shift to the talk today about, uh, your paper, just to foreground our discussion about it, could you explain what work-as-imagined and work-as-done means?

Brynn: Yes, so, this is, um, today we’re obviously talking about my first paper out of my PhD. So, um, I’m doing what’s called a thesis by publication. I know you’re doing that too. And this is different to a traditional thesis by monograph. So, I think when a lot of people think of a PhD, they think of, oh, you’ve got to write a huge book. And that is typically what people have done, historically, and that huge book is called a monograph. But in the past few years, it’s become more and more common for people to do this thesis-by-publication, because as we all know, um, a lot of our metrics, uh, are determined by how many papers we get published in journals. And so, this is my first paper out of the PhD, and it’s the first paper I’ve ever published ever. So that’s very exciting.

Emily: Very exciting! Congratulations again!

Brynn: Thank you. Thank you! So, for this paper, what I was doing, um, it’s kind of like part one of this sort of two-part process. So, my PhD is looking at how do healthcare organizations, so, I’m really looking at the organization itself, how do they ensure language access for limited English proficiency, or LEP patients in the context of, like, Australia, where everything is done in English, right? So, as I was thinking about, okay, how do I do this? I knew that I wanted to look at the actual policies that are on the books. I wanted to see, okay, what are people, quote, supposed to do within a healthcare organization to ensure that these LEP patients, um, get access to things like interpreters or translated documents, and because I feel like we need to start there. We need to see, alright, what are we supposed to be doing, right? So, I was able to find this framework that’s called work-as-imagined, versus work-as-done.

So this is a framework that’s often used to analyse the work that people do in the fields of human ergonomics, so, like, thinking about how people actually work, um, for anyone who ever read the book Cheaper by the Dozen, which I loved as a kid, it takes place in, I think it was, like, the 19…30s or 40s, and, um, the dad in that book I think he, uh, studies human ergonomics. So it’s, like, efficiency of work. How do people work? How do people get things done, kind of like on a factory floor, right? So, this framework is used there, but also, it’s been more and more used in healthcare, which, when I read that, I was like, well, that’s weird. Those seem like two totally separate fields of work, right? But the way that this works in healthcare is, um, it’s used to analyse clinical work in terms of what is, like, supposed to happen over the course of patient care, and then what actually happens.

So, um, let me give you an example. So, there’s a book called Resilient Healthcare Volume 2, um, and it’s edited by several people, and one of the people is Erik Hollnagel, um, and he’s one of the most prolific scholars of work-as-imagined versus work-as-done in healthcare. And in this book, he asks us to imagine this scenario, like, this imaginary scenario, to kind of get the picture. So, the scenario is…A hospital has a policy that all newly admitted patients must have a blood draw with routine blood tests, and this blood draw is to be done by a nurse. Okay, fine, that sounds pretty logical. However, in this scenario, no nurse is supposed to draw blood from an admitted patient until an order is made by a doctor, and a label is already printed and ready to be put onto the vial of blood. However, at this hospital, the nurses often ignore this official policy and draw blood from a patient as soon as they’re admitted, so they’re not waiting for the doctor’s order. And this is because the nurses know that the doctor will request this eventually, so they feel that drawing the blood immediately and having it waiting for when the order does actually come through is a time-saving measure. Even to the point that they kind of unofficially teach new nurses to do this, when the new nurses first start working at the hospital. And so, as the reader, we might ask ourselves, well, why is the hospital policy written so that the doctor has to request the blood draw before the blood can be taken. And, you know, maybe we’re thinking that based on the nurse’s workaround, the policy was written without taking into account the long wait times that actually happen between the patient being admitted, the doctor seeing the patient, the doctor requesting the blood draw, the label being printed, and then finally the actual drawing of blood. So, this is exactly what happens, when work-as-imagined, or what policymakers imagine a work environment and work itself to be, comes up against work-as-done, or how people actually do work based on environmental constraints.

So, the way that I like to explain this in sort of my elevator pitch is to think of, like, expectations versus reality. We’ve probably all seen those, uh, memes online, where you see, like, a really pretty cake, and it’ll say, like, expectations, and then you see a picture right next to it, and it’s, like, reality. And it’s, like, the cake that someone has tried to make, but it’s all smushed, and it looks weird, you know? So, this is kind of what work-as-imagined versus work-as-done is. And that’s not to say that always you know, policy is completely not in touch with how work is actually done. But that does happen quite a bit. And so, I wanted to use this framework to see, okay, in Australia and New South Wales and Sydney in particular, what do these healthcare policies say? What are patients who have limited English proficiency, what are they supposed to be able to access? Who is supposed to give them this access, this language access, and how, versus…What actually happens? So, this paper is the first part that shows us the imagined work, what the policies say should happen. The paper that I’m currently writing is about what actually happens.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, that’s very, that’s a nice, um, setup there, and uh, thank you for explaining that, the framework you’ve used, and um, the meme reference was really good, and it is, you know, it’s a great way to get across what exactly you’re looking at.

So, as you’ve mentioned in this paper particularly, we’re talking about your first paper, um, you’re presenting an analysis of these healthcare policies that relate to the linguistic diversity in Australia, but you find they employ a monolingual logic, and within this multilingual reality. Could you tell us a bit more about, you’ve hinted a little bit, but a bit more about the policies you collected specifically in your data, and how your study is a methodology that we would call a policy ethnography, and tell us a bit more about that, if you could?

Brynn: Yes, so I looked at, um, several different policies, 13 in total, um, and I wanted to make sure that I was looking at policies that came from the four different levels of governance within Australia. So that’s federal, New South Wales state, because that’s the state that we live in, or that I live in, and local health district policies, so, like, each, within a state, it’ll be divided into local health districts, and so each of those local health districts might be slightly different from each other. Um, and then finally, the fourth level is institutional policies. So, I am looking at an entire health network, which I have given the pseudonym Blue Meadow Health, um, and it’s a private health organization in Sydney.

Um, and so I’m looking at policies from all four of those levels, but importantly, the most important sort of overarching policy here is called the Australian Charter of Healthcare Rights. And this charter lays out what patients, any patient within a health system in Australia, should expect from their healthcare encounter, basically. And one of the rights that is guaranteed under the Charter is the right to information. And so, that is then what I based my selection of other policies on, was like, okay, what other policies are there that are guaranteeing a patient the right to information? And how are they saying that people who don’t have English can get that information? So, what I did was I analysed these 13 different policies, and I kind of did this in a linear way. And I did this by asking who do the policies say should assess a patient’s language, English language proficiency before or during a medical encounter? How should a patient’s English language proficiency be assessed in order to determine if they need something like an interpreter. And what guidance is provided to healthcare staff to determine whether communication is successful at any point in the consultation process. Um, and so that’s basically how I coded all of the policies. And that’s how I determined how they were supposed to address a limited English proficiency patients’ needs.

Emily: Um, and as part of that, in your paper, you explain a bit about process mapping as a method of analysis, and so could you explain how you applied that method to your data, and maybe take us through that process itself? That would be great.

Brynn: Yeah, so, um, this is a concept called process mapping. It comes from, um, Debono et al., 2019. And that’s basically where this idea of a linear process of a policy is analysed, in order to describe how the policy is to be enacted on, based on how these policies imagine work to happen.

So again, sort of this overarching theme of, like, what is the work, the actual work, that goes into ensuring that LEP patients get language access, that get care, that, where they can understand what’s being said. So basically, it’s, it sounds fancier than it is. It’s essentially what I just said, where we’re talking about, okay, so, who is supposed to do this work? How is this work supposed to get done? And what is the end result of this communicative work supposed to be? And to me, this was really important because I feel, based on the work that I did with my Master of Research, where I was also looking at some similar things, that we have a lot of really great research that has been done about why do doctors and nurses maybe not use interpreters that much with their patients? Or, we have research about why patients do or do not prefer to use interpreters, like, professional interpreters versus family interpreters, um, within the healthcare context.

But what we really don’t have much of is sort of this nitty-gritty, maybe it sounds boring, but I really like it. Um, this nitty-gritty stuff about, okay, well, how is the work actually getting done? What is the workflow supposed to be? If a patient needs an interpreter, how do I, as a healthcare staff member, actually go about figuring that out, arranging for the interpreter, making it all happen within the course of my workflow. Because we all have jobs, where we have to get things done during the course of a busy day, and for me, I think that this is a really interesting angle to look at this really huge area of research. Because if we don’t know what this actual process is, then we can’t see where maybe the lines of defence are failing and people aren’t getting interpreters.

Emily: And a part of that, you know, we say to get an interpreter, okay, but before you even get an interpreter, someone has to assess, right? Does this person need an interpreter if someone doesn’t request one, or advocate for one? Um, so in your paper, you also talk about, I think it’s really interesting to see who is supposed to do this assessment of a patient’s English language proficiency. And as part of that, you did find some patient work, and you also talked a little bit about how healthcare practitioners are supposed to do this maybe as well, so if you could tell us a bit about that, who’s assessing the need for an interpreter, and how do they do that?

Brynn: Yeah, so according to policy, really, what the policies all say is, hey, patients, if you need an interpreter, like, if you don’t have much English and you need an interpreter, make sure that you tell us, the healthcare organization. Which, again, okay. So, this is where the concept of, you asked earlier about monolingual logic, this is where the concept of monolingual logic comes into play. So, I’m getting this idea of monolingual logic from work that’s been done by Piller, Bruzon, Torsh, and then earlier, the concept of the monolingual habitus, which comes from Ingrid Gogolin. And in the monolingual habitus, which we in Australia, um, often conceptualize as the monolingual mindset, which was proposed by Clyne. But the monolingual habitus means that there are these policies, or these work environments, that come from this logic, or this setup, of somebody who maybe doesn’t understand how languages work, and how multilingualism works. So, when Ingrid Gogolin came up with this concept, she came up with it in the realm of education, so, like, primary, high school, things like that. And she was looking at how multilingual kids were able to access education when they maybe didn’t have the language of the educational institution, right? So, then we kind of narrow down this idea of monolingual habitus into a subsection monolingual logic, which to me, in this case, is saying, okay, so these policies are saying that, hey, patient, if you need an interpreter, come tell us. But we, anybody who has another language knows that when you learn another language, it’s not that easy to then be able to go up to an institution, which is what healthcare is, and say, hi, I don’t speak this language, I need an interpreter. But overwhelmingly, that’s what these policies say. So, the policies will say things like, if you need an interpreter, speak to our staff. If you would like an interpreter, ask a staff member to organize one for you.

But the thing is, the monolingual logic about this is that all of these policies are written in English, so the people who need to know this information, likely cannot access this information because it’s in English. Now, the charter that I was talking about before, um, was translated into, I believe it’s, like, 32 community languages. But it’s only one page, and it’s just kind of bullet point information. It’s not the real substantial information that somebody might need if they’re trying to interact with the healthcare system. And so, you really, if you’re a patient, who has the right to access information that you can understand about your own health, but you don’t have the ability to go up to, or call, or email someone from a healthcare organization to say, hey, I need an interpreter, in English, then you’re not gonna get one.

The policies also say things like, oh, hey, not a problem, we get it, you can download this, I need an interpreter card from a website, and you can, like, present it, because it’s supposed to be in two different languages. But, you know, again, this is, this comes back to sort of an organizational problem, because when I clicked on the link that would have taken me to that card, there was no page. It was, like, 404, error, page not found, you know, so, so again, it’s like they’re saying, yes, yes, we want you to be able to access language and language supports, but we’re not putting in the work necessary to get you there.

Um, something else that the policy said was that even though the patient is supposed to go tell, the, you know, staff that they need an interpreter, that it is the healthcare practitioner’s, quote, responsibility. This kept coming up a lot in the policies. That health practitioners are responsible for assessing a patient’s need for an interpreter and arranging for an interpreter to assist them. So, it was very weird. It’s like, okay, so there are these two different messages that are being sent by policy. Who is supposed to do this work? And again, this comes back to this is actual work that has to get done. This is the stuff that happens throughout the course of the day, that somebody needs to think about as actual work that people are doing. And if we’re going to be saying to healthcare practitioners, hey, you need to be responsible for this, that’s fine, but then we need to give them the tools to actually know how a patient is supposed to be assessed, because the policies later go on to say, uh, okay, you know, healthcare practitioners, if you want to know how to assess a patient’s language, uh, English language capabilities, just, uh, determine if they can speak English. And it’s like…No, that doesn’t make any sense. Um, you know, again, maybe according to a monolingual logic, that does make sense for someone who maybe doesn’t have a lot of experience with assessing language or understanding how, sometimes, when we have another language, we can speak conversationally, um, to somebody. But, if you throw us into a healthcare situation where they’re using complicated medical jargon that you’ve never learned, um, when you might be in a heightened state of emotion, things might feel very high stakes. You know, our ability to then use that other language goes down. Um, and so that’s why it becomes important to get somebody like a professional interpreter. And so, if policies just say, well, figure out if they can speak English. Okay, but you have to tell us how to do that, and that’s what really doesn’t exist in these policies.

Emily: Yeah, that’s, um… That’s a bit crazy to think about. It’s a huge, like, it’s a huge part of getting an interpreter, but how, and who’s responsible, and to keep talking about that, let’s discuss who’s missing from these policies, the medical receptionist. I think it’s interesting you keep saying staff or the policies say staff. And in a medical building, in a hospital, in a clinic, staff could mean so many things. Um, so let’s talk about medical receptionists and how and why they’re an important part of the process that we’ve been discussing so far, and what are the impacts of their work.

Brynn: So, this is, and I keep saying to everyone, I’m like, I will die on this hill. Um, I am so, I really want us to talk about medical receptionists, because we really do not have much research into the role that they play in being part of this journey that a patient goes on throughout a medical system, and it really is a system, right? The healthcare system, it’s like a big machine, and I think we, any of us who have ever been through the healthcare system, whether it’s here in Australia or anywhere else, you know, it’s often… it’s very easy to feel lost in that machine, you know? You feel like you’re just sort of a number, you don’t necessarily feel like you know, the healthcare organization in general is taking care of you. And you know, we’ve made a lot of medical advancements in the last hundred or so years. I’m very thankful for that, and if we get to have longer, better lives because it’s a bit of a machine, I understand that there is that trade-off.

But the thing is, medical receptionists are generally a patient’s first point of contact with a healthcare organization. Think about any time that you’ve had to call, whether this is your GP, or a specialist, or a hospital, and you’ve needed to make an appointment, who’s the first person that you talk to? A medical receptionist. If you go to be admitted to hospital, chances are, the very first people that you see are the admissions department, or, you know, receptionists at that front desk. So, what I really learned from my Master of Research, which was a systematic literature review of 50 different current studies, that were looking at linguistic diversity within the healthcare context, was that all the time, I kept hearing about staff. Staff. Medical staff, front desk staff, receptionists. And so, I was like, well, wait a minute, it seems like these medical receptionists are playing a big role in this patient’s journey. But why don’t we know much about them? Why don’t we know what they do or don’t do in order to get an interpreter for a patient, or what happens if somebody calls them to make an appointment, and the receptionist can tell that the person has a limited English proficiency, what do they do?

So, this is exactly what my research goes into in the second part. Um, so you had asked earlier about what a policy ethnography is. And this is where this comes into play. So, a policy ethnography is where it’s kind of the combination of the two words. We look at policies. So, like, what I did for this paper, sort of an audit of policies. But then we combine that with the work-as-done portion, which is conducting interviews, in my case, with medical receptionists. So, I did that as well. Um, so that I could ask them, okay, what do you do? How do you manage linguistic diversity when you’re also doing 500,000 other things? Like, you know, making sure that patients have appointments and sending emails and taking calls, and you know, dealing with clients or customers or patients that are upset, you know, a lot goes into their day, so, in this policy part, this also, like you said, kept coming up, where it would, the policies were directing patients to go, quote, talk to staff. And inevitably, what that meant was go talk to a medical receptionist, because that’s who your, the patients are going to see in that patient-facing role.

And some of the policies, one in particular, even says look, yes, healthcare practitioners are responsible for making sure that a patient gets an interpreter if they need them, but in reality, medical receptionists are often the ones who need to do this. So, they should be trained as well. But that was it. That’s all they said. And so, the paper that I’m writing now is all about how medical receptionists make these decisions, and sort of spoiler alert, it really does come down to medical receptionists. They are the ones who are really making decisions about whether a patient is going to get a professional interpreter or not. And so, I think that they are really this missing key in the healthcare machine. They’re like a missing cog in the part of the wheel that we just haven’t explored that much, and I think that if we do, we’re gonna find out a lot more about how language access actually works.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, it’s fascinating, and it really seems like you’ve uncovered a really important piece of the puzzle that may have been overlooked. And that is really necessary to take a closer look at.

And so, throughout this conversation, we’ve talked about the policies, how you’ve analysed them, kind of who’s doing what. And so, let’s say, you know, someone does request an interpreter, or someone thinks, oh, this person needs an interpreter. They get the interpreter, can you tell us how the policies you looked at define, okay, now effective communication is happening, or is it happening between patients with limited English proficiency and their healthcare providers, how are they determining that in these policies?

Brynn: Well, that was one of my biggest moments where I, like, gasped out loud when I was reading these policies, was because I did, I really wanted to know, alright, fine. We’re getting an interpreter, or we’re not getting an interpreter for limited English proficiency patients. What is the outcome? So again, it goes back to that, like, process mapping. What is the outcome that we want from this? And ostensibly, the outcome is communication, right? We want the, um, we want the healthcare provider to be able to feel comfortable communicating with the patient, and vice versa. We want the patient to be able to get as much healthcare information as they would get if they were getting the care in their preferred language, right? But what was incredible was that all of these policies define communication with adjectives, and that was it. Nothing else.

So, they were like, well, we want to make sure that there’s, quote, effective communication, or, quote, clear communication, or quote, good communication. And I was reading it, and I was like, but what does that mean, you know? What does that mean, especially when we’re talking about people, the healthcare providers and the patients, who are potentially coming from not only different language backgrounds, but different cultural backgrounds, because that healthcare communication can look extremely different in different cultures, right? There’s something that’s quite common, which in certain cultures, if somebody, especially, like, an elderly relative, if they are given, like, a terminal diagnosis. So let’s say that somebody, um, you know, 80-year-old grandmother has terminal cancer, in certain cultures, it is very common to, for the doctor to not tell that patient oh, you have terminal cancer, because it’s considered to be kinder to not give that information, and to not stress the person out. And so what we see is that this will happen sometimes, even in a healthcare context where, you know, it’s happening in, like, a large GP or a large hospital, where this communication won’t get conveyed, to a person, because If the healthcare provider is coming from, like, you know, an Australian English background, they are saying to the patient, like, yep, you are terminal, you’re going to die, you’ve got cancer, but let’s say that, like, the patient’s family member is there acting as the interpreter, from their perspective, that is not culturally correct, and so sometimes they will then choose not to interpret that information as the family member to their elderly grandmother, they will just say, you know, oh, you’ve got pneumonia, please take this medicine, you’ll feel better, you know. And so, so that’s why we have to have a more robust concept of communication. And we have to consider communication, multilingually and multiculturally. We have to have this known to not just healthcare providers, but all parts of staff, including medical receptionists, that there are these differences in communication that will happen. And so, we need to decide what is it that we expect all patients, regardless of language background, what information do we want them to get? And what information are we okay with being left up to different cultural interpretations or preferences.

Emily: Yeah, thank you so much, Brynn, for taking us through your first paper, and I think, you know, this study definitely, um, has impacts and benefits for everyone to improve the healthcare system, to make it, uh, to have more, quote, effective communication, uh, can benefit all not just people who are multilingual or multicultural.

So, to wrap up our conversation today, I would love to ask, what is next for you in your work? Is there anything else you want to share with our audience today?

Brynn: So, like I said, I’m working on the second paper now, and this paper is going to be about how medical receptionists make decisions around whether or not they’re going to use or allow the use of an ad hoc interpreter, which is, like, this family member that I was talking about, that will often accompany a patient, and the family member speaks English to a higher proficiency level than the patient. So sometimes, healthcare professionals, they will say, oh, that’s fine, you be the interpreter. And there are lots of thoughts and feelings about that in the literature and in different studies. Um, some people say, yep, that’s totally fine. Some people say, nope, that’s never okay. So, what I want to know is what are the medical receptionist’s decision-making processes like? And what is guiding their decision-making processes as to whether a person can use an ad hoc interpreter, or call for a professional interpreter, or choose not to have an interpreter at all. Um, so that’s this paper, and then the paper after that will be about how these medical receptionists that I interviewed discuss using Google Translate when they talk to patients. Which is going to be really interesting.

And then, uh, like I said, with the thesis by publication, yes, you publish papers, but then you have to write, like, linking chapters and a big literature review, so that’s gonna be my life for the next, uh, year and a half, is just all of this writing. But it’s really interesting to see how it all comes together, how these sort of separate papers can all come together to sort of paint one big picture about what’s going on in healthcare right now, and I do hope that it will contribute to allowing for more language access for lots of different people. And helping medical receptionists to incorporate this into their already extremely busy workflows. I really want us to, like, think about the medical receptionists, you know, really consider what this is like for them, and make it as easy as possible on them, so that that knock-on effect translates to the patients.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you again, Brynn! This has been great. Um, I really appreciated the chance to get to interview today, you today, and hear all about the exciting work that you’re doing. So, uh, thank you for agreeing to join the interview!

Brynn: Thank you, Emily. Thanks for letting me be in this seat.

Emily: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. Um, and thanks for joining, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!

Kurdish Heritage Language Education

Martin Serif Derince — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:03:24 +0000

Ez li welêt mamoste bûm. Lê piştî 12 Îlonê em ketin hepsê. Hepsê de em hinek kurdî elimîn. [In the homeland, I was a teacher. But after the military coup of September 12, I was imprisoned. It was in prison that we learned Kurdish—literary Kurdish—a little.] (Mamoste Mesud, Kurdish language teacher in Germany, pseudonym)

This testimony comes from an interview I conducted with a Kurdish language teacher in Germany as part of my doctoral research, completed recently at the University of Potsdam. It is not an isolated account. Several other Kurdish language teachers I interviewed, as well as Kurdish political activists told me that prison in Turkey was where they first encountered written Kurdish. The experience recurs with striking regularity across generations and biographies.

Mehmed Uzun (Image credit: UnionsVerlag)

For instance, Mehmed Uzun — one of the most celebrated authors in Kurdish literature — writes in his memoirs that his commitment to literary Kurdish also began during his imprisonment in Turkey in the first half of 1970s. As a resilience strategy, he wrote in no other language than Kurdish until 1985, when his first novel appeared while he was living in exile in Stockholm. There, Mehmed Uzun and a number of other Kurdish intellectuals built a literary legacy that became one of the catalysts for the establishment of Kurdish-language teaching in Swedish schools — the first time Kurdish had been taught in a school setting in Europe. That Swedish experience, in turn, became a key reference point for efforts to maintain and teach Kurdish in other diaspora contexts, particularly in Germany and eventually in Kurdish homeland(s) across Mesopotamia.

Kurds and Kurdish Language Teaching in Germany

Germany is one of the countries where Kurdish has a relatively long history of instruction in school settings. Since 1993, Kurdish has been taught within programs known as Herkunftssprachenunterricht — commonly translated as heritage language education (HLE). These programs are, in fact, one of the few official public domains in Germany where the term “Kurdish” appears at all. This is because Kurds hold no recognized status as a distinct group in German state classifications: they are registered simply as citizens of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, or Syria — or as German citizens with a migration background from those countries. This administrative logic renders the Kurdish community largely invisible in official documents and state discourse, absorbed into national categories that say nothing about language, culture, or identity. And yet, today, around 3,000 students across seven German states are enrolled in Kurdish HLE programs — a quiet but significant presence that the public as well as academic sources barely acknowledges.

Germany is home to the largest Kurdish community in the European diaspora — an estimated 1.5 million people, of whom around 580,000 report Kurdish as their primary language at home, according to national statistics. This community has been shaped over roughly a century by successive waves of political oppression and conflict across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Yet despite this demographic weight — and despite three decades of Kurdish language teaching in German schools — no comprehensive scholarly study of Kurdish heritage language education (KHLE) existed before this research. That is a striking gap, particularly given the relatively rich academic literature on HLE in Germany more broadly.

Map of German states offering Kurdish heritage language education (Image credit: Martin Derince)

Kurdish is also exceptional within that literature in another respect: it is the only stateless language among the 30 languages currently taught in HLE programs in Germany. Unlike the others — most of which were introduced through bilateral agreements between Germany and countries of origin such as Turkey, Greece, and Italy — Kurdish has no state to negotiate on its behalf, no official institutional backing, and no recognized interlocutor within the policy frameworks that govern HLE. The question this raises is not a small one: how, under these conditions, did KHLE programs come to exist and survive at all?

Answering it is what this research set out to do. Over four years of activist ethnographic fieldwork — conducted not from a position of observant participant, but as a researcher explicitly committed to the communities being studied — what emerged was a picture of extraordinary and creative agency. Kurdish teachers, parents, community organizations, and intellectuals had each, in their own way, carved out a space for their language through constant contestation, negotiation, and struggle. It is this agency, and the distinctive dispositions that sustain it, that I eventually conceptualized as Resistance Habitus.

Conceptualizing Resistance Habitus

The concept brings together two theoretical traditions. The first is the literature on resistance — not only in the context of organized social movements, but also in the sense of everyday practices through which people quietly challenge power without open confrontation. The second is Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: the durable system of dispositions, shaped by experience, through which individuals and communities perceive and act in the world. From these two traditions I derive the concept of Resistance Habitus, which I define as a historically embedded, socially situated, and durably embodied system of dispositions that orients Kurdish actors toward the sustained pursuit of KHLE as part of a broader struggle for sociopolitical, linguistic, and pedagogical recognition — under conditions of statelessness, institutional marginalization, and exclusion.

No abstract definition captures Resistance Habitus better than the story of someone who lived it. When asked how he came to be a Kurdish language teacher in Germany, Mamoste Mesud recounts:

One Newroz evening, I saw that Mamoste A.B [a Kurdish language activist] had opened a stand there—it was in 1991. He had set up a stand and was standing behind it, talking about education. He said, “We have a small group here, a small community. You could [also join]…” I said, “I was a teacher in the homeland,” and he said, “We’re also looking for a teacher here, join our group.” I said, “Of course, with pleasure.” We had a Kurdish friend, he was from Rojava, and his Kurdish was very good. For two years, we attended his Kurdish courses, to learn grammar. In fact, my main motivation was to learn Kurdish, it wasn’t about becoming a teacher and at that time I already had a job that paid well and took up a lot of my time. Before I became a teacher, I was earning 4,500 Marks in my previous job. Then, I became a teacher and started earning 1,800 Marks. But we made that sacrifice so that Kurdish would be accepted, so that Kurdish would take its place among the international languages, and so that Kurdish would gain dignity. That is why we made this sacrifice.

Mamoste Mesud’s words capture the dispositions of successive generations that viewed language teaching as both political resistance and cultural commitment shaped by a desire to dignify Kurdish, carve out a place for it among world languages, and contribute to its institutional recognition and promotion even if that required sacrifices at many levels.

Not much different from Mamoste Mesud’s trajectory, Mamoste Evdile — a pseudonym for another pioneer of KHLE in Germany — explained how they prepared the very first teaching materials with extremely low resources back in the early 1990s.

I can say so openly, it’s not a shame, our conditions were like that, our circumstances were like that. I had an old typewriter. My kids had found it in garbage. Probably someone had thrown it away and [my kids] took it home. We used it to write with it and then we added the special characters according to the alphabet of the Kurdish language using a pencil. […] I still have those materials. I put them in a file, I still use it. I mean, even if I retire, I will not give them away. I think the materials that we started with should be protected like in a museum.

Cover of the first Kurdish language textbook in Germany (Image credit: Martin Derince)

Mamoste Mesud’s lived experience of learning literary Kurdish in prison and eventually becoming one of the first Kurdish language teachers in Germany after he joined a self-organized language initiative and Mamoste Evdila’s using an old typewriter found in garbage to produce instructional materials might be striking because they defamiliarize the space of language learning. Yet, in no ways are they exceptional stories in the world of Kurdish language education. They are, in many ways, a defining one. They are a compact illustration of exactly how Resistance Habitus is manifested through historical consciousness, affective commitment, collective organization, strategic agency, transnational networks, and pedagogical innovation which I explained as six dimensions of Resistance Habitus in my research.

Resistance Habitus and Beyond

The KHLE experience in Germany does not ask us simply to admire what has been built against the odds. It asks us to take seriously what those odds reveal about whose languages are valued, whose communities are recognized, and whose educational needs are considered the responsibility of the state. These are not questions unique to the Kurdish case — but the Kurdish case makes them impossible to ignore. Language education is never neutral. Here, that truth is written into every lesson that exists because a group of people refused to accept that their language had no place in schools — and built that place themselves, against a policy landscape that had not foreseen them.

Yet recognizing this agency is not the same as celebrating it uncritically. The Kurdish case also shows what it costs when agency has to substitute for structure. When a single teacher produces their own materials, recruits students, negotiates with school administrators, and runs a classroom without professional support or formally recognized qualifications — that is agency, yes. It is also a burden that comparable programs do not place on individuals. Resistance Habitus names both the force of that agency and its price. Policy makers and educational administrators who take it seriously should be asking not only how to acknowledge what Kurdish actors have built, but how to dismantle the conditions that made such extraordinary effort necessary in the first place.

Older adults learning English in Berlin

Hanna Torsh — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:45:03 +0000

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast Dr Hanna Torsh talks to Katharina Gensch (University of Hamburg) about her new paper “English language education for older adults in a multilingual urban environment,” which has just been published in Educational Gerontology.

Abstract. This paper explores how older adults in the German capital of Berlin react to the perceived increase of English as a commonly used language in their urban environment. Drawing from an interview study with participants of English classes for older adults, the article identifies different attitudes expressed in reaction to linguistic changes in their environment. These attitudes include embracing the concept of an international city and linguistic diversity, framing anglicization as an integral – yet not necessarily well-liked – part of certain neighborhoods, and rejecting it as a discriminatory, ageist practice. Furthermore, the interviewees were found to employ English learning and use as a versatile strategy to participate more fully in their environment’s communicative practices. Due to global dynamics, older adults living in multilingual cities can be expected to become an ever more relevant population group. Research on the language practices of older adults in multilingual environments often focuses on the perspective of migrants’ language acquisition and practices. The article argues that, against the background of globalization, educational gerontology will need to focus more on foreign language acquisition – including research on older migrants, but also on older adults who do live in countries where their first language is the official one, but nevertheless make use of an additional language in order to fully participate in their daily surroundings’ communicative practices.

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

References

Gensch, K. (2025). English language education for older adults in a multilingual urban environment. Educational Gerontology, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/03601277.2025.2569380
Zemba, S., & Mehrotra, M. (2023). “What’s your accent, where are you from?”: Language and belonging among older immigrants. Journal of Aging Studies, 67, 101189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2023.101189

Transcript

English can feel ubiquitous in Berlin (Image credit: Katharina Gensch)

Hanna Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Katharina Gensch. Katharina is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Vocational Education and Lifelong Learning in the Faculty of Education at Hamburg University in Germany, under the supervision of Associate Professor Claudia Kulmus.

Katharina’s research focus is on the language learning experiences of older adults, and the connections between learning English and the practices of aging.

Katharina has also worked as an English language teacher in Germany for 5 years, and has recently published an article in the Journal of Educational Gerontology, entitled, English Language Education for Older Adults in a Multilingual Urban Environment. Katharina, welcome to the show.

Katharina: Hey, Hanna, thank you so much for having me.

Hanna: I’m really excited about talking to you about this article. It’s a fantastic piece of work. So, let’s start by you telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got interested in the language learning experiences of older adults in Berlin.

Katharina: So, I have to go back to being a master’s student of American Studies at Leipzig University. That was when I decided to get my CELTA, that is the Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults. And shortly afterwards, I took over the English classes for older adults at a community center in Leipzig that a friend of mine had been teaching beforehand.

And yeah, that’s when I realized that I really enjoyed working with older adults, and at the same time still following my passion for language and also working with students who really appreciated these weekly classes and told me how much these classes meant to them. So, when I moved to Berlin after graduation, I looked into course providers here, and I took up Teaching English to Older Adults again as my first job after university here in Berlin.

And whenever I told anyone about my job, they would ask me, well, why would older people still bother to learn English? And can they even still learn a foreign language at their age? And who are these people taking your classes in the first place? And, well, I mean, I did have some ideas about this, but I really wanted to dive deeper into the topic, and I also had been thinking about doing a PhD. And so, some years after having moved on to another job, I decided to come back to the topic and to academia.

So yeah, now I’m a PhD student at the Faculty of Education in Hamburg, and as you said in my dissertation, I explored the reasons why older adults in Berlin take English classes, and how they make sense of the language learning specifically as older adults.

Hanna: Wonderful. I mean, I think it’s so interesting that you talked about getting that response from people. Can they even learn? I mean, I have to say, I had the same sort of, response when I was first fortunate enough to hear you and Claudia talk about this in Hamburg when I visited earlier this year, because it hadn’t really occurred to me that, of course, old adults are still learning, and of course, older adults are interested in learning new things, but we do have these sort of stereotypes as a society that, you know, this is not a group that can, yeah, that can still learn, and, or that are kind of the focus of educational research, educational theories, things like that.

So, I haven’t read very much apart from your work about older learners in the literature. So, let’s start, perhaps, by defining that term. I know when we first talked about this, I said, oh no, Katharina, is this me? Am I old? So, tell me, what do we mean by older? And then maybe you can tell me a little bit about why this is such a sort of missing aspect of the research, and what are the key issues when we’re thinking about older learners and, and learning languages?

English can feel ubiquitous in Berlin (Image credit: Katharina Gensch)

Katharina: So, generally, when we talk about how to define older, it really depends on whom you ask. Like, even if we just think about drawing a chronological line, we’ll get different answers depending on who you’re asking. This range will range from 35 years old when it comes to pregnancies, to 50 or 55 in labor market analysis to sometime in the 60s, which is the common legal retirement age in most countries, and really anything in between and beyond is a possible answer to what goes as older. And at the same time, aging is something that’s experienced so differently by everybody at different stages in their life. So, I would say it’s debatable in how far defining age by a number can be helpful in the first place. And so, I personally, from my research, have decided to go by whether the learners describe themselves as old or not. So, more concretely, I have focused on English classes and course providers that directly address older adults. So that, for example, means a class that is entitled English for Seniors, or English for Older Learners. So, I am assuming that anybody who attends these classes would identify as old, whatever that means to them personally.

And this is something also which I find interesting, this is something that providers themselves have been struggling with recently. How do you justify that you entitle a course as something specifically for seniors, something specifically for older people? As in, how far is that, or can that be perceived as stigmatizing also? Like, claiming that older adults need or get their own class? Why is that?

So, with public adult education centers, here in Germany, that’s mainly the Volkshochschulen, there has been a tendency to not use this type of address at all anymore. And this, again, of course, has influenced my sampling for my thesis, which does not include learners from the Volkshochschulen, but only from private class providers and also community centers.

Hanna: Right, interesting. So, the different institutions are actually marketing their courses. differently, in terms of whether they explicitly say they’re for seniors or not. Oh, that is super interesting. I have a gym that’s just opened up down the road from me that’s for 50 plus, and I suddenly realized in a few short years, I am eligible for it, and it says seniors! So, I think I can kind of see both sides. I can see why, they might not want to do that, as you say, because of stigmatisation, but I also see the value because, of course, it’s going to be very different a very different cohort, if people identify as seniors in terms of what they want out of the classes, potentially, although I guess that’s what that’s maybe what you can tell us about. So, what did you find? What did you find in those classes that you did examine that were marketed towards seniors, so that the participants identified themselves as older learners. What were your key findings about those learners?

Katharina: Well, especially regarding the direct address, that is something that I asked the people that I interviewed, and they really appreciated that direct address, because they were like, well, you know, that is, exactly what I’m looking for. I am, you know, I am starting learning English again after so-and-so many years of not taking English classes, and if a class is marketed directly for seniors, I expect that this will be the same, or at least a similar situation for the other students in the class as well, so I will not feel left out or left behind in my learning process. They just assume that people in their age group roughly will start from a similar point as they themselves, let’s say.

Hanna: So in a sense, it maybe, like, mediates against that stigmatization, because then they’re not potentially or they might feel like they’re not the only person in that room who is potentially not looking for English for work, or not looking for English for, you know, mobility, but actually looking at it for different reasons associated with being in that older age bracket. So, yeah, super interesting. And what did you find about the other sort of motivations that the participants had for doing English at that time in their life, which they identified as being kind of their senior years.

Katharina: Well, it’s a super wide range of topics. It ranges from things we might think of first, like, still going on vacation, and still going traveling, and finding English a useful language to have, to do this more independently. It is also about cultural reasons in the broadest sense, things like really enjoying English music, or English books, being a literature lover and wanting to read certain things in the original language.

But, one really important aspect is, for many of the people I talked to, was really that English has become so ubiquitous within the past years, especially compared to the time when they were, you know, students, adolescents, younger adults, and they feel like English really is a means to participate in the communication that is happening all around them all the time, and that makes them feel like they can still be a part of their urban environment where English has become so all over the place, really, especially in Berlin.

Hanna: So, tell me a bit about that. I’ve, I’ve not spent much time in Berlin, I’ve been a tourist there, and I’ve always loved it, but I, from reading your paper, I get the sense that there’s been this big change in terms of the presence of English in that environment.

Katharina: Yeah, so we really have to imagine that, as a person living in Berlin, and also as an older person living in Berlin, you encounter English in all aspects of your daily life, that maybe spoken interaction with non-German speakers, such as, you know, tourists asking for direction, but also staff at a restaurant or a store that will only speak English, to English as part of the linguistic landscape. So, when you look around and you look at all types of signs of ads, be it, you know, on storefronts or in public transport, all there will be English, like, so much of it will be in English.

Hanna: And that’s something that’s really changed for this group of participants over their lifetime?

Katharina: It would I mean, I just talked about not, doing a, you know, numerical age, but, just to give you a rough idea about the people I talk to, so the people I interviewed at the time of the interview were some were around the youngest one was 55, and the oldest one was 87 at the time I was talking to them. So yeah, obviously things used to be different, only several decades ago, even, and then with the specifics of German history, of course, and in Berlin, those people who grew up in the eastern part of Germany, or the eastern part of Berlin, the GDR, they would have not learned English back in school, but rather have learned Russian. So, this is an entire, like, a considerable part of older adults living in Berlin now that have not been in touch with English to the same degree as, we have.

Hanna: Yeah, that’s so interesting. Yeah, and, so for those learners, their exposure to English would have come about, not necessarily in school, but later on in life, and then through this growing, increase of English in the environment. Yeah, oh, that’s so fascinating. Actually, I have a colleague who studied German, and I remember him saying he went to a cafe in Berlin, and they said, no, no, English only, and he threw up his hands and said, why did I bother? There is this, sort of sense that maybe in some parts of Berlin, you don’t you can’t even use German. It has to be English.

Senior citizen learning English in Berlin (Image credit: © Ebba Dangschat, via VHS Berlin)

Katharina: Yeah, absolutely, and I mean, I think I didn’t even realize it, that it does work to this extent until I talked to, the people I interviewed for my thesis, that just how, how much it is. I mean, you can hear and see it in so many places, and people will just address you very casually in English without even stopping to ask if this is a language that is available to you.

And I mean, this can of course be challenging for people of all ages, even if we consider English proficiency to be higher in younger cohorts, that doesn’t mean that everybody is comfortable in English. But especially to older adults, this can be a, like, a daily and current source of irritation, which they then have to deal with, and I can only imagine what, you know, that all these little daily irritations that you’re meeting, what that sums up to, and what that means for feeling like you belong or don’t belong into that urban space of your home city anymore.

Hanna: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really pertinent, sort of finding about how you have these students that are, they’re learning English, but they also sort of articulate this resistance to the imposition of English in a space which they felt should be, in some way, you know, welcoming and inclusive to them as, you know, long-time nationals and residents. We had a similar sort of debate happen here in Australia around linguistic landscape with signage, and there was a suburb quite near where I live, actually, where a lot of the signage was multilingual. And the local government, tried to put up, some laws about the signage being required to have a certain amount in English, because there was this sort of, there were these voices in the community saying, we feel excluded by these multilingual signs, and that sort of imposition of other languages into a space that they felt needed to be, you know, familiar to them as those they as insiders. So, it’s so interesting to me that you had participants who felt like that but were still learning English, so they were still, you know, they were still doing the work of learning the language, but they still were able to kind of articulate this resistance to it.

Katharina: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s people react super differently to, the use of English around them. You have those who are really embracing it, and to whom this use of English is a sign of a diverse and multicultural city, and they really enjoy being part of this. You also have those who they just acknowledge the fact that English has, you know, the use of English has increased, but they’re really, for them, no strong feelings involved at all. That’s to them just how things develop, how language use develops. And then, as you said, you have those who really reject that, and who also I’ve also people tell me that they experience it as a discriminatory and ageist practice that knowingly excludes older people, who do not know English very well from, public communication, really.

And yeah, as you said, I find it, I still find it so inspiring that, you know, regardless of your attitude of their attitude towards that use of English, every one of the people I talked to still chose to learn English in order to overcome these irritations, to find, you know, find their way, around, navigate this now-so-English urban environment of theirs.

Hanna: Yeah, it’s a really, I think it’s a really nice example of all of these different kinds of motivation for language learning that are often not black and white. You know, you can feel ambivalent while still being invested as a language learner. So, yeah, I think that’s it’s a really nice illustration of that.

I wanted to, to switch now to this question of English, because, of course, we’re not talking about any language, right? We’re talking about this, you know, this language that is, in lots of ways, a kind of an international language in many multilingual cities around the world that, you know, is not necessarily the language of any specific minority, but is in fact a lingua franca. So, you know, what can your study tell us about how, you know, language learning languages like English, or learning a language like English as a lingua franca is maybe becoming part of growing older for urban in urban environments, in not just in Berlin, but potentially also in spaces like, you know, around the world, like Berlin, where English is, you know, is so ubiquitous, as you say.

Katharina: Yeah, I really think it showcases how dominant a language English is. And, I mean, I was thinking about, because especially in Berlin, we have there’s many other languages that are very commonly spoken, and that you can also see and hear in the public space. I mean, Turkish, Arabic, and Russian, also Ukrainian, are the very big ones, but there’s still a lot of other languages that you will encounter on a daily basis. But they definitely do not have the same status attached to them as English does, so English is always connected to this, this idea of multiculturalism of, of cosmopolitanism.

Also, here, especially here in Berlin, you have this really artsy, vibe attached to English. The international artist scene, where most people speak English with each other all the time. And what’s interesting is that you know, when you think about it, it’s really striking how it seems to be perfectly acceptable for staff, to only speak English and not know German, while with languages spoken by more marginalized groups, even if they are spoken by large parts of the population, this would be considered a lack of integration or assimilation, whereas with English, nobody even seems to think into that direction.

I think I just verged away a little bit from your original question but I think on a more, meta level, what my study also tells us is, yes, English is becoming this lingua franca, and older people choose to learn English, to, you know, participate in communicational practices around them more completely, but on the one level above that, it’s also really telling about how do we even not think about English as a foreign language anymore? Whereas with other languages spoken, there’s still this stigma attached to it if they are spoken instead of German, whereas with English, that it’s just a completely different logic that seems to be at work there.

Hanna: that’s beautifully expressed. Yeah, I think that’s really exactly the issue, that it is, as a kind of learning object, it’s seen quite differently. It’s not about accessing a speech community as such, but it’s about accessing all of these other things that you’ve talked about cosmopolitanism, prestige. And it’s certainly there is research that shows that in other contexts, English is that, too. You know, English is, is wealth, English is status, so it’s much less about learning a language, as you said, that is spoken by a specific minority. It’s not about accessing people so much, it’s almost about adding to your human capital, in a, in a different way.

So yeah, I think that’s really relevant. One of the things that we say often in Language on the move is that it’s never about the language, it’s always about the speakers, right? And so, I think it’s a really good example of that, with this, that it’s not English, it’s actually about what being an English speaker means, what it counts for in interactions and in communication.

Alright, well, I mean, we could, we, yeah, I mean, we could talk about that, and I think there’s some really interesting research by my colleague Alex Gray about that in China as well, about the way that English is often valued ahead of learning other languages in the Chinese, nation-state. Because of its high value, and that’s certainly the case in lots of global contexts that we see, too.

Katharina: Maybe I can, add on to that, because what you just said is that English is about more than just learning a language, it’s also about, you know, all these other things that, become accessible, or you think become accessible when you learn it. With a slightly different, take on that, that’s also probably one of my one of the key findings that I learned from my research so far is that these older adults learning English, it’s about so much more than just them learning a foreign language, but it’s about them, as they grow older, still being able to navigate their environment independently. So, be that at home in Berlin, or on vacation. It’s about them not depending on the English skills of others, like, you know, their children or grandkids who have grown up with English.

So it is, after all, not only about learning a language, but it’s also about them shaping the current stage of their life, about shaping their age stage in a way that feels satisfying to them. That, to me also really shows how just in general, and with the bigger picture, thinking about and improving access to language learning for all adults is really something we need to consider when we think about how does a society where everybody can age well look like? So, we have to include that perspective in it, especially in multilingual spaces like, you know, Berlin, Sydney, whichever that might be.

Hanna: Yeah, yeah, oh, that’s really great. So, it’s about, also, for them, creating or retaining their agency. I really like that. That’s really interesting. It would be great to explore that in the Sydney context, too. I don’t think we know very much about that yet. So, that would be really interesting.

Okay, so, it’s such a great study, and I know that for our audience, it’s always interesting to hear about how studies are done, so maybe you could tell us a little bit about your methods. So how did you actually undertake this research, and do you have any tips for other graduate researchers about doing this sort of research from your own experience?

Katharina: Yes, absolutely. So generally, I decided to do interviews, qualitative interviews, quite early on, because especially having been a teacher myself, and having had the experience that these people have stories to tell, that not are that are not very often listened to by researchers. I really figured that qualitative interviews really leave the room and space for them to tell their own story that would be that would be my focus.

So, I reached out to several providers in Berlin who offer English classes for seniors. I have to say that among them were two providers that I used to teach classes at a couple years ago, which obviously, made access to them so much easier, because they immediately invited me to come into the classes, to stay during class, and then present my topic, and ask if somebody would be willing to do an interview with me. That was extremely helpful.

And yeah, so I did, problem-centered interviews, I did 23 of them all together. And as I said, I only included classes that explicitly address older adults in their course titles. And I predefined a set of questions to cover, so their reasons for taking English classes, for choosing the specific course that they were currently attending their impressions of their English class, their previous, current, and anticipated encounters with the English language, and then, quite broadly, interpretation of their current life phase.

And, because you asked me what would be my advice for fellow graduate students, what I found really, really helpful, and I would really encourage research to do, is to always leave enough room to create a interview space that encourages the respondents to really go into detail, to bring up alternative perspectives, to spontaneously share stories that they might not have thought of as related to language learning in the first place.

But yeah, I feel like this really has allowed me to get more of a complete picture of their experience. So, for example, there’s been this this one student who we were talking about her English learning experience, and if, you know, things might be different learning a language now that she’s older, then it might, you know, than her learning English back as a teenager was and this all of a sudden brought up her story of her grandmother learning English by herself at home with a book, and how, she only then remembered she’s like, oh my god, I never thought about this before, but we all made fun of her for trying to learn English.

And that led into her reflecting onto what is it that we as a society have as a view of all the people learning English, and what does it do to, now that I myself am a real person learning English? So it opened up this whole room for self-reflection, related to age and language learning that I was so happy that we had room in the space, and also the time, to have that and not, you know, stick to a predefined set of questions, and once that is answered, yes or no, you move on to the next question.

Hanna: Oh, that’s a wonderful story, yeah. Yeah, I have to say, as I get older, I’m having those moments more and more, where I’m realizing exactly that. It’s like, wait a minute, this person in my life was my age when this was happening, and this is how I saw them. So, what a wonderful realization, and to have that as part of your data. That’s fantastic. Yeah, thank you. I think that’s a really good, tip.

Certainly, I would endorse that also, and often you get even the best data when you’ve, pressed stop and the recording is over. It’s a bit like when the patient puts their hand on the door of the doctor’s surgery, is often when the doctor gets the most important information. So, I always encourage researchers to write down everything that was said that they thought was important after the recording device goes off, because often that’s when people do relax and start to really give you those fantastic stories like that one.

Katharina: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I actually that is the very first postscript that I did, all contained that note to myself, leave recording device on until the very end.

Hanna: Yes, that’s also very important, yes.

Katharina: Yes, because that is, as you said, like, you know, you the interview might be over, and then while you’re already saying goodbye, and you’re already in the hallway, then they’re like, oh, you know what I just thought about. And yeah, I wish very often that I had still that on record.

Hanna: I mean, we, you know, we can take notes, that is also valuable. And I recently heard a presenter give a talk on data where the participants wouldn’t be recorded. They were very against it, but they were quite happy for him to take notes, so his entire project was actually just based on notetaking, so we can do that too. But yeah, yeah, absolutely. Oh, look, it’s just been so wonderful talking to you about this. I have one last question for you. So, now that you’ve published this article, which I understand is part of the PhD, so what’s next, in your research, and what’s next for you, perhaps, in other projects that you’re involved in?

Katharina: So, actually, it is, next up is zooming out of the article again, and connecting all the dots to write my thesis, because, while the you’re right that the article is part of my thesis, and that is it’s data for my thesis, this is, the article itself is not part of the, of the PhD, so I’m actually writing a monograph, and so after having zoomed in on the article, I have to zoom out again and trying to connect the dots of the bigger picture. Other than that, since June, I’ve also been part of a research project called Under Pressure, Literacy and Discrimination at the University of Hamburg, where I get to research older female migrants’ multilingual literacy practices in Hamburg. So, I am really excited to look at multilingualism and older adults from yet another perspective for that.

Hanna: Oh, that sounds really cool, I can’t wait to see what comes out of that project. Katharina, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you about your fantastic research. Thank you so much for joining us, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Thanks everyone also for listening. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Thanks, Katharina.

Katharina: Thank you so much, Hanna.

Hanna: It was lovely to have you. Thanks everyone, and until next time.

Teaching English Pronunciation

Hanna Torsh — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:21:30 +0000

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh talks to Lindsay McMahon, founder of the All Ears English Podcast, about pronunciation teaching for global English.

What does it mean to speak well? And what does it mean to teach others to speak English well? What does good English sound like for you?

These are questions which teachers of English, as a first, second or foreign language and everything in-between, need to grapple with.

In the interview, I talk to Lindsay about her approach to English language teaching, connection not perfection, and how this translates to a focus on pronunciation which is suited for the needs of her students. This means using authentic interactions as much as possible, and working to change minds about the value of ‘native’ accents if most of your interactions are actually using English in global contexts with other multilingual speakers rather than in inner-circle countries with first language speakers. Finally, we touch briefly on what the surge in speech technologies means for teaching and learning pronunciation.

Suggestions for further reading

Burns, A., & Seidlhofer, B. (2020). Speaking and pronunciation. In M. P. H. Rodgers & N. Schmitt (Eds.), An Introduction to Applied Linguistics (3rd ed., pp. 240–258). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429424465-14
Canagarajah, A. S. (2012). Teacher Development in a Global Profession: An Autoethnography. TESOL Quarterly, 46(2), 258–279. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.18
Jenkins, J. (2000). The Phonology of English as an International Language. Oxford University Press.
Jenkins, J. (2002). A Sociolinguistically Based, Empirically Researched Pronunciation Syllabus for English as an International Language. Applied Linguistics, 23(1), 83-103.
Jenkins, J. (2004). Research in teaching pronunciation and intonation. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 24, 109-125.
Jenkins, J. (2015). World Englishes : a resource book for students (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Low, E.-L. (2015). Current issues in EIL pronunciation teaching. In Pronunciation for English As an International Language (1st ed., pp. 128–149). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315814131-10
Marlina, R. (2025). Evaluating the International and Intercultural Orientation of an ELT Textbook in Cambodia through the Lens of Global Englishes Language Teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 59(1), 344–358. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3330
Rose, H., & Galloway, N. (2019). Global Englishes for language teaching. Cambridge University Press.
Yates, L., & Zielinski, B. (2009). Give it a go: Teaching pronunciation to adults. Adult Migrant English Program AMEP Research Centre, Macquarie University.

Transcript (added April 14, 2026)

Hanna: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hannah Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in Applied and Sociolinguistics at Macquarie University. My guest today is Lindsay McMahon. Lindsay is the founder of the All Ears English podcast and app, and we’re going to talk about teaching pronunciation.

Lindsay, according to her fantastic website, has been an English instructor for over 15 years, and her podcast is in the top 20 ranked podcasts in Korea, Japan, Brazil, and China. Welcome to the show, Lindsay!

Lindsay: Thank you, Hanna. I’m really glad to be here.

Hanna: Oh, we’re thrilled to have you. So, can you start off by telling us a bit about yourself and how you started this, highly successful English language learning podcast, All Ears English?

Lindsay: Yes, I’d be happy to. So I started my career after college, traveling the world and teaching English to adults as a second language. So I lived in Japan, taught there, saw that angle of teaching, lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, taught there, as well as Guatemala, and then New York City, where I was able to teach students from all over the world.

And I saw some of the gaps out there in the language training world, especially for adult learners, but I knew that I loved interacting with my students, learning from them about the world. I could always learn more from them than they could for me, I think, from my perspective. And at the same time, so this is about 2012, 2010 to 2012, podcasting was just coming up, it was just becoming popular. There were a few shows out there, but not too, too many, and I thought, oh my gosh, what if we could teach English through a podcast? It sounds like a very simple concept now, but at the time, it was somewhat new. And so I knew another teacher who was also living in Boston at the time. I called her, and I said, hey, do you want to start a show together? She said, yeah, let’s do it. It was as simple as plugging in the mic, Hannah. I mean, that’s what I love about podcasting, it is very approachable for any teacher, any educator, they can literally plug in the microphone and go for it.

Hanna: Yeah, absolutely. That’s lovely. It’s a lovely origin story. And, and obviously it worked, because you’re still going. It’s been 12 years now, so, that’s fantastic. Well, look, we could talk for a whole episode about the process of putting that together, but today I really would like to focus in on pronunciation teaching. Now, I don’t know if this, but I teach a unit at Macquarie University on pronunciation teaching, and it’s one of the areas of language teaching that has been kind of, kind of been tricky. So, it’s called sometimes the Cinderella of language teaching. Yeah. So I’m really keen to know, how, with your approach to language teaching, how do you approach this aspect of language, pronunciation?

Lindsay: Yeah, this is a really important thing to talk about, because it is one of the things that really plagues our students, our listeners the most, but it’s one of the things that is not taught as much in traditional TESOL programs. When I got started in ESL, I took a 30-day program at the School for International Training, which is fantastic, by the way, in Brattleboro, Vermont, and there wasn’t a ton of pronunciation taught, or how to teach pronunciation wasn’t taught to us as much. However, so our main philosophy, broadly speaking, around teaching pronunciation comes back to our overall philosophy of our podcast and our company, which is connection, not perfection.

It’s not just a trademark for us, it’s really a it’s a vision, it’s it touches our hearts. This is comes back to my origin story as a language learner, having traveled the world and learned Spanish one moment on a beach in South America, sitting there feeling quite isolated, frankly, feeling like I had some of the language, but I was too self-conscious to really connect. And that’s where, as we got through episode 50 of the show, we thought, okay, let’s use a different approach here. Well, the reason we’re learning languages is not to learn a language. It’s actually for human connection. And we know that, yes, it’s true, but if we can remember that, if our students can remember that on a day-to-day basis, it will be transformational.

So, our goal is to actually take human connection as the ultimate goal into pronunciation. And so we can talk a little bit today about how we do that, and we’ve just launched a new pronunciation course, so we’ve had a chance to figure that out a little bit in the last few months. Yeah.

Hanna: Oh, great, yeah. Oh, I love that, yeah, I mean, I there’s so many important ideas wrapped up in that idea of connection, not perfection, and this is where, as an applied linguist, I always think, something one of my professors said to me in my training it’s never about language. It’s always about people. That’s you can’t separate them. And so, yeah, I really love that slogan.

Lindsay: It’s so true, and especially, Hanna, with adult learners, because I think what I’ve found, at least for excuse me, millennials, Gen Xers, they’ve gone through a life of kind of trauma in the classroom, in a sense, of the methods that have been used, and it’s been ingrained in them. They have a narrative about how they are as an English speaker, and frankly, it’s usually not a very positive one. And so that kind of breaks my heart, and so our goal is to change that narrative and put something truly more important. I mean, I don’t think that you can be self-conscious and be seeking connection at the same time. The human brain can’t do it. And so that’s the idea.

Hanna: Oh, that’s wonderful, yeah. Yeah, I talk about this in my own

book, actually, that my PhD research is based on about, language learning in Australian language classrooms. So, I don’t know if you’re interested, but just a little side note. So, in Australia, we haven’t had a great history of foreign language learning, and part of it has been teaching learners to kind of feel like they’re bad language learners. And, I mean, you could apply that globally to other methods of teaching English as well. That’s right. So, you kind of have this learner, who has all of this sense of negativity around their own abilities, yeah, yeah, perfect. And it’s so linked to pronunciation, isn’t it? Because pronunciation is one of those, sort of, aspects of language performance that is very much connected to our, sort of, social being. It’s not something you can do independently, on your own, in front of a book. , it has to come in that moment. So maybe, let’s talk a bit about your pronunciation course and your approach to teaching pronunciation.

Lindsay: Yeah, exactly. I’d love to. So, when we started to design this course back in September, I worked with a curriculum developer who was fantastic, and we sat down and we thought, what will be the angle that will make sense with the connection mentality? We kind of had two choices, and I see pronunciation courses going in one of two ways. Some focus on specific accents. Teaching the American accent, teaching the British accent, teaching the regional accent, speak like an American, quote-unquote. It’s out there, we realized that was an option for us, but then we thought there would be a better way to do that, and the goal of this course and our overall philosophy on pronunciation is clear speech.

It’s very simple. It’s clear speech for global English, because I’m not sure that the American accent or the British accent is the future of global business. Many of our listeners are, in fact, learning for their career. Or they’re kind of straddling between learning for, like, life fulfillment, in a sense, travel, feeling good about achieving their goals, and future career opportunities. And so we decided to focus on not showing you how to speak like an American, or speak with an American accent, how to speak clearly, and how to reduce your effort in speaking. When we know how to speak clearly, we reduce our effort. So what that comes down to, on a principle level is understanding that English is a stress-timed language. First of all, not a syllable-time language, like so many other languages. And this is where we get into the weeds. I’m not an expert in pronunciation myself, it’s why the team developed the course, but it really is about studying the heartbeat of English, right, broadly speaking and understanding that first, and before we start to kind of mimic and start to sound American. I don’t I don’t love the connotation of that.

Hanna: That is super interesting, and as you say, that’s certainly out there in the in the in the language teaching landscape, the idea of, like, learning a particular accent. And so you decided instead to focus on this idea of clear speech, and when you talk about clear speech, so you were interested in, like, the you’re interested in the rhythm of English, that it’s stress-timed.

And so how does your, how does that fit in with the idea of, connection, I guess? So how do those because one of the things, I think, that is very common, or is a bit of a theme in the pronunciation literature, is the idea of intelligibility rather than native accents. So maybe you could tell me a little bit more about that.

Lindsay: Yeah, that’s very similar. So I see intelligibility as a very similar thing to clear speech, right? Can you be understood? Can you reduce the effort with which others have to put in to understand you, and vice versa, the amount of effort you are spending, on trying to pronounce correctly? Therefore, you’re connecting, right, so in those moments, we still believe you can make pronunciation quote-unquote mistakes and still find connection.

So the way that kind of breaks down in our course, all of the courses and all the material that we have are pretty natural, so we always bring in interviews with native speakers into the course, and they’re natural. They’re not rehearsed, they’re not prepared, they’re not scripted in any way. This is for all of our courses. We tend to target the B2C1 level in our courses, so they, our students are ready for that. So it’s a lot of shadowing with these very real, natural conversations. So it’s taking the raw English and looking at how does it actually look, but stepping back without this pressure to repeat and sound like this accent. Instead, starting by observing how this accent might be different, how this rhythm might be different from the way maybe we speak in our native languages. To compare that, first of all. Yeah.

Hanna: If that’s the if the aim is then to think about rhythm, and this is certainly something that’s come up a lot in the in the literature about, different targets, so rather than looking at native accents as targets, looking at things like, international English, or global English, or even English as a lingua franca the work of Jennifer Jenkins. All of those models often talk about rhythm as sort of more important than, say, and this is something I talk about with my students a lot, and there are different ideas about it, but more important than, say, getting the TH sound right. Actually, the rhythm of speech, gives listeners a lot more clues as to meaning than just getting those individual segments right.

Lindsay: 100%. And I think listening is really tied in with pronunciation, right? We can’t really extract them from each other. So essentially, I was just talking to one of our students last week, and he works for a consulting company in the Middle East, and he’s still kind of in the mentality of, I want to practice with a native speaker, and I was trying to understand I know that I understand that mentality, I know it’s been around for a long time, but I was challenging him a little bit. And I was asking him, who do you actually work with on a daily basis? Who are these people that you’re having to present to where the stakes are really high for you? And I understand the stakes are high, right? And he said it’s 99% people from the Middle East speaking in English. And I said, oh, okay then, so this makes sense that we might want to expand our idea of who we want to be practicing with, and practicing for, and what our goal is, and that’s where the connection piece comes in. Ultimately, you’re going for the connection.

Hanna: So, in that sense, one of the things that for example, English teachers, or student English teachers, or those who want to improve their professional skills in English language teaching, can think about then is who are their students actually talking to? We know this as well from the literature, that in terms of language users, English has many, many more people using it as a second language. So you and I are kind of unrepresentative here, Lindsay because we are speaking our first language together, but actually, most interactions happen between speakers of second languages, and so they are, in fact, the target audience, if you like, the target listeners.

Lindsay: Exactly, so that really changes everything in the approach, and what now becomes more important, especially with the, I guess, post-COVID world, the Zoom world. Many of our students are just on Zoom conference calls all day with someone from Australia, someone from the UK, someone from Japan, someone from Brazil, right? And so we’re having all these different accents, and again, and that’s where the goal becomes clear speech. So, I think this approach is really set up for the future, a little bit more so than the old what I would call the old model, in my opinion.

Hanna: And I mean, that’s something I think that, really links in with this sort of digital shift in language teaching too, right? That actually, if our communication is, like we’re doing right now, is over a screen, we do have to be clearer, because we’re not in person, we can’t use all of those – it’s embodied, because we can see each other, but it’s very different to being in person. And that just means we have to be a little bit more tolerant of, maybe, disfluencies, a little bit more, accommodating in terms of our listener, and accommodating their needs. So, yeah. I mean, that’s something Jennifer Jenkins talks about a lot, too, in the lingua franca model, is accommodation. So it’s not just the speaker and their pronunciation, but of course also how much they’re willing to accommodate the other person’s language and differences from what they might expect.

Lindsay: Yeah, absolutely, 100%. There’s a lot to think about here. And as we’re building courses with the listening piece, one student told me last week that she struggles a lot when she’s on Zoom calls, and the person turns off their camera, just as you’re describing, and that becomes 10 times harder from a listening perspective. So as we build our courses, as we build our curriculum, really thinking about how can we create specific scenarios for students so we can get deliberate practice in those exact scenarios. That’s what we’ll be looking at for next year.

Hanna: This is also something, I don’t know how you whether you do this sort of purposefully in your course, but something I’m trying to do in my unit, and is certainly being advocated by other researchers in this space developing curricula for global English, is introducing just a diversity of speakers into your curriculum, so that instead of just hearing these, kind of, often highly scripted, I mean, I think that’s part of it too, the scripting, but highly scripted first language speakers, interacting with no problems as though speaking and listening are completely problem-free activities. You actually have a diversity of accents and a kind of diversity of situations, some of which, as you say, are not scripted.

Lindsay: Absolutely, and background noise, actually creating that authentic environment, or not creating it, filming in it, right? Going out there and finding people to interview and collaborate with in those natural environments. We built a course back in 2016, which is becoming a little dated at this point, but we enjoyed building it, drove around the U.S. and interviewed all different people with all different American accents, but also international accents at festivals, fairs, restaurants, really just out in the world. And a lot of students, when they get in the course, they get a little intimidated because it’s a really challenging course, but if you stick with it, that brings up the question of how do we teach that durability of commitment, right? How do we make sure we keep coming back to something that feels hard the first time, but if we stick with it. Within 6 months or a year, we can get there.

Hanna: Oh, that’s wonderful! I will have to check that out, because I have to say, I am fairly unfamiliar with the range of accents in the US, and there is a huge range, and it’s 400 years, plus, of course, the First Peoples of occupation, so a long time to develop language change. Yeah, I would love to do that. Yeah, I mean, that’s certainly something we hear from our students here, too, because the Australian accent is not widely represented, so a lot of migrants to Australia get a real shock when they come, and they’ve been studying English for a long time. And again it comes back to that sense of, actually, we need to prepare learners for a diversity of accents so that they don’t have that real negative response straight away to something that sounds I’ve had some fantastic comments over the years that sounds outlandish. That was my favorite one.

Lindsay: That’s really nice.

Hanna: Australian accent, yes, yes, just, I mean, if you’re only used to hearing, let’s say, a standard British, English, Australian on the street, sounds very different to that, and as you say, it can be quite difficult and traumatising. We talked a little bit before about the challenge of learning English, in a kind of negative way, and the trauma of that. And how do you how do you support learners to get through that?

Lindsay: And it’s an important point that you brought up, Hanna, this idea of the wall goes up. I’m sure a lot of research has been done on this, the first listening shock concept, right? When we hear that line that we feel like we can’t understand, then all of a sudden, that wall goes up in our head, and we think we can’t understand anything moving forward. And how do we teach our students to bring that down? I mean, again, like I said, for us, it comes back to what are we focusing on? It’s the eye contact, it’s the, can I get a laugh out of this person? Can I share a joke? Can I share a story? Share a human moment? But how can we further bring that wall down so that doesn’t happen as quickly or as easily?

Hanna: I think that’s so, it’s kind of connected to that idea in language teaching of the effective filter that emotionally, you feel very yeah, absolutely, and, so my second language is German, and I find, I learn standard German, as we do, and I find I, struggle so much with so-called dialect, and I have to really notice my own discomfort with it, and kind of sit with it a bit, and, and persevere. Yeah, so, and that kind of leads me, I guess, back to the idea that with pronunciation, I think we also need to remember it’s not just about the speaker. So sometimes, no matter how clearly you speak, or how much you’re trying, the context is such that you’re not going to be invited in, or someone’s not going to accommodate you, and that is that is that is on them, not on you. So, how do you deal with that issue with your learners? That’s certainly something that comes up with my teaching.

Lindsay: Yeah, I think it’s teaching vocabulary skills or communication skills to ask good questions, making sure that we understand the context we’re in, how we can add value in any given situation, asking the right questions of how to get yourself back into that conversation. 100% it’s a normal, natural thing, where it’s not always possible to plug in in every situation, and also just the fact of knowing that that’s going to happen, right? We could have great, clear speech, ready for the global business world, but there could be a day where it doesn’t work out, and we have to be okay with that.

Hanna: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think, potentially also in professional situations, there is much more awareness, as we talked about before, that there’s so many second language speakers in that space. What we find in the migration space is it’s often kind of interpersonal situations where for whatever reason, people are not very tolerant, or they’re not really willing to accommodate. And no matter how much people try, in fact it’s a two-way street, and so sometimes you have to acknowledge it’s not anything to do with your own pronunciation as a second language user, it’s actually someone else’s unwillingness to understand, because their walls are up for whatever reason, yeah.

Lindsay: Sure. Yeah, and so it’s an I mean, I think any challenge in life, especially interpersonal challenges, are a chance to build confidence, and go inward a bit, and kind of work on our own, I guess, mindfulness, in a sense, or just approach to conflict. And so it’s an invitation, I think going through life without learning a second language is would be sad. I mean it just opens you up to another world, so obviously there are gonna be challenges, and that’s on some level, that’s a gift, right?

Hanna: Yeah, and one of the things that we try and do, with our, with our students and also with our sort of research team is to sort of build that solidarity around this is something that happens to all of us as second language users. This is kind of part of the experience, and we all see it, and we all recognize it, and sometimes, no matter how fantastic you are as a communicator if it doesn’t work, it’s it’s actually nothing to do with you. So it’s always a two-way street, speaking, I always say, . It’s not all your responsibility to make yourself understood, it’s also the other person you’re talking to.

Lindsay: 100%, and also for your teachers, for your listeners, I mean, I think that’s where our fuel as teachers comes from, right? So, like I said, my origin story came from trying to learn Spanish, feeling super disconnected and lonely on a beach in Colombia, and then my kind of pain from that moment still, like, extends out now, came into our philosophy, our vision, and it fires up my teaching even 15 years later, right? So, like, maybe that’s something teachers need to go through to have had some kind of experience like that to bring that into their teaching.

Hanna: It’s a kind of metamorphosis that I think we all go through. Yeah, wonderful. Oh, look, it’s been such a pleasure to talk to you about this topic, and it just sounds like a fantastic course, and I really love the sound of that other episode with all the different accents. I’m definitely going to check that out. But before we, wrap up, I would like you to tell me a little bit about what you think, two things. One is, like, you talked a little bit about what you think will happen with pronunciation in the future. Also, what’s kind of next for you with the app? What’s on the horizon, for all English and for you, personally?

Lindsay: Yeah. Well, one thing I’d love to get back to is live events. We’ve done live events over the years, we haven’t done them in a while, but inviting students to come and join us in a city and do an urban immersion adventure, where we pair them, we ask them to go out and do scavenger hunts around the city. It’s just, they’ve been the coolest events and the most transformative, where we’ve been able to see the most growth from our students. Those are hard to organize in a lot of work, but we have loved them, so I’d love Lindsay: like to bring that back, but on the more scalable level, I think AI is coming for us, for sure, but not in a negative way. We’re planning on figuring out a way to leverage it. We’ve been experimenting with how we can use it in pronunciation corrections, but also just together, with the teacher alongside the AI, not necessarily replacing the AI. So we just need to figure out a way to do that remotely, because most of our students are coming from other countries and studying remotely with us. So AI will definitely be a big part of it, and we’ll be continuing with our podcast. That is our biggest megaphone, that is how we get our philosophy out there, and how we can see the improvement from the very beginning from our listeners, from our students, and we love hearing from them, and seeing that it’s working and that it’s helping them. So, the show will go on.

Hanna: Wonderful. Oh, I have to just ask about the AI thing. So that’s, that’s really interesting. One of the things that’s coming up a lot on my radar is the use of the automated tech, the automated speech recognition for pronunciation teaching. And there, I have to say, as an Australian English speaker, that the standard, speech recognition on Microsoft Office is completely humiliating, because as an Australian English speaker, everything that I say is, is it’s understood through a filter of American standard American, and so, I when I when it writes it out, I sound like I have, like, a really strong Australian accent, and all of my vowels are really strong which is not great as an educator and a teacher, you don’t want to hear you’ve got a really strong, difficult to understand accent. So, yeah, so but certainly it’s something that I think is a really great possibility, because practicing pronunciation is really on your own is almost impossible without a listener to tell you, is that comprehensible? So it’s there’s a possibility there.

Lindsay: Yes, students want immediate feedback, and I understand why they do, of course they do, more so than any other area of English, vocabulary idioms. I was working with a curriculum developer this year, building a course, and he was from Scotland, and he was saying the same thing. The Scottish accent does not work as well with AI, but I think that’s just a matter of time. I think, I mean, it’s just how fast things are moving. I think in 6 months to a year, that won’t be an issue anymore, I hope, genuinely. And so what we do, we’re actually working with a company called Sensei AI. They’re based, I think, in they’re based in the US, but they have a large market in Asia, so working with Asian schools in Asia, with kids, actually. And they have a nice tool. We’re looking at some other options, too, so it’s just as simple speaking into the recorder, and then getting an analysis of each word, of the rhythm, of that kind of thing. So, we’ll just we’ll keep digging into it, I think. It’s impossible to ignore. I know our students are out there using AI on their own, so we’d like to guide that a bit more with a clear curriculum. , we want to help you get somewhere, not just chat, because we know when we just kind of chat, we end up at that intermediate plateau, right? That B2 level where we’re not able to move into C1, C2. So, that’s kind of our vision, but it is at the same time a little intimidating, I’m not gonna lie, right? I mean, it’ll change the industry significantly.

Hanna: Yeah, absolutely, but that’s it’s good to know you’ve got a Scotsman working on it, because yeah, he would have exactly the same issue, so but yeah, I think that a tool where you have input from language experts is really valuable, and yeah, I’ll definitely be looking out for that, and yeah, really interesting, the idea of it looking at rhythm, because I think that’s something that I don’t have a problem with when I do speech recognition. Like, it gets all my vowels wrong and some of my words, but the general sentences, it can pick that up fine. And that is something that we know, we know, gets in the way of intelligibility when speech is different. So there’s some work in Australia by Professor Linda Yates, who’s worked on this for many years, about exactly this, and in the migrant learning space, about the importance of speech rhythm. So we’ll keep an eye out on that, and the tool is there. I would love to check it out. Lindsay, it’s been so lovely talking to you about this. Thank you so much.

Lindsay: Thank you! Thank you so much for having me on.

Hanna: That was lovely, and thanks all to our audience for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and don’t forget to recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time.

Summer school and conference: Literacies for Social Participation

Language on the Move — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 09:51:04 +0000

University of Hamburg (Image credit: UHH/Ohme)

The Literacy in Diversity Settings Research Center (LiDS) at the University of Hamburg will host a summer school and conference devoted to “Literacies for Social Participation” in July this year.

The summer school dates are July 20-31, and the conference dates are July 27-28. The summer school includes the conference but the conference can be attended separately.

Readers are cordially invited to attend and/or alert their students and colleagues to these exciting events (for details how to apply, scroll down to the end of this post)

About the Summer School “Literacies for Social Participation” (July 20-31, 2026)

Literacy is an individual competence that is critical for social participation. It is key to education, employment, health, rights and well-being. Yet, this key is not a singular entity, not least in contemporary differentiated societies marked by migration; it is complex as it involves multiple languages, registers, modalities, as well as different technologies and formats. In a highly mobile and interconnected world, migration and digitalization have collided to fundamentally transform what it means to be literate.
These emerging complex multilingual, multilectal, and multimodal literacies may be poorly matched to the literacy requirements of institutions with a monolingual habitus (Gogolin, 1994), where literacy practices in one dominant, standard language prevail. The resulting communication gaps can threaten access, equity, inclusion, and cost-effectiveness, and hence constitute a real barrier to social justice (Piller, 2016).

As all contemporary societies are affected by migration and digitalization, with individuals facing the barriers and opportunities associated with multilingualism, this summer school offers an internationally oriented curriculum to outstanding masters and doctoral students.

The core learning aims are:

1) to enhance knowledge on literacy and learner diversity;
2) to trace tendencies that go beyond one national, regional or local context;
3) to examine literacy development across the life-course;
4) to critically discuss the implications of research findings for policy and practice.

The learning goals will be achieved across five core modules with required readings:

1) Literacy across the lifespan;
2) Institutional settings;
3) Research methods in social literacies;
4) Academic skills;
5) Independent course work.

About the conference “Literacies for Social Participation” (July 27-28, 2026)

Are you a PhD student researching in the field of multilingual literacy development and social participation? If so, you are cordially invited to submit an abstract to participate in the doctoral symposium Literacies for Social Participation at the University of Hamburg on 27-28 July 2026. Successful applicants will present their research to an international audience of their peers and receive in-depth feedback from renowned experts in the field, including:

Prof Dr Dr h.c. mult. Ingrid Gogolin, University of Hamburg
Prof Yanli Meng, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Humboldt-Professor Ingrid Piller, University of Hamburg and Macquarie University
Prof Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, Tongji University
Prof Vera Williams Tetteh, University of Ghana and Macquarie University
Prof Yufang Ruan, Zhejiang University

The doctoral symposium is a constituent event within the Hamburg International Summer School, Literacies for Social Participation, which runs from 20-31 July 2026. We invite you to also apply to participate in the summer school, however this is not a requirement to present at the doctoral symposium. The summer school and the doctoral symposium provide an exceptional combination of high-level academic engagement and networking opportunities related to linguistic diversity and social participation. Participants will have the opportunity to both showcase their expertise and deepen their knowledge of cutting-edge research in the field.

How to apply

Find out how to apply to attend the summer school here. (Application deadline: April 06, 2026)
Find out how to apply to present at the doctoral conference here. (Application deadline: April 06, 2026)

Attendance at the summer school and conference is free thanks to sponsorship from the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Foundation and the University of Hamburg.

Found in Translation

Tazin Abdullah — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 07:41:45 +0000

In this episode of Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah talks to Dr. Laura Rademaker (Australian National University), the author of Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission.

The conversation explores the distinctive historical context of Australia’s Northern Territory as a location for Christian missionary activity. Tazin and Laura talk about the multiple tensions and elements involved in language interactions between monolingual English-speaking missionaries and multilingual Indigenous communities, against the background of settler colonialism.

Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission was published by University of Hawai’i Press in 2018.

About the book

Found in Translation is a rich account of language and shifting cross-cultural relations on a Christian mission in northern Australia during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how translation shaped interactions between missionaries and the Anindilyakwa-speaking people of the Groote Eylandt archipelago and how each group used language to influence, evade, or engage with the other in a series of selective “mistranslations.”

In particular, this work traces the Angurugu mission from its establishment by the Church Missionary Society in 1943, through Australia’s era of assimilation policy in the 1950s and 1960s, to the introduction of a self-determination policy and bilingual education in 1973. While translation has typically been an instrument of colonization, this book shows that the ambiguities it creates have given Indigenous people opportunities to reinterpret colonization’s position in their lives.

Laura Rademaker combines oral history interviews with careful archival research and innovative interdisciplinary findings to present a fresh, cross-cultural perspective on Angurugu mission life. Exploring spoken language and sound, the translation of Christian scripture and songs, the imposition of English literacy, and Aboriginal singing traditions, she reveals the complexities of the encounters between the missionaries and Aboriginal people in a subtle and sophisticated analysis.

Rademaker uses language as a lens, delving into issues of identity and the competition to name, own, and control. In its efforts to shape the Anindilyakwa people’s beliefs, the Church Missionary Society utilized language both by teaching English and by translating Biblical texts into the native tongue. Yet missionaries relied heavily on Anindilyakwa interpreters, whose varied translation styles and choices resulted in an unforeseen Indigenous impact on how the mission’s messages were received. From Groote Eylandt and the peculiarities of the Australian settler-colonial context, Found in Translation broadens its scope to cast light on themes common throughout Pacific mission history such as assimilation policies, cultural exchanges, and the phenomenon of colonization itself.

This book will appeal to Indigenous studies scholars across the Pacific as well as scholars of Australian history, religion, linguistics, anthropology, and missiology.

Transcript

Tazin: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Tazin Abdullah, and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Dr. Laura Rademaker. Laura is a DECRA research fellow at the School of History at the Australian National University in Canberra. She works in the areas of interdisciplinary histories as well as oral history and memories, with a special interest in ‘cross-culturalising’ history. Her interests include religion, gender, secularisation, and ‘deep history’. She is an editor of History Australia, monographs editor for Aboriginal history Monographs and secretary of the Religious History Association.

On this episode, we will find out about Laura’s work, with a special focus on her 2018 book Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission. Laura’s work in this book provides a highly engaging exploration of the intersection between English, Christianity, and Australian citizenship. Set against the interactions between Christian missionaries and Indigenous Australians, we learn about the deep intricacies of the relationship between language and place.

I’m very excited about this podcast, and Laura, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today!

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real honour.

Tazin: To begin with, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your research, and how you came to be interested in historical language contact?

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Sure, so I’m a historian down at ANU, as you said. I’m not an Indigenous person myself. I became interested in, I guess, the interactions that happened at Christian missions in Australia, particularly after I – so, I did an honours thesis way back when in the day. It was soon after the apology to the Stolen Generation, by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and I learned from this that. So, I come from a church background. I learned from this that my own church had been part of, had been complicit in the removal of children.

And I did a thesis looking at the white women who, I mean, you could say looked after, you could say, were guardians who were the, you know who I mean. Looking after isn’t the right term, really. Like, these are kidnapped children, but the women who took in these children in a remote mission on Groote Eylandt. But doing that thesis, it was increasingly led to question, how did how did these people from completely different cultural backgrounds – how did they communicate with each other? How did they understand each other? What did they make of each other? You know, had these children from remote communities who didn’t speak English, maybe spoke a little bit of pidgin and later Creole, and these white women coming up from Sydney and Melbourne who only spoke English and had very fixed ideas about what they wanted to impart to these children. I wondered, what did these children make of all of that, and what did the Aboriginal communities who surrounded them, and who were sort of looking on to the mission, what did they make of that?

Also, way back, you know, even longer before this Honours thesis, I was a rotary exchange student, in Denmark.

Tazin: Oh, wow!

Dr. Laura Rademaker: And I learnt to speak Danish when I was there. Well, you know, imperfectly, and my Danish is rubbish today, don’t ask me to speak Danish. But something that I really took out of that experience was the significance for people, especially people who speak a language which is not, you know, not widely spoken. It really mattered to the Danes that I was that I was learning their language, and they were really excited that someone would learn Danish, which they thought was of no use, apart from, to have better relationships with Danish people. And so that’s kind of stuck in my mind, that, the significance of languages for smaller communities.

Tazin: That’s amazing, especially in the context of today, when people learn language from apps The difference between what you described – learning a language while interacting with people, as opposed to learning a language from an app. It’s amazing that that’s what inspired you.

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Yeah, and it’s actually something that came up in the research. I mean, we’ll talk about this later, but I was interested in why some missionaries learned Aboriginal languages and why others didn’t, and the relational dynamic is really what’s important.

I think teaching someone your language is an act of hospitality, is an act of generosity, it’s relational, and you can’t barge into a language community without an invitation or a welcome. Or at least that’s the way I see it. And so having these unique and precious languages as a way for Indigenous people to control who entered their worlds, and to exclude people who are not welcome.

Tazin: Wow! Well, turning to your book, I would like to ask you about a quote from the preface, and I use this because I found it very meaningful, personally, and, you know, I felt like it is the basic philosophical question about translation. So in the preface, you say: “Whether translation – and all the ambiguities that might attend it – was a blessing or a curse is a matter of interpretation.” Could you tell us about this?

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Yeah, I mean, this was really the, you know, my core interest that was driving this. I’m interested in the way that translation you know, of languages, but also more broadly in a sort of a metaphorical sense of cultures. Well, the way it creates something new in the encounter. You can say, you can say all translation is imperfect, but even the label imperfect kind of puts a value judgment on it, that it’s deficient.

But it’s those so-called imperfections, that actually – where there’s something creative in this cross-cultural encounter that can come out, and there can be learning from different peoples. And I think in my research, what I was really interested in exploring was the way that First Nations people were able to take what missionaries brought and create something new on their own terms because of the ambiguities of translation.

Yeah, but we tend I mean, you tend to put those terms like imperfect or unfaithful and things like this that really do have that value judgment, and I wanted to really push back on this.

But in the – sorry, I’m going on.

Tazin: Go on, please. This is very interesting.

Dr. Laura Rademaker: In the context of colonialism and imperialism and these missions which were really trying to form people into being a particular kind of person and a particular kind of Christian, there was the desire to have a so-called perfect translation and convey this unchanging message that would be received in a, you know, in a predictable way. But that’s because of the ambiguities of translation, that wasn’t possible. And that’s happened again and again, not just in Australia.

Tazin: Yes, of course.

Dr. Laura Rademaker: In many contexts.

Tazin: Yeah, and then the way that, I guess, it was received, and whether it was beneficial to the people receiving it, is, as you say, a matter of interpretation.

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Yes, exactly, exactly. And the communities have different, you know, individual members and communities have different views on this as well.

Tazin: Yes, of course, yeah, that’s amazing. You write about the Northern Territory – that’s your research site – as iconic, being Australia’s settler colonial frontier. What is unique about the context that you have written about? And why were language and translation so significant in this context?

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Sure. Look, I, as a kid, my family did a lot of. We did a lot of road trips and camping trips and stuff, and, I travelled to the Northern Territory quite a bit as a child. And I guess for me, it has this nostalgic, you know, it’s still that, you know, I kind of had bought into that almost frontier romantic mindset. This wild landscape that was, you know, somehow represented the true, the real Australia.

I hope that I’ve been able to mature from that and become a bit more critical of the way that those visions actually sort of reinforce a settler colonial, a colonial ideology that the country is naturally belonging to white people, And anyway, this romantic vision of empty space ready to be sort of civilized or tamed or something. Anyway, so that, you know, I came to it with that background.

But, in terms of, as a researcher and as an historian, what’s really exciting is I guess the way for many communities in the Northern Territory, colonization, the beginning of colonization is still such recent history. You know, when I was doing oral histories up on Groote Eylandt. the people I spoke with, it was their parents who had first encountered white people in their country, and they remember as children the missions first being set up. This was the first non-Indigenous community setting up on their country, you know, in the1920s, 30s, 40s. That was a living memory. So it’s really, really recent history, and as an historian, this is, you know. Being able to sit down and talk with people about what that experience was like and, what it meant to their communities is fascinating and sheds light on earlier periods for which we can’t do oral histories. The mission encounter in Australia, the Christian missions, and happens so much later in Australia.

One of the stats that I sort of throw around is, in the 1950s and the 1960s, Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory were the most missionized people in the entire world. There was, I think there was one missionary for every, sort of, five to six Aboriginal people in the Territory. Like, it was crazy.

Tazin: Wow!

Dr. Laura Rademaker: The level of intensity of this, civilizing, Christianising project that was going on up there. So, it was a really intense encounter, as well as a really recent history that then can help us understand, sort of, much more global experiences, that happened in other places.

I mean, I can go on. The other thing about the Northern Territory is so many Aboriginal languages in the Territory are still so strong. They’re spoken by children, they’re, you know, they’re still people’s first languages. And one thing that I think is really helpful for me as a researcher is to have that experience of being the outsider and being unsettled as the English speaker. It reminds me that English is not naturally the language of this country. But I as an English speaker, English doesn’t necessarily belong, and I have to be the learner. I have to sometimes make a fool of myself because I don’t understand, or I’m trying to say something that, you know, is pronounced the wrong way, or means something different.

But that, I think I mean, I hope that comes through in my writing, having that experience, and seeing – unsettling how natural English feels in this place.

Tazin: Yeah, well, I mean, I from what you just said, I guess I’m taking away again how recent the history is, as you said, because sometimes we get this idea that all of these things happened in the past.

Dr. Laura Rademaker: No, no, no.

Tazin: And it’s way back there, but it’s not, and the impacts, as you have written in your book, actually last till today.

Dr. Laura Rademaker: I mean, colonization is still continuing, I would say,. But also, yeah, there’s people, you know, in living memory who can speak about massacres, knowing about massacres and things like that, really not very long ago at all.

Tazin: Much of that knowledge would also be in their languages, in their original, in their native languages. Wow!

I understand that the early missionary ventures in Australia were not very successful. How did the Christian missionaries attempt to engage with Aboriginal communities? What were the, you know, the tensions, the multiple elements that influenced their language use and interactions?

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Yep. Yeah, so this is something I’ve puzzled over for a while, and I’m still, still thinking through trying to understand as an historian.

So, the Christian missions in Australia were quite famously unsuccessful at the time. I’m talking about the early 19th century, and this was often blamed on Aboriginal people themselves, especially as you move through the 19th century, there was the argument that Aboriginal people lacked the cognitive ability to understand Christianity. That they maybe had, didn’t even have souls, that they were not, you know, religious beings, they couldn’t have, they weren’t, you know, their culture was supposedly so backwards. Things like this, you know, really horrifically racist, ideas.

But it is, I mean, when you look to the, you know, to the nearby Pacific at the same time, in the early 19th century, Christianity and demand for translated Bibles was really expanding quite quickly. So what, you know, what could possibly explain this?

One thing, sort of, structurally about Australia is that the Christian missions arrived more or less simultaneously, or just after settler colonisers who were claiming Aboriginal land. And so, the massacres, the displacement, the dispossession of land, the disease, all of this proceeds or is concurrent with missionaries. And I think in that context, I mean, Aboriginal people could see the contradiction, right? And the missionaries were ultimately, as much as many of them were quite critical of the violence and, you know, supported humanitarian causes – they were ultimately allied with the British Empire, which was responsible for all of this that was taking place.

And so to convert to Christianity in that context is a capitulation to this such a, this devastating destruction. At the same time, there was there wasn’t much I mean, in terms of Protestant tradition, translating the Bible is kind of the number one thing you do when you arrive in a new culture because you want the Christian message to be taken up in the culture of the people that you’re trying to convert. And this didn’t, I mean, there were there were small attempts in Australia, but there was no translated Bible until I think it wasn’t a full Bible in an Aboriginal language until 2002, or maybe it was 2005. Anyway, it was in the 2000s – very, very recent.

There were early missionaries who translated segments of scriptures, but there wasn’t, sort of large-scale Bible translation work in Australia. And this, I would say, was due to the belief that Aboriginal people were were destined to extinction. Or that if they were to survive, their future was going to be in English, and they were going to assimilate into white Australia. And so we have these sorts of colonising assumptions about the naturalness of English, the dominance of English, the naturalness of British possession of Australian soil right there from the beginning in these decisions not to translate, and the belief in the universality of English.

Tazin: And do you think the other aspect may have been the multiplicity of Aboriginal languages as well? Because there wasn’t just one language.

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Yes, that’s true, and I should have said that, yes, I mean, there’s many Aboriginal languages are closely related and mutually intelligible, but there’s so many languages.

But I would also say that was used as an excuse. It was there was sort of often the, well, well, there’s this language and that language, which language do we do? But it’s better that everybody just speak English. And so, it sort of cuts both ways.

Tazin: That’s so interesting, and I’ll pick up on that with you a bit later, because, you know, there’s so many parallels with language, in the use of English in Australia even now. But before that, I actually wanted to say that I learned a lot from reading your book. And one of the most interesting things I learned was that the Anindilyakwa speakers had, for centuries, already been engaging in the translation and interpretation of language and culture. So there was language contact between tribes, and with those from other lands, such as the Makassans.

And I was reading, I pictured, you know, people who were multilingual in a society where there already existed a sophisticated exchange between languages. And in this setting came the missionaries with English, a language, as you said, tied to settler colonialism and to citizenship in, you know, in Australia. Would you please tell us about this?

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Yeah, so this is, I mean, again, I’m not a First Nations person. I don’t speak for First Nations people, but this is all across, you know, the top end of the Northern Territory, multilingualism in Indigenous communities is the norm, and has been the norm for centuries for Indigenous communities. Marriage is often exogamous. You marry outside your clan, which is also normally, often, means that you marry outside your language group, and so there’s multilingualism within the family. Your mother and your father and your grandmother and your grandfather might all speak different languages, and this idea that you would be confined to just one language would be completely bizarre and unusual.

And, as you, as you mentioned, the Makassan traders, so they came from Sulawesi, from Indonesia. They’ve been coming for hundreds of years across the top end, and there’s, and they were multilingual as well. Their crews spoke sort of a Malay pidgin, but there was multiple languages on board these ships. And they exchanged with Anindilyakwa people on Groote Eylandt, about Yolngu people, Tiwi people as well, and you can find, like, words.

You probably know this, you can find words from their languages in these Aboriginal languages, and the one that I talk about in my book is Jura, which is common across the Northern Territory, a word that means paper, or book, or writing. Comes from Arabic originally. It has made its way into Aboriginal languages.

So there’s this really intense cross-cultural exchange around the idea of language communication, writing books. So Aboriginal people were aware of this long before the colonisers came, and had traditions of translating and interpreting, had norms about who would speak for whom, people were esteemed as interpreters, and linguistic expertise were recognized and valued. But there’s also sort of an embedded reciprocity and interdependence in when you have this inbuilt multilingualism in your community. When you become dependent on each other in a way that you might not, where you have a monolingual community. People have particular language expertise and are used to translating and interpreting, singing for different countries in ceremony. That would require someone who’s an expert in this or that language, so they can sing the right song for that song line. It all requires, you know, this incredible linguistic expertise, which is seen as a strength.

But for the English speakers, of course, all this is seen as a little bit messy and complicated, and wouldn’t it be much more efficient if everyone just spoke the one language. I think it was hard for the colonisers, for the missionaries, to see that this multilingualism might be a strength rather than an obstacle to overcome. And the Commonwealth’s government introduced a syllabus for Aboriginal schools in the 1950s that was very explicitly about introducing English. And they did say, oh, there’s so many languages, what are we going to do? It’s too hard to learn all the languages. We just need one language, and that language should be English, because this is the language of Australian citizenship.

Now I feel like I’ve rabbited on for quite a bit!

Tazin: Please, please go on. This is very interesting!

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Yeah, yeah, I guess in the work, I wanted to challenge the assumption that those who people who don’t primarily speak English as their first language or primary language were necessarily victims or vulnerable, that this multilingualism was a real strength. And that the assertion that English is, should be a universal language. And that we are stronger by all speaking the same language. Yeah, that’s a cultural assumption, and it’s also an imperial assumption in this context as well.

Tazin: And yeah, and this particular aspect of your work, you know, is particularly interesting for me and our team at Language on the Move, because a lot of our research strongly focuses on the implications for contemporary, multilingual or linguistically diverse communities in places like Australia, where English is, you know, remains a dominant language. English in Australia continues to relate to citizenship. And speakers of other languages, they have different identities assigned to them, depending on the language, often very negative identities, right? And there are high-status languages and low-status languages. There’s all those things, and perhaps we sideline what other languages have to offer. We lose what could be meaningful exchanges.

What can we learn from your work, and what can readers take from this very insightful historical account to inform our research in contemporary Australia?

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Yeah, I guess it’s what you were saying, that, that English doesn’t need to be the only or the dominant language. That there is great strengths and creativity and resources in being a multilingual community. And Australia historically has always been multilingual. You know, this English is not the language that is connected to this land. It’s not the language of the country. It’s the language that we, you know, it’s the dominant language at the moment, but it’s not the language of country. And I wanted to recover that and recapture that.

I also, as I said, I guess I wanted to challenge assumptions that, those who don’t speak English as their primary language are necessarily victims or vulnerable, that language. It can be a tool, it can be a weapon. There’s a way that evading English can be a choice, an assertion, a reclaiming of identity, a form of resistance.

I don’t know, you would have seen in the book, I opened this story about the first missionaries arriving on Groote Eylandt, and they wanted to translate the, the Sunday School song, Jesus Loves Me. And so, they approach the old man at the camp, and this missionary says, you know, “Jesus loves me, this I know” [Laura sings the line] and he wants to know the word for ‘me’. And the way he tells it is that he pointed to his chest and said, you know, me, how do you say me? And the old man gave him the word for chest hair. And so, the missionary started singing in Anindilyakwa, Jesus loves my chest hair.

Now, the missionary, he told this story many times, and he used it in his fundraising as kind of an amusing story about how these poor, ignorant, you know, ignorant First Nations people, supposedly, you know, were so naive or gullible or silly that they didn’t understand what he was getting at, and isn’t it a great story! But the way that I read it, and the way that I think makes sense, having met with the old people of this community, and I brought this interpretation to them and said, oh, yes, this is probably what happened is that the First Nations community, the old people were playing a joke on the missionary.

They used their language to set him up to make a fool of themselves and to assert themselves as the knowledge holders. Anyway, so I guess this is a long roundabout way of saying I want to, yeah, recover the agency of groups that are outside the dominant language community, and show how they’ve shaped Australian history as well, and show how their languages have been a source of strength.

Tazin: Yes, and I did find that story very amusing as well. So glad you began with that story. It was hilarious, and what you know, what a great way to understand what happened in that interaction, the way you described it. Tell us what is next for you and your work. What other research projects are you working on now?

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Sure, well, I’m continuing that work, with the same community up on Groote Eylandt, but also with some other Northern Territory communities on the Tiwi Islands, and Gunbalanya in West Arnhem, and I’m looking at a broader project on First Nations self-determination. But I’m also, I guess I’m really interested in the history of Christianity and Aboriginal land. The ways that religion has been used to deny Aboriginal land and

enable dispossession, but also the way that First Nations people have drawn on their spiritual resources and spiritual claims to make claims to land as well. So I’m very much in the thick of religious thinking at the moment, but, this work on translation is still very much on my mind and informing what I’m doing, the ways that concepts get translated across cultures, and then can be turned back against the dominant culture. I’m really interested in the ways that First Nations people have done that throughout history.

Tazin: And it’s wonderful for us to have this knowledge of history of languages in Australia. So,thank you very much for your work, Laura, and we really look forward to reading more of it.

Dr. Laura Rademaker: Oh, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Tazin: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time!

How I worked as a foreign accent coach

Andrea Pešková — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 08:16:24 +0000

Human voice – between sound and identity

I have always been fascinated by the human voice. When you speak on the phone with a stranger, it can reveal so much about them. You can often tell whether it’s a man or a woman, estimate their age, and sense their attitudes and emotional state — whether they sound polite, distant, nervous, happy, or sad.

And, importantly, you can almost immediately recognize whether the person speaking has a foreign accent or not. Pronunciation is never just about sounds: it reflects the social meanings attached to language.

A different kind of accent training

In my phonetics and phonology classes, I usually deal with a familiar scenario: students ask me how they can improve their pronunciation in their L2 Italian or L2 Spanish and sound more “natural”. How to avoid a foreign accent — or at least minimize it.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having a foreign accent. It simply shows that you grew up speaking another language. But many students want to refine their pronunciation, and I am a happy companion on that journey.

This time, however, it was different. A friend asked me to do a favor for one of her friends — an actress. In her new movie production, she had to play a German woman speaking Spanish with a strong German accent.

She told me: “Well, I know I have to do the German R sound, which is very different from Spanish. But I feel there’s more.”

Exactly. There are even native Spanish speakers who have difficulty pronouncing the rolled R — this phenomenon has a name: «rhotacism» or «the French R» (la erre francesa). But even speakers who don’t “roll” the R can still sound perfectly native-like.

(Image credit: Andrea Pešková)

So, what is it all about?

What makes Spanish sound German

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most distinctive features of “German” Spanish.

German speakers don’t only struggle with R sounds. One of the most noticeable characteristics is the aspiration of the voiceless stops /p t k/: pala ‘shovel’ may sound like [ˈp^hala], tono ‘tone’ like [ˈt^hono], and cosa ‘thing’ like [ˈk^hosa]. The aspiration should remain subtle and light — otherwise it may begin to sound more “English” than “German”.

Another typical feature is that the final [o] may sound overly close, almost like [u], turning perro ‘dog’ or loco ‘crazy’ into perru or locu in Spanish ears.

German speakers also tend to pronounce the Spanish approximants [β ð ɣ] between vowels as full stops, so la bodega ‘the wine cellar’ [laβoˈðeɣa] becomes something like [laboˈdeɡa] rather than the softer Spanish version.

They also often insert a glottal stop before vowel-initial syllables or words. El auto ‘the car’ becomes [elˈʔawto], and otra ‘other’ turns into [ˈʔotɾa]. This gives Spanish a slightly “choppy”, segmented rhythm.

Orthographic influence plays its role too. Speakers may pronounce the normally silent h, voice the s between vowels as z (casa ‘house’ [ˈkaza]), or mispronounce as [ɔɪ̯] instead of [ew]. And the infinitive ending -er may shift towards something like -a in the word comer [komˈea] ‘to eat’.

Prosody contributes as well. Stressed open syllables may sound unusually long, unstressed vowels may be reduced, stress placement may shift, and intonation patterns often diverge. For example, the end of neutral statements may sound exaggeratedly emphasized, lacking the subtle falling contour typical of Spanish.

Making the accent sound real

We worked on all these phonetic features, and my student did an excellent job. We wanted the accent to sound authentic and recognizable, but never exaggerated or comical.

While we focused mainly on pronunciation, I also pointed out that in real-life speech, grammatical transfer phenomena often accompany a foreign accent. In many movies, accented speech is portrayed with perfect grammar but an overdone pronunciation, which feels unnatural.

In reality, small deviations are common in second-language speech — for instance, occasional omission of articles (Me gusta pizza ‘I like pizza’ instead of Me gusta la pizza ‘I like the pizza’), overuse of subject pronouns that are usually dropped in Spanish, or transfer of verbal tense and aspect.

These subtle grammatical influences, combined with pronunciation, shape the overall impression of an accent and make speech sound more believable.

From correction to creation

What we both found most fascinating in this experience was the shift in perspective: instead of trying to eliminate a foreign accent, we tried to recreate one. It was a playful reminder that accents are not errors but expressions of our identity, multilingual experience and authenticity.

We often see how accent becomes a marker of belonging — or of difference.

But when we learn to listen closely, every accent tells a fascinating story about who we are, where we come from, and the paths our languages have taken.

Additional resources

If you want to explore more accents in Spanish, visit this page that my students in Osnabrück (Germany) created: https://andrea-peskova.com/archivo-de-los-acentos-l2/. There you will find examples of Czech, Italian, Slovak, Greek, and American English accents in Spanish.

Digital mutual aid among migrants, in the shadow of ChatGPT

Jenia Yudytska — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:47:33 +0000

Ukrainian migrant asking ChatGPT to explain different types of rental contracts in Austria (still from Yudytska & Androutsopoulos 2025)

For nearly four years now, I’ve been heavily involved in online (Telegram-based) communities for Ukrainian forced migrants in Austria. Such communities sprang up all across Europe after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, serving as grassroots digital info-points. In those early, chaotic days, the groups focused on a Ukrainian’s first steps upon getting off the train in their new country. They have since expanded to cover everything from where to buy buckwheat (a very pressing question!) to the fine details of the local education system, health insurance, job market, etc.

The communities are run for Ukrainian refugees, by Ukrainian- and Russian-speakers, that is, overwhelmingly by migrants – forced, labour, student; first-gen, second-gen; etc. It truly is mutual aid: those who migrated earlier answer questions on integration, those who left recently give tips on how best to reach relatives in occupied territory. My family left in 1999, when I was five; I co-admin one group for Ukrainians in my home state of Upper Austria (ca. 3,700 members) and one group focused on how to change from the Temporary Protection status to a longer-term work/residence permit (ca. 8,300 members), plus I occasionally help out in other groups.

In 2025, our communities gained one more, less welcome, “member”: ChatGPT.

Migrants’ search for information

Understanding the role of ChatGPT in these communities requires understanding the complex informational space newly arrived migrants are in. There is an avalanche of info to take in. Some involves the everyday differences: when your child has a fever, at what temperature can you call the ambulance without getting in trouble for wasting their time? Other aspects are specific to the (forced) migrant status, and would stump a local too. Language barriers make accessing information difficult. Even with machine translation, it’s hard to know what term to google or how to interpret a bureaucrat’s answer.

This is where the Telegram communities come in, providing an easy place to ask for help and discuss problems.

An NGO’s German-Ukrainian sign about food and clothing distribution; the understandable but incorrect Ukrainian suggests machine translation (photo taken by author)

Still, they’re not a panacea. Us volunteers learned only on the fly the ins-and-outs of the Austrian asylum system in all its kafkaesque glory: we sometimes misremember, misunderstand, and mistranslate. Grasping a question can take real detective work, especially when there’s a dozen ways to translate a single German term. Official Austrian sources give a lot of information orally; this leads to bewildering discussions where one person informs the chat their social worker said X, another says it was Y, and the third Z. Maybe it’s miscommunication, maybe the official sources have no clue either.

Above everything loom the rumours, best illustrated by the (admittedly pretty sexist) Russian acronym, ОБС – одна бабка сказала, lit. “some old lady said”. It’s used in the sense of, “Uh-huh, riiight, you got that info from your cousin’s friend’s mom’s neighbour”. In 2027 all Ukrainians in the EU will be put on the next train home, even if the war is still ongoing. Truth or ОБС? Great (unanswerable) question!

Enter ChatGPT

Into all this chaos slams the iron certainty of ChatGPT. If it worked as advertised, it would be an invaluable resource for migrants. You ask a question, it searches for and provides a summary of official information. No linguistic barriers, no mistranslations, no complex legalese; no petty online fights to wade through. The appeal is clear.

The only tiny problem is that it doesn’t work as advertised.

The biggest issue is in how ChatGPT functions: it doesn’t search for and copy-paste information from a database, but rather generates a statistically likely sequence of tokens (words) based on the data it was trained on. This is why it can “hallucinate”, that is, make up answers which are linguistically coherent but factually untrue. It has also obviously been fed more data (law databases, official websites, forum discussions, etc.) from Germany than Austria. For example, it has confidently explained to a Ukrainian that she’s legally obligated to have health insurance – true in Germany, not so in Austria.

Linz Castle on the Danube, Upper Austria, lit up in the colours of the Ukrainian flag (photo taken by author)

The AI technique ‘Retrieval Augmented Generation’ (RAG) is meant to resolve this: ChatGPT first searches for and pulls relevant information from a website, then incorporates it into the answer. (ChatGPT uses RAG sometimes, but not constantly. It costs more energy, thus more money.) But the answer is still generated, so hallucination is still possible. This leads to ChatGPT claiming, for example, “According to the City of Vienna website, Ukrainians have to hand in their old refugee ID card. [Link to website]” Except its generated summary missed a negation: the website explicitly states Ukrainians do not have to hand in their old refugee ID card. RAG can thus lead to even greater misinformation, as it implies a direct source.

The other huge problem is the limited information actually available on migrant issues; even if hallucination was somehow solved, the adage of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ for machine learning remains. For example, to switch to a longer-term residence permit requires the migrant to have an ortsübliche Unterkunft (“housing according to local standards”). ChatGPT physically cannot answer what these local standards are. I know this because, according to my old-fashioned research techniques of searching law databases, skimming court cases, and asking lawyer friends, neither can anybody else! Unfortunately, it is too often the case that there is too little concrete info for ChatGPT to be trained on.

In short, using ChatGPT for information is a gamble. Sometimes it works great, sometimes it generates nonsense. To know which is which, the migrant is left with the same problem of surmounting the language barrier they started with.

Mutual aid with and against machines

Rows of donated women’s shoes at SUNUA, a grassroots organisation supporting Ukrainians in Upper Austria, 3 weeks post-invasion (photo taken by author)

I don’t consider myself a techno-pessimist – actually, I rely on language technologies heavily in my online volunteer work. My phone’s autocorrect is a life-saver. While I can read and write in Russian, I left Ukraine before starting formal education, and find it slow and frustrating to spell without autocorrect. Similarly, machine translation is a great help. I occasionally need it to double-check my understanding of more complex Ukrainian-language questions; I also machine translate German-language official updates for the sake of speed, then post-edit the Russian text to correct mistakes and stilted phrasing before posting.

That is, due to my background as a child migrant from a primarily Russian-speaking area of Ukraine, I have varying levels of competencies in the three languages I need: Russian, Ukrainian, German. For all their faults, language technologies are an invaluable resource for stuffing the gaps so I can help people successfully. And efficiently, as this has always been 100% unpaid labour in my free time, next to my full-time uni work.

But all this is why I find the intrusion of ChatGPT into our spaces so infuriating on a personal level. In the midst of a horrible situation, between fear, grieving, trauma, burnout, we’re all trying to use the linguistic and technological resources available to us to help each other. I accept arguing against a community member’s cousin’s friend’s mom’s neighbour’s experience as part of that – that connection is also a resource, and it’s human to trust an acquaintance over a fuzzily written law in a language you don’t speak yet. I’m willing to spend my free time picking apart where the confusion lies.

The author’s post in a Telegram group explaining that AI as a source must be clearly stated, with over 60 users leaving reaction emoji of agreement (screenshot taken by author)

I don’t accept arguing with ChatGPT screenshots.

ChatGPT adds beautiful formatting, with eye-catching emoji as bulletpoints. ChatGPT switches between Cyrillic and Latin easily, writing out German acronyms and translating them to Russian in brackets: ÖGK (Österreichische Gesundheitskasse – Австрийская касса медицинского страхования), wow. ChatGPT cites laws using a fancy § paragraph sign I have to copy-paste each time.

Sure, the actual information may or may not be correct, but that’s less important than the style, which so neatly mimics that of official sources. It simply looks trustworthy – the complete opposite of my own messages, written one-handed on a moving bus, with at least one butchered case suffix apiece. It’s unsurprising that people cling to ChatGPT’s information more stubbornly than to the usual ОБС.

Arguing against it is thus extra tedious and, frustratingly, requires me to do additional work. “Wait, no, where did you get that information from, is that an official source?” “Uh, nope, that website ChatGPT cited says the opposite.” “Dude, did you actually read the law ChatGPT ‘references’ – it’s about industrial chemicals, not document translation.” Most unsatisfactorily for all involved, having to prove a negative: “I’m sorry, but there’s no information on that. I don’t know why ChatGPT says there is, maybe it exists for Germany, but not for Austria.”

As a migrant who’s also stared at bureaucratic German in confusion and anxious despair, I don’t blame people for turning to AI. As a volunteer, it’s genuinely made me want to quit: in anger, in exhaustion, with a childishly vindictive, “Well, if they prefer machine over human, so long and thanks for all the fish.”

Where to next?

In principle, the issues explored here are no different from those we’re facing in other areas: education, academia, news, etc. Misinformation is rife everywhere; so is a lack of digital literacy on what current AI can and can’t do. For me, the crucial point is how vulnerable forced migrants are. Misuse of ChatGPT can lead not to a failed homework assignment but to problems on an existential level: with the legal status, with housing, with having enough money for food. Similarly, to put it bluntly, I’m paid to deal with students’ AI use; in volunteer work, it’s just one more weight tipping the scales in favour of finally quitting. It’s also important to add that not all my fellow admins share my worries. Some eagerly embrace ChatGPT answers themselves, which of course save time and energy for volunteers who have little of either to spare.

Our current ‘solution’ is that people must state openly that the information they’re posting is AI-generated. Then other members can decide themselves to what extent they trust it. In this, I would say, we’re ahead of the curve compared to many organisations, and for now, this will have to be enough.

Reference

Yudytska, J. & Androutsopoulos, J. (2025). The use of language technologies in forced migration: An explorative study of Ukrainian women in Austria. In M. Mendes de Oliveira & L. Conti (eds.), Explorations in Digital Interculturality: Language, Culture, and Postdigital Practices (pp. 135-166). Transcript. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839476291-007

Language on the Move Podcast wins Talkley Award 2025

Ingrid Piller — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 22:55:17 +0000

The team behind the Language-on-the-Move Podcast (Image credit: Language on the Move)

Final piece of good news for the year before we head into a publishing break over January: we’ve just heard that the Language-on-the-Move Podcast has won the 2025 Talkley Award

The Talkley Award is issued by the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) and “celebrates the best piece or collection of linguistics communication produced in the previous year by current ALS members. The Award acknowledges that the discipline of linguistics needs champions to promote linguistics in the public sphere and explain how linguistic evidence can be used to solve real-life language problems.”

This is a wonderful end-of-year present for our team in recognition of the work and care we’re putting into creating the podcast. Special thanks and congratulations also to our podcast publishing partner, the New Books Network.

After the 2012 Talkley Award went to Ingrid Piller for the Language on the Move website, this is the second time the award goes to our team – an amazing recognition of the long-term impact Language on the Move has had on public communications about linguistic diversity and social justice.

Thank you to all our supporters who nominated us for the award! Special thanks to Dr Yixi (Isabella) Qiu and her students in the Guohao College Future Technology Program at Tongji University. After using the Language-on-the-Move Podcast as a learning resource, they have been among our biggest fans

To celebrate with us, listen to an episode today! You an find your list of choice below.

As always, please support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Students of the Guohao College Future Technology Program at Tongji University in Shanghai are among the fans of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast (Image credit: Dr Yixi (Isabella) Qiu)

List of episodes to date

Episode 64: Your Languages are your superpower! Agnes Bodis in conversation with Cindy Valdez (17/11/2025)
Episode 63: Australia’s National Indigenous Languages Survey: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Zoe Avery (28/10/2025)
Episode 62: Migration is about every human challenge you can have: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shaun Tan (17/09/2025)
Episode 61: Cold Rush: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Sari Pietikainen (09/09/2025)
Episode 60: Sexual predation and English language teaching: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Vaughan Rapatahana (02/09/2025)
Episode 59: Intercultural Communication – Now in the 3^rd edition: Loy Lising in conversation with Ingrid Piller (26/08/2025)
Episode 58: Erased voices and unspoken heritage: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Zozan Balci (20/08/2025)
Episode 57: The Social Impact of Automating Translation: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ester Monzó-Nebot (03/08/2025)
Episode 56: Multilingual practices and monolingual mindsets: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (18/07/2025)
Episode 55: Improving quality of care for patients with limited English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Leah Karliner (26/06/2025)
Episode 54: Chinese in Qatar: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Sara Hillman (19/06/2025)
Episode 53: Accents, complex identities, and politics: Brynn Quick in conversation with Nicole Holliday (12/06/2025)
Episode 52: Is beach safety signage fit for purpose? Agnes Bodis in conversation with Masaki Shibata (05/06/2025)
Episode 51: The case for ASL instruction for hearing heritage signers: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Su Kyong Isakson (28/04/2025)
Episode 50: Researching language and digital communication: Brynn Quick in conversation with Christian Ilbury (22/04/2025)
Episode 49: Gestures and emblems: Brynn Quick in conversation with Lauren Gawne (14/04/2025)
Episode 48: Lingua Napoletana and language oppression: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Massimiliano Canzanella (07/04/2025)
Episode 47: Teaching international students: Brynn Quick in conversation with Agnes Bodis and Jing Fan (31/03/2025)
Episode 46: Intercultural competence in the digital age: Brynn Quick in conversation with Amy McHugh (12/03/2025)
Episode 45: How does multilingual law-making work: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Karen McAuliffe (05/03/2025)
Episode 44: Educational inequality in Fijian higher education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Prashneel Goundar (25/02/2025)
Episode 43: Multilingual crisis communication: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Li Jia (22/01/2025)
Episode 42: Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche (14/01/2025)
Episode 41: Why teachers turn to AI: Brynn Quick in conversation with Sue Ollerhead (09/01/2025)
Episode 40: Language Rights in a Changing China: Brynn Quick in conversation with Alexandra Grey (01/01/2025)
Episode 39: Whiteness, Accents, and Children’s Media: Brynn Quick in conversation with Laura Smith-Khan (24/12/2024)
Episode 38: Creaky Voice in Australian English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Hannah White (18/12/2024)
Episode 37: Supporting multilingual families to engage with schools: Agi Bodis in conversation with Margaret Kettle (20/11/2024)
Episode 36: Linguistic diversity as a bureaucratic challenge: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Clara Holzinger (17/11/2024)
Episode 35: Judging refugees: Laura Smith-Khan in conversation with Anthea Vogl (02/11/2024)
Episode 34: How did Arabic get on that sign? Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Rizwan Ahmad (30/10/2024)
Episode 33: Migration, constraints and suffering: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Marco Santello (14/10/2024)
Episode 32: Living together across borders: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Lynnette Arnold (07/10/2024)
Episode 31: Police first responders interacting with domestic violence victims: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Kate Steel (29/09/2024)
Episode 30: Remembering Barbara Horvath: Livia Gerber in conversation with Barbara Horvath (10/09/2024)
Episode 29: English Language Ideologies in Korea: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (08/09/2024)
Episode 28: Sign Language Brokering: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jemina Napier (30/07/2024)
Episode 27: Muslim Literacies in China: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ibrar Bhatt (24/07/2024)
Episode 26: Life in a New Language, Pt 6 – Citizenship: Brynn Quick in conversation with Emily Farrell (17/07/2024)
Episode 25: Life in a New Language, Pt 5 – Monolingual Mindset: Brynn Quick in conversation with Loy Lising (11/07/2024)
Episode 24: Language policy at an abortion clinic: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ella van Hest (05/07/2024)
Episode 23: Life in a New Language, Pt 4 – Parenting: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shiva Motaghi-Tabari (03/07/2024)
Episode 22: Life in a New Language, Pt 3 – African migrants: Brynn Quick in conversation with Vera Williams Tetteh (27/06/2024)
Episode 21: Life in a New Language, Pt 2 –Work: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ingrid Piller (19/06/2024)
Episode 20: Life in a New Language, Pt 1 – Identities: Brynn Quick in conversation with Donna Butorac (12/06/2024)
Episode 19: Because Internet: Brynn Quick in conversation with Gretchen McCulloch (03/06/2024)
Episode 18: Between Deaf and hearing cultures: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jessica Kirkness (01/06/2024)
Episode 17: The Rise of English: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Rosemary Salomone (21/05/2024)
Episode 16: Community Languages Schools Transforming Education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Joe Lo Bianco (07/05/2024)
Episode 15: Shanghai Multilingualism Alliance: Yixi (Isabella) Qiu in conversation with Yongyan Zheng (02/05/2024)
Episode 14: Multilingual Commanding Urgency from Garbage to COVID-19: Brynn Quick in conversation with Michael Chestnut (27/04/2024)
Episode 13: Making sense of “Bad English:” Brynn Quick in conversation with Elizabeth Peterson (13/04/2024)
Episode 12: History of Modern Linguistics: Ingrid Piller in conversation with James McElvenny (10/04/2024)
Episode 11: 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jasna Novak Milić (08/04/2024
Episode 10: Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital: Brynn Quick in conversation with Erin Mulpur, Houston Methodist Hospital (26/03/2024)
Episode 9: Interpreting service provision is good value for money. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jim Hlavac (19/03/2024)
Episode 8: What does it mean to govern a multilingual society well? Hanna Torsh in conversation with Alexandra Grey (22/02/2024)
Episode 7: What can Australian Message Sticks teach us about literacy? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Piers Kelly (21/02/2024; originally published 2020)
Episode 6: How to teach TESOL ethically in an English-dominant world. Carla Chamberlin and Mak Khan in conversation with Ingrid Piller (20/02/2024; originally published 2020)
Episode 5: Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (19/02/2024; originally published 2021)
Episode 4: Language makes the place. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Adam Jaworski (18/02/2024; originally published 2022)
Episode 3: Linguistic diversity in education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Ingrid Gogolin (17/02/2024; originally published 2023)
Episode 2: Translanguaging: Loy Lising in conversation with Ofelia García (16/02/2024; originally published 2023)
Episode 1: Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (15/02/2024)

Language on the Move

Islam in English

References

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Romani Grassroots Language Learning

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Learning Languages on Social Media

Reference

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Transcript (added 02/06/2026)

The cost of language juggling

How interpreting drains the bilingual mind

Working memory, working hard

Putting the question to the test

The key finding: interpreting blocks learning gains

What about other cognitive skills?

Implications understanding interpreting and cognition at large

Further questions and a takeaway

Reference

Author bios

Dialoguing through prohibitions and transgressions

Introduction

The first observations

A commanding tone appears

From commands to warnings

The dialogue continues

Reference

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Bilingual writers and corpus analysis

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“Broken Arabic” between mockery and commercialization

Es fi: ‘Broken’ Arabic in the Gulf

Pidgin as a contact language

Gulf Pidgin Arabic: Evolution and Transformation

GPA as a Tool in Entertainment and Commercialization

GPA between mockery and commercialization

The (un)imagined work of linguistic inclusion

References

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Kurdish Heritage Language Education

Kurds and Kurdish Language Teaching in Germany

Conceptualizing Resistance Habitus

Resistance Habitus and Beyond

Older adults learning English in Berlin

References

Transcript

Teaching English Pronunciation

Suggestions for further reading

Transcript (added April 14, 2026)

Summer school and conference: Literacies for Social Participation

About the Summer School “Literacies for Social Participation” (July 20-31, 2026)

About the conference “Literacies for Social Participation” (July 27-28, 2026)

How to apply

Found in Translation

About the book

Related content

Transcript

How I worked as a foreign accent coach

Human voice – between sound and identity

A different kind of accent training

What makes Spanish sound German

Making the accent sound real

From correction to creation

Additional resources

Digital mutual aid among migrants, in the shadow of ChatGPT

Migrants’ search for information

Enter ChatGPT

Mutual aid with and against machines

Where to next?

Reference

Language on the Move Podcast wins Talkley Award 2025

List of episodes to date