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.

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.  

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. 

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 (to follow soon)

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.

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.

Related content

• Grey, A. (2025a). Podcast Episode 63: Australia’s National Indigenous Languages Survey: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Zoe Avery
• Grey, A. (2025b). Making linguistic diversity visible in Parliament
• Jacobsen, B. (2017). Aboriginal languages matter – but to who?
• Kavanagh, B. (2018). Are Aboriginal languages really useless in the workplace?

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!

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 <eu> 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.

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

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

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

2025 has been incredibly busy for us. Apart from everything we do in the real world, we’ve published 64 blog posts in 2025 – that’s more than one post per week. Twenty-four of these were podcast episodes – that’s one podcast episode per fortnight.

A lot of hard work goes into running Language on the Move at this level, and I am so grateful to the team who keep this indie publication project going: the contributors, the readers, the behind-the-scenes support from our webmaster, and the financial and administrative support from the Humboldt Foundation, the University of Hamburg, and Macquarie University.

At a time when the wider world seems to get darker and darker, having so much to be thankful for is an amazing gift; and the best way to express gratitude is to pay it forward, as I reflected in May when I accepted an Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship Award:

Open embedded content from YouTube

Language on the Move 2025 in numbers

As every year, we share a list of all our Language on the Move publications below. We start with the highlights followed by the full list.

This is what Spotify tells us about the Language-on-the-Move Podcast

Top 10 most read blog posts

1. Alexander-von-Humboldt-Professorship Awards 2025
2. New Year’s Visit
3. Hiring a dream team in linguistic diversity and social participation
4. Alexandra Grey, Making linguistic diversity visible in Parliament
5. Gerald Roche, Language access rights are vital
6. Laura Smith-Khan, What’s new in Language and Law in Education and Training
7. Allegra Holmes à Court, How judges think about language
8. Rosemary Salomone, English in the crossfire of US immigration
9. Nashid Nigar and Alex Kostogriz, Immigrant Teachers are reshaping English education
10. Laura Smith-Khan, Learning to speak like a lawyer

Top 10 most downloaded podcast episodes

1. Podcast Episode 42: Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche (14/01/2025)
2. Podcast Episode 57: The Social Impact of Automating Translation: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ester Monzó-Nebot (03/08/2025)
3. Podcast Episode 58: Erased voices and unspoken heritage: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Zozan Balci (20/08/2025)
4. Podcast Episode 61: Cold Rush: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Sari Pietikainen (09/09/2025)
5. Podcast Episode 63: Australia’s National Indigenous Languages Survey: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Zoe Avery (28/10/2025)
6. Podcast Episode 53: Accents, complex identities, and politics: Brynn Quick in conversation with Nicole Holliday (12/06/2025)
7. Podcast Episode 41: Why teachers turn to AI: Brynn Quick in conversation with Sue Ollerhead (09/01/2025)
8. Podcast Episode 56: Multilingual practices and monolingual mindsets: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (18/07/2025)
9. Podcast Episode 54: Chinese in Qatar: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Sara Hillman (19/06/2025)
10. Podcast Episode 59: Intercultural Communication – Now in the 3^rd edition: Loy Lising in conversation with Ingrid Piller (26/08/2025)

This is what Spotify tells us about the Language-on-the-Move Podcast

Please make sure to subscribe!

As search engines and social media continue to erode as drivers of Internet traffic, having a solid subscriber base has become ever more important. Please support us by encouraging your students, colleagues and friends to subscribe to Language on the Move in the ‘Newsletter subscription’ box in the footer below.

You can also follow us on BlueSky, connect with individual member of the Language-on-the-Move team on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast in the podcast app of your choice.

December

1. Language on the Move Podcast wins Talkley Award 2025 [added on Dec 30, 2025]
2. Jemima Rillera Kempster, Centering people in technology-mediated communication – a report about a fantastic symposium dedicated to new technologies in intercultural communication, which we hosted at Macquarie University on December 8.
3. Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2026 – now in its ninth year! Make sure to join us in this reading challenge!
4. Sophie Munte, ALAA 2025 at Charles Darwin University

Highlight
Brynn Quick had her first academic article published. This is part of Brynn’s PhD research, which investigates how medical receptionists deal with patients who have little or no English. This first publication is a policy analysis but the findings from the ethnographic study are bound to be even more exciting – watch this space!
First publication is always so sweet. Congratulations, Brynn!
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

This is what Spotify tells us about the Language-on-the-Move Podcast

November

4. Sara Hillman, Aishwaryaa Kannan, and Tim Tizon, From “Howdy” to “Hayakom”: A shifting university linguascape
5. Larissa Cosyns, Shared Reading Day 2025
6. Podcast Episode 64: Your Languages are your superpower! Agnes Bodis in conversation with Cindy Valdez (17/11/2025)
7. A major task of 2025 was to assemble the Humboldt Professorship team of three doctoral and three postdoctoral researchers: meet them here.
8. Andrea Pešková, Native listening and learning new sounds

October

9. Podcast Episode 63: Australia’s National Indigenous Languages Survey: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Zoe Avery (28/10/2025)
10. In this post, we introduced the newly established World Education Research Association (WERA) International Research Network (IRN) “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” – please consider joining if you are conducting research in this area.
11. We are still looking for Sydney-based teachers to participate in a research survey about “Language brokering in schools.”
12. Event: New technologies in Intercultural Communication – pre-event program and abstract; the post-event report is here.

Highlight
Ana Sofia Bruzon finished her PhD this year. Graduation will be in April next year when you will hear more about her work on “Technology and Transnational Bilingual Parenting: A Double-Edged Sword.” For now, congratulations, Dr Bruzon!

September

13. Ana Sofia Bruzon, Why “critical” use of AI in education might mean refusal
14. Podcast Episode 62: Migration is about every human challenge you can have: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shaun Tan (17/09/2025)
15. Podcast Episode 61: Cold Rush: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Sari Pietikainen (09/09/2025)
16. Podcast Episode 60: Sexual predation and English language teaching: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Vaughan Rapatahana (02/09/2025)

Brynn Quick published her first academic article this year (Image credit: Language on the Move)

August

17. Podcast Episode 59: Intercultural Communication – Now in the 3^rd edition: Loy Lising in conversation with Ingrid Piller (26/08/2025)
18. Podcast Episode 58: Erased voices and unspoken heritage: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Zozan Balci (20/08/2025)
19. Brynn Quick, How to manage your supervisor
20. Podcast Episode 57: The Social Impact of Automating Translation: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ester Monzó-Nebot (03/08/2025)

Highlight
Our team is making a growing contribution to multilingual healthcare, including these two new publications:
Marinaro, N. (2025). Operationalising linguistic unease for the evaluation of language policies in healthcare. Revista de Llengua i Dret(84), 73-93. https://doi.org/10.58992/rld.i84.2025.4492
Li, J., Luo, M., Cho, J., & Zhang, J. (2025). The double-edged sword of language: empowerment and precarity for interpreters in a Chinese border hospital. Multilingua. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/multi-2025-0168

July

21. Alexandra Grey, Who’s new in Law and Language?
22. Kristen Martin, LLIRN 6th Anniversary Workshop – our partner, the “Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Research Network” turned 6 this year. We celebrate with them the power of networking!
23. Podcast Episode 56: Multilingual practices and monolingual mindsets: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (18/07/2025)
24. Larissa Cosyns, Dr Loy Lising spreads a multilingual mindset
25. Humanities’ cuts pose existential threat to Australia’s capabilities
26. 

    Nicole Marinaro sharing news of her latest publication (Image credit: Language on the Move)

    Shanghai Magnolia Pujiang Talent Program Success

27. Alexandra Grey, Making linguistic diversity visible in Parliament

Highlight
The recruitment process for the fellows on the Humboldt Professorship team “Linguistic Diversity and Social Participation Across the Lifespan” took up much of 2025.
The interviews with 20 shortlisted candidates were one of the highlights of the year. We wish we could have hired all these talented young researchers. It was such a privilege to get to know them and we wish to acknowledge them, too, and wish them well!

June

28. Podcast Episode 55: Improving quality of care for patients with limited English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Leah Karliner (26/06/2025)
29. Podcast Episode 54: Chinese in Qatar: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Sara Hillman (19/06/2025)
30. Emily Pacheco, Children of Migrant Deaf Adults
31. Podcast Episode 53: Accents, complex identities, and politics: Brynn Quick in conversation with Nicole Holliday (12/06/2025)
32. Podcast Episode 52: Is beach safety signage fit for purpose? Agnes Bodis in conversation with Masaki Shibata (05/06/2025)

May

33. Alexandra Grey, Legal Corpus Linguistics
34. Tazin Abdullah, Research participants needed to evaluate online multilingual communications
35. Allegra Holmes à Court, How judges think about language
36. Hiring a dream team in linguistic diversity and social participation
37. Alexander-von-Humboldt-Professorship Awards 2025
38. 

    Ana was awarded her doctorate this year and is now Dr Bruzon. An occasion to celebrate with her supervision team (Image credit: Language on the Move)

    Laura Smith-Khan, What’s new in Language and Law in Education and Training

Highlight
In May we had much to celebrate: The Humboldt-Professorship Award Ceremony in Berlin was complemented with an inspiring “Welcome Symposium” hosted the Literacy in Diversity Settings (LiDS) Research Center.

April

39. Podcast Episode 51: The case for ASL instruction for hearing heritage signers: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Su Kyong Isakson (28/04/2025)
40. Podcast Episode 50: Researching language and digital communication: Brynn Quick in conversation with Christian Ilbury (22/04/2025)
41. Podcast Episode 49: Gestures and emblems: Brynn Quick in conversation with Lauren Gawne (14/04/2025)
42. Podcast Episode 48: Lingua Napoletana and language oppression: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Massimiliano Canzanella (07/04/2025)
43. 

    The bulletin board of the Literacy in Diversity Settings (LiDS) Research Center was filled with announcements for guest lectures throughout the year (Image credit: Language on the Move)

    Laura Smith-Khan, Learning to speak like a lawyer

Highlight
Throughout the year, we welcomed an amazing group of visitors to the University of Hamburg, as part of two lecture series: the Lunch Lectures of the Literacy in Diversity Settings (LiDS) Research Center and as part of the public lecture series “Everyday Multilingualism.”

March

44. Podcast Episode 47: Teaching international students: Brynn Quick in conversation with Agnes Bodis and Jing Fan (31/03/2025)
45. Gerald Roche, Language access rights are vital
46. Rosemary Salomone, English in the crossfire of US immigration
47. Nashid Nigar and Alex Kostogriz, Immigrant Teachers are reshaping English education
48. Podcast Episode 46: Intercultural competence in the digital age: Brynn Quick in conversation with Amy McHugh (12/03/2025)
49. Podcast Episode 45: How does multilingual law-making work: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Karen McAuliffe (05/03/2025)

Emily Pacheco graduated from her MRes with a thesis about the language brokering experiences of the hearing children of migrant Deaf adults (Image credit: Language on the Move)

February

50. Alexandra Grey, Making Zhuang language visible
51. Podcast Episode 44: Educational inequality in Fijian higher education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Prashneel Goundar (25/02/2025)
52. Tazin Abdullah, Lifelong learning from academic mentorship
53. Brynn Quick and Tazin Abdullah, Seven reasons why we love hosting podcasts
54. Kristen Martin: Closing the Gap Languages Target: An update
55. Emma Genovese, Language and inclusion in law
56. Sunjoo Kim, More than meets the eye
57. Celeste Rodriguez Louro, Automating silence?

Highlight
The 3rd edition of Ingrid Piller’s textbook Intercultural Communication (Edinburgh University Press, 1st ed. 2011) was published this year. The 3rd edition includes a new chapter in intercultural crisis communication based on our team’s research on multilingual communications during the Covid-19 pandemic.

January

58. 

    “Intercultural Communication” is now out in the 3rd edition – with a new chapter on crisis communication in a linguistically and culturally diverse world

    Ingrid Piller, New Year’s Visit

59. Rami Luisto, Local culture mirrored in dog signs
60. Podcast Episode 43: Multilingual crisis communication: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Li Jia (22/01/2025)
61. Anna Dillon and Sarah Hopkyns, Visit to Abrahamic Family House
62. Podcast Episode 42: Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche (14/01/2025)
63. Podcast Episode 41: Why teachers turn to AI: Brynn Quick in conversation with Sue Ollerhead (09/01/2025)
64. Podcast Episode 40: Language Rights in a Changing China: Brynn Quick in conversation with Alexandra Grey (01/01/2025)

Language-on-the-Move Podcast episodes 1-39

A full list of pre-2025 Language-on-the-Move podcast episodes is available here.

Previous annual reports

1. Language on the Move 2024
2. Language on the Move 2023
3. Language on the Move 2022
4. Language on the Move 2021
5. Language on the Move 2020
6. Language on the Move 2019
7. Language on the Move 2018
8. Language on the Move 2017
9. Language on the Move 2016
10. Language on the Move 2015
11. Language on the Move 2014
12. Language on the Move 2013
13. Language on the Move 2012
14. Language on the Move 2011
15. Language on the Move 2010
16. Language on the Move 2009

Group photo, New Technologies in Intercultural Communication Symposium (Image credit: Language on the Move)

On a crack-of-dawn flight early Monday morning last week, I flew to Sydney for the day to attend “New Technologies in Intercultural Communication“, a symposium hosted by the Language on the Move Team at Macquarie University.

The presentations explored intercultural communication ranging from the use of digital technologies by elderly migrants and their families (Dr Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto), GenAI as digital shadow care support by international students (Dr Julia Kantek and Dr Thilakshi Mallawa Arachchi), language learning tools by transnational parents for heritage language maintenance (Dr Ana Sofia Bruzon), learning technologies in primary science classrooms in Australia and Korea (Dr Hye-Eun Chu), and social media in language learning (Dr Yeong-Ju Lee). And to think the new technology promising proficiency and fluency “back in my day” (I find myself relating to a joke Professor Piller made about technological development) relied on cassette tapes at the language lab!

The symposium showcased a fascinating catalogue of digital technologies enabling intercultural communication. We heard about high school students in an Australian classroom connecting with Korean students to hypothesize why the seasons differ between their two countries. We heard of transnational parents employing creative ways to encourage their children to connect to their heritage languages, especially to communicate with family members. It was also intriguing to hear how social media platforms such as Tiktok offer features such as “duet”, creating opportunities for speakers of different languages to collaborate and co-construct meaning.

While we heard of these novel and exciting ways technology can be used to enhance intercultural communication, each presenter emphasized the human element in communication. I could not help but think about how language learning tends to be marketed as fun, brain-boosting, or career-enhancing. And yet, language in human relationships is messy, and missteps happen! Even so, whether you already speak the language or are learning an additional one, I believe empathy and deeper understanding are borne out of the struggle to communicate and truly connect with each other.

The most striking point for me was that some uses of technology actually stem from institutional failures or social exclusion, leaving the vulnerable members of our society even more marginalized. Earvin reminded us that although much of the discussion seems to be on the importance of digital literacy skills, many still lack basic access to technological infrastructure that we often take for granted in urban Australia. Julia and Thilakshi’s presentation highlighted the isolation that international students experience, turning to GenAI for immediate advice on legal matters, polishing their resumes, or easing homesickness. Ana pointed to multilingual parents’ struggles of heritage language maintenance in the face of pervasive monolingual mindset across Australian schooling and public discourse.

As I flew back to Brisbane that evening, reflecting on the presentations, discussion questions, and conversations I had with fellow attendees strengthened my resolve to keep pushing for equity in language learning and digital access.

We need to keep asking: How do we use technology for intercultural communication? Who gets left out? And how can we keep working towards digital and social inclusion?

I want to thank UQ School of Education for making it possible for me to attend the symposium, and to Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, Dr Loy Lising, Dr Ana Sofia Bruzon and the Language on the Move team for bringing together a rich program and creating the opportunity to hear from and exchange ideas with other scholars.

“Read – Learn – Grow – Be Kind” – this street library says it all (Image credit: Language on the Move)

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge 2026 is out!

Now in its ninth year, the goals of our reading challenge have remained broadly unchanged since 2018: to encourage reading in the discipline and beyond, and to make linguistics reading fun.

These goals have become even more relevant, due to two converging trends:

On the one hand, book reading is in freefall internationally while, on the other hand, screen time is rising exponentially.

If you think this is just a case of one medium replacing another, you are unfortunately mistaken.

In its most prevalent form – social media use – screen time has negative effects on our ability to concentrate, to think deeply and critically, and to develop empathy. These negative effects are now so widely felt that their popular designation “brain rot” was selected as the Oxford Word of the Year 2024.

Book reading, by contrast, is the antidote to brain rot. Book reading challenges us to concentrate and to deeply engage with an extended argument or a narrative universe.

To train your brain you need to read long form. You can’t outsource your reading to AI-generated summaries, either.

Furthermore, many of our readers are (aspiring) researchers and Stephen King’s advice in On Writing is valid in our profession, too:

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge is here for you develop, enjoy and extend the habits and pleasures of reading, particularly in the field of linguistic diversity and social participation. For each month of 2026, we are suggesting a category and one of our team members offers a recommendation in that category.

Enjoy and feel free to add your own recommendations in the “Comments” section below.

And don’t forget that, in addition to the categories and recommendations suggested here, the Language-on-the-Move Podcast will also continue to bring you regular reading ideas in 2026.

Happy Reading!

Previous Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenges

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2025
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2023
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

January: a book about new technologies in intercultural communication

Recommendation: Cabalquinto, E. C. B. (2022). (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media. Oxford University Press.

Earvin’s presentation about the myth of digital inclusion of older migrants in Australia was one of the highlights of our recent symposium devoted to “New technologies in intercultural communication.”
Whether you missed out on the symposium or want to deepen your engagement with Earvin’s work, (Im)mobile Homes offers a gripping exploration of the use of smartphones, social media, and apps in the family and care practices of transnational families. (Ingrid Piller)

February: a book about settler colonialism

Recommendation: Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press.

This book completely reshaped my understanding of Indigenous politics, border, nation, and sovereignty in North America. It also made me reflect on my reliance on the extensive literature on Indigenous cultures and languages – ritual speech, performances, tales, or beliefs – produced over the last century by anthropologists and linguists, most of which are dismissive of the scene of dispossession, the complicated history of places, or simply what people say about themselves and their struggles. (Gegentuul Baioud)

March: a book stirs that your social imagination

Recommendation: Bregman, R. (2017). Utopia for realists. Bloomsbury.

In this book, Rutger Bregman stirs our imagination by inviting us to re-think the way modern society is organized and by offering us a glimpse into a potentially better future for all. He calls for a new vision that would more effectively address current global challenges such as increasing inequalities or the progressing automation of labor.
But what does he exactly propose?
In short, a 15-hour work week, universal basic income and open borders. The author invites you on a journey between time and spaces with real examples of communities that have taken utopia seriously and have started to experiment with it. (Olga Vlasova)

April: A book about the philosophy of language

Recommendation: Le Guin, U. (1974). The Dispossessed. HarperCollins.

Le Guin constantly fluctuates the reader´s receptors between the old and the new, roots and progress, personal and professional, politics and philosophy. We follow the life and work of a physicist who travels back and forth between two historically connected but contrasting planets and political systems.
The protagonist commits to seeking the truth not only by understanding his own context of origin but also by defying it; how do we find our truth? And is it ever objective? The novel is considered a post-feminist utopian fiction raising discussions on whether linguistic innovation is necessary for conceptual change.
A story of intergalactic migration trying to answer the long-standing question: to whom does knowledge belong? (Mara Kyrou)

May: A book about the experience of growing up as the child of a migrant

Recommendation 1: Vuong, O. (2019). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin.

Vietnamese-American history, language, and generational trauma come together in the form of a poetic letter with utterances such as “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.” Dedicated to someone who will never see it: the author’s mother, who never learned how to read.
Through the eyes of a young man named Little Dog discovering his homosexuality in a space for undocumented immigrants, this book tells the story of a Vietnamese immigrant family in the US and their complex relationship with the English language. It chronicles their migration history escaping the atrocities of war, the fragile family dynamics that emerged from that experience, and the love for words that connects the writer with himself, while ironically separating him from his mother. (Juan Felipe Sánchez Guzmán)

Recommendation 2: Toxische Pommes. (2024). Ein schönes Ausländerkind. Zsolnay.

Ein Schönes Ausländerkind is a fictionalised autobiography of the author’s childhood, after her family fled to Austria due to the Yugoslav Wars. The book made me laugh a lot, as the author (who writes under the pseudonym she uses to post satirical sketches online) pokes fun at the many absurdities of migrant life. But I also found it very powerful in its depiction of a messy, painful, but loving father-daughter relationship where the adult struggles to learn the local language, leading to child language brokering. (Jenia Yudytska)

June: A book about narrative research in a migration context

Recommendation: Stevenson, Patrick (2017). Language and migration in a multilingual metropolis: Berlin Lives. Palgrave Macmillan.

This book offers a highly engaging and innovative exploration of Berlin’s multilingualism through personal migration narratives. Working ethnographically, the researcher situates his analysis in a single shared apartment in Neukölln, using the linguistic repertoires and biographical trajectories of its five residents—a Russian-speaking woman, two Polish-speakers, a Kurdish-speaking man, and a Vietnamese-speaking woman—to demonstrate how migration, identity and sociolinguistic practice intersect in everyday life.
The book portrays the apartment as a microcosm of the city’s wider linguistic landscape, tracing how individuals navigate language ideologies, negotiate belonging, and construct social relations within a complex metropolitan environment. (Martin Serif Derince)

July: A book exploring linguistic diversity from multiple perspectives

Recommendation: Aguilar Gil, Y. E. (2020). Ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística. Almadia.

Language loss, resistance, indigenous literature(s), prejudice, identity, autonyms and exonyms – these are just some of the topics discussed in this collection of essays by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, an Ayuujk linguist, writer, translator, and activist. An interactive work edited by the author’s colleagues, this book presents texts written for an online magazine over several years alongside links to related social media posts, as well as a speech given by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil at the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and a closing epilogue by herself. A great read – refreshing and profoundly reflexive – for anyone interested in linguistic diversity in Mexico and beyond. (Nicole Marinaro)

August: A book about translation and interpreting

Recommendation: Shuttleworth, M., & Daghigh, A. J. (Eds.). (2024). Translation and Neoliberalism. Springer.

This book examines how neoliberalism shapes translation and interpreting across diverse regions, focusing on four themes: market-driven translation and interpreting curricula, policy impacts on language services, technology’s role in translation and interpreting markets, and intersections of translation and neoliberalism at a discourse level. It offers critical insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers into the socio-economic forces transforming translation studies, industries and curricula. (Jinhyun Cho)

September: A book about digital migration studies

Recommendation: Leurs, Koen, & Ponzanesi, Sandra (Eds.). (2025). Doing Digital Migration Studies: Theories and practices of the everyday. Routledge.

This open-access edited volume serves as an introduction to ‘digital migration studies’, an umbrella term for research on migration in relation to digital technologies. The articles examine topics ranging from migrant agency on TikTok to the use of automatic dialect recognition during the asylum procedure.
Although most contributions don’t explicitly focus on language, the breadth of topics and methodologies covered still sparked ideas for new research directions for me as a linguist. (Jenia Yudytska)

October: A book about an under-recognized diaspora

Recommendation: Bald, V. (2013). Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America. Harvard University Press.

Film and other information: http://bengaliharlem.com

Historical Harlem, New York does not conjure up images of South Asians going about their daily lives, but Bengali Harlem tells us the story of immigrants who arrived from the 1800s onwards from the Indian subcontinent.
This book focuses on migrants who were ethnolinguistically Bengalis (from what was known as Bengal) and came as merchants, seamen, or laborers to be absorbed into working class America. In the face of racism and discrimination, they built homes and lives, leaving behind generations of Americans with Bengali cultural and linguistic heritage. (Tazin Abdullah)

November: A book of migrant poetry

Recommendation: Saleh, S. M., Syed, Z., & Younus, M. (Eds.). (2025). Ritual: A Collection of Muslim Australian Poetry. Sweatshop Literacy Movement.

Billed as “evocative, unsettling, and unafraid,” this rich collection of Muslim Australian poetry offers a rich treasure trove of poems to come back to and savour again and again. The poems invite the reader to not only reflect on the diversity of Muslim identities but what it means to live on Indigenous land as a designated migrant within a White settler colony. (Ingrid Piller)

December: Cozy fiction for when you need a break from your research

Recommendation: Arden, K. (2019). The Winternight Trilogy. Del Rey.

I’m now 1.5 years into my PhD and I find that, now more than ever, I need good fiction to read after a long day of academic reading/writing. The Winternight Trilogy is set in the harsh winters of a folkloric version of medieval Russia and follows Vasya, a young woman whose difficult peasant life collides with those of chyerti, the demons and devils of Slavic folklore.
The settings and creatures described in this trilogy are nothing short of magical, and reading the prose makes me feel like I am tucked away snug in a winter cabin with a roaring fire and hot chocolate.
A lesson that I am learning along my PhD journey is that it is imperative to nourish myself while I work so hard, and reading these books is part of that nourishment for me. Knowing that I have the winter snows and rich folklore of these books to look forward to at the end of the day helps me to persevere through the daily ups and downs of PhD life. (Brynn Quick)

Group photo of all awards recipients at ALAA Conference 2025 (Image credit: ALAA)

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the 2025 Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) Conference, held at Charles Darwin University in Garramilla/Darwin on Larrakia Country from November 17-19. The conference was devoted to the topic ‘Language and the Interface of Mono-, Multi-, and Translingual Mindsets’ and brought together Australian and international scholars.

The 3-day conference in a tropical setting offered many inspiring and new experiences and an excellent platform for networking, collaboration and the exchange of ideas.

Inspiring Keynotes

Keynote lectures delivered by Shoshana Dreyfus (University of Wollongong) and Robyn Ober (Batchelor Institute) left a great impression on me.

Shoshana spoke about linguistic strategies in activism. She presented a positive discourse analysis unraveling effective activist discourse in letters to the minister. Based on such a letter she had written herself, her talk showed how activists rally support. Her compassionate talk shed light on different registers to make change and become an ally for non-verbal people.

Robyn introduced the audience to beautiful metaphors of linguistic diversity and exchange in Indigenous Australian education. Her description of “slipping and sliding” between languages gave insights into multilingual practices.

The audience was particularly touched by the metaphor of language as a guitar: just as an instrument with multiple strings produces more melodious and harmonious tunes, multilingual people have more than one string to their bow, which creates greater harmony when joined.

Encountering Indigenous Languages and Cultures

The Macquarie University team at ALAA (Image credit: Sophie Munte)

As a PhD student from the University of Hamburg in Germany who currently spends time at Macquarie University in Sydney as part of my joint PhD degree across the two institutions, the conference offered me the privilege to learn about Indigenous languages and cultures.

Darwin offers a setting where the fact that Australia is Indigenous land is much more palpable than in Sydney. Together with Robyn’s keynote and other talks, this opened my eyes to Australia’s rich diversity of Indigenous cultures and languages.

Presenting my research

The conference provided me with the opportunity to present first results from my PhD research on the governance of parent-school communication in linguistically diverse schools in Hamburg and Sydney.

Employing policy analysis, surveys and interviews, my research explores the use of child language brokering as a way to bridge language barriers between parents and schools. The international comparison will shed light on how institutions in different national contexts deal with their shared responsibility to communicate with parents. Ultimately, the research will contribute to improved policies and teacher training so that all parents can fully participate in the education of their children, regardless of linguistic background.

Grateful to ALAA for the support

Attending the 2025 ALAA conference has been a wonderful opportunity for me. I am particularly grateful for the funding support I received through the ALAA Postgraduate Conference Scholarship. This scholarship, which was awarded to six higher degree research students, including myself, financially supports the conference attendance of HDR researchers.

I also commend the ALAA Higher Degree Research representatives for creating such an inclusive and welcoming event: each evening they organized meet-ups for all HDR candidates at the conference, including a language themed trivia night – all of which helped to establish a supportive community among us HDR students and build connections that will endure beyond the conference.

Figure 1: Transitional “Hayakom at HBKU” sign marking HBKU’s presence in the TAMUQ building (picture taken by authors)

Walking into the Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) building today feels different from just a year ago. As part of an ongoing project, several students and I (Sara) have been documenting the visual and linguistic changes taking place across the TAMUQ building in Education City, Qatar. The university’s traditional greeting Howdy, its maroon banners, and the familiar Aggie insignia (the shared nickname and identity of Texas A&M students and alumni) are still visible, yet they are beginning to lose their dominance. In their place, visitors are now welcomed by new blue-and-white signs displaying a translingual message: “Hayakom at HBKU.” The Gulf Arabic word hayakom, meaning “welcome,” has become increasingly prominent on posters, banners, and orientation booths. Although much of this signage is not yet permanently installed, the shift is already evident.

This evolving dynamic from Howdy to Hayakom reflects more than just a sudden change in branding. It marks a shift in Qatar’s higher education landscape, as the U.S. branch campus TAMUQ, part of Qatar Foundation (QF) and located in Education City, prepares to close in 2028 while its fellow QF institution, the homegrown Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), gradually assumes its facilities and students. The closure decision followed a surprise February 2024 vote by the Board of Regents of Texas A&M University’s main campus in College Station, Texas, which cited regional instability and a renewed focus on its U.S. mission. Soon after that announcement, the three of us began photographing every Texas A&M emblem, sign, and display in the building, creating a record to track the changes over time and to preserve a piece of the campus’s history. Over the past year, we have watched the visual culture of the space shift in real time. Through signage, slogans, and colors, the linguistic landscape of the building and the identities it projects tell a story of institutional transformation, cultural localization, and shifting ideologies of belonging.

The educationscape as a site of change

Scholars of linguistic landscapes often remind us that signs do more than convey information; they materialize power, ideology, identity, and values in public space (Ahmad, 2022; Hillman & Ahmad, 2024). The same can be said for educationscapes, where universities use visuals, language, and architecture to communicate identities, values and affiliations (Krompák et al., 2022).

Figure 2:  Howdy signage inside the TAMUQ building representing Aggie identity and transnational continuity (picture taken by authors)

At TAMUQ, Howdy has reigned supreme for more than twenty years. As the official greeting of Texas A&M, faculty, staff, and students at the main campus use it to welcome one another and to greet campus visitors as a sign of Aggie hospitality. On the Doha campus, Howdy appears in signage, emails, and posters for Student Affairs events such as “Howdy Week.” Its cheerful informality reinforced continuity between College Station and its branch campus thousands of miles away.

Now, however, Howdy coexists with Hayakom. HBKU has introduced its own greeting, one that foregrounds the local linguistic and cultural context. HBKU Student Affairs has also begun cultivating its own traditions: “Hayakom Tuesday,” echoing TAMUQ’s “Howdy Week,” and “Blue Thursday,” where students are encouraged to “wear blue, show blue, scream blue!”—a parallel to TAMUQ’s maroon-and-white Spirit Thursdays where Aggies are encouraged to “embrace the maroon and white.”

This bilingual, bicultural overlap reflects the liminal moment both institutions currently inhabit. TAMUQ has not yet closed, and many of its students and faculty still identify strongly with Aggie traditions. At the same time, HBKU is asserting itself through new rituals, slogans, and events.

From maroon to blue: Rebranding space and identity

Alongside slogans, colors play an equally prominent role in communicating institutional belonging. TAMUQ’s maroon and white palette linked it visually to its U.S. home campus, reinforcing transnational identity and Aggie pride. Walking through the corridors meant walking through a transplanted Texas brandscape, complete with photos of College Station landmarks.

Figures 3a and 3b: HBKU “Blue Thursday” and TAMUQ “Spirit Thursday” posters on Instagram (screenshots taken by authors)

Today, that palette is fading. Blue and white, the colors of HBKU, now dominate new signage, orientation banners, and student activities. Cushions in the front entrance lobby now feature HBKU’s blue and white geometric logo, and the hallways are lined with images of the Minaretein building (meaning two minarets), HBKU’s signature architectural complex that includes both a mosque and academic colleges, replacing many of the Texas-centric visuals that once dominated the space.

The color shift is more than aesthetic. It signals a deliberate rebranding that seeks to reshape not only institutional identity but also the sense of belonging for students, faculty, and visitors.

Signs of state and leadership

The changes are also visible in the presence of Qatar’s leadership. At the building’s entrance, portraits of the Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and his father, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, now hang prominently. Such state imagery was absent during the TAMUQ era, when visual emphasis rested on Aggie traditions and the global prestige of Texas A&M. Their presence today highlights HBKU’s identity as QF’s homegrown university and its role in advancing national priorities. The walls themselves remind visitors that HBKU is a Qatari institution, rooted in the state’s vision for education and innovation.

Bilingualism and the Arabic language protection law

Another notable change is that TAMUQ operated under a cross-border partnership agreement with QF and was not required to maintain bilingual signage. As a result, its displays were often inconsistent, with some appearing only in English and others in both English and Arabic. However, HBKU complies more with Qatar’s 2019 Arabic Language Protection Law (Law No. 7 of 2019 on the Protection of the Arabic Language). This law requires Arabic to be the primary language on all public signage.

In practice, this means HBKU’s official signage is almost always bilingual, with Arabic typically placed above or beside the English text. This layout gives prominence to Arabic while reflecting HBKU’s use of English as its official medium of instruction and as a shared language among its diverse student body

Figure 4: Portraits of Qatar’s leadership, including the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (left) and the Father Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (right), now displayed at the building’s entrance (picture taken by authors)

The difference is visible, for example, in faculty office nameplates. At TAMUQ, they appeared only in English, whereas at HBKU they are consistently bilingual, with Arabic displayed first. This small but significant shift reflects how language policy is made material in the everyday visual culture of the university.

Belonging and identity in flux

What does it mean for students, faculty, and staff to inhabit this shifting educationscape? This is a question we are currently exploring in our ongoing research about the transition from TAMUQ to HBKU. For Aggies, watching maroon and Howdy fade from view may bring a sense of sadness, as if traditions and ties to the wider Aggie network are slowly being eroded. For new students entering through HBKU, however, Hayakom and the visible presence of Qatari leadership may foster a sense of national belonging and legitimacy that TAMUQ, as a foreign branch campus, could perhaps not fully provide.

The transition also brings into focus broader debates about language, identity, and higher education in Qatar. For years, international branch campuses have stood as symbols of global mobility and English-medium internationalization. HBKU, by contrast, is an explicitly Qatari project, though still English-medium. Its bilingual signage acknowledges the centrality of Arabic in public life while retaining English as the dominant academic language. In this sense, the visual and linguistic rebranding of the building does more than mark institutional change; it materializes Qatar’s ongoing negotiation between global aspiration and national affirmation.

From global brand to national–international project

The TAMUQ-to-HBKU shift can be read as part of a wider trend. Around the world, branch campuses have been praised for providing global exposure but also critiqued for being costly, unsustainable, or disconnected from local needs (Bollag, 2024; Kim, 2025). By 2028, TAMUQ will join the growing list of international branch campuses that have either closed or been absorbed into national institutions. Yet this trajectory is not universal. In the Gulf and parts of Asia, other branch campuses continue to expand, supported by government funding and demand for global higher education pathways.

Figures 5a and 5b: TAMUQ English-only office nameplate and HBKU bilingual Arabic–English office nameplate (photos taken by authors)

In this case, the closure decision was not driven by Qatar’s plans but rather by political currents in the United States, where heightened scrutiny of foreign funding and a turn toward isolationism have reshaped attitudes toward international partnerships. Although HBKU is QF’s homegrown university, it was intentionally designed to be both nationally grounded and internationally oriented—an English-medium institution that continues to attract global faculty and students while advancing Qatar’s local educational priorities. The move from Howdy to Hayakom thus signals more than a greeting. It marks a broader shift from borrowed traditions to localized yet globally connected narratives of identity and belonging.

Reading the signs

As universities, like cities, are built through language and signs, paying attention to the educationscape reveals the symbolic and material contours of change. At TAMUQ/HBKU, the coexistence of Howdy and Hayakom, maroon and blue, photos of Aggie landmarks and Minaretein, encapsulates a moment of transition.

These signs remind us that institutional change is not only about policy or governance. It is lived and seen in everyday spaces: on banners, cushions, doorways, and Instagram posts. They invite us to consider how language, color, and imagery make and remake belonging in higher education. For now, both greetings echo in the same hallways. Yet with each new sign and slogan, the balance tilts, signaling which voice will carry forward for now.

References

Ahmad, R. (2022, October 11). Mal Lawwal: Linguistic landscapes of Qatar [Blog post]. Language on the Move. Mal Lawwal: Linguistic landscapes of Qatar – Language on the Move
Bollag, B. (2024, December 31). International branch campuses spread in Mideast amid concerns about costs, impact. Al-Fanar Media. https://www.al-fanarmedia.org/2024/12/international-branch-campuses-spread-in-mideast-amid-concerns-about-costs-impact/
Hillman, S., & Ahmad, R. (2025). Combatting Islamophobia: English in the linguistic landscape of FIFA World Cup 2022. In K. Gallagher (Ed.), World Englishes in the Arab Gulf States. Routledge.
Kim, K. (2025, July 4). Branch campuses and the mirage of demand. SRHE Blog. https://srheblog.com/2025/07/04/branch-campuses-and-the-mirage-of-demand/
Krompák, E., Fernández-Mallat, V., & Meyer, S. (2022). The symbolic value of educationscapes—Expanding the intersection between linguistic landscape and education. In E. Krompák, V. Fernández-Mallat, & S. Meyer (Eds.), Linguistic Landscapes and Educational Spaces (pp. 1–27). Multilingual Matters.
Law No. (7) of 2019 on the Protection of the Arabic Language. (2019). Al Meezan, Qatar Legal Portal. https://www.almeezan.qa/EnglishLaws/Law%20No.%20(7)%20of%202019%20on%20Protection%20of%20the%20Arabic%20Language.pdf

Author bios

Dr. Sara Hillman is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and English at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU). Prior to joining HBKU, she spent nearly a decade at Texas A&M University at Qatar. Her research spans emotions, identity, and (un)belonging in English-medium instruction (EMI) and transnational higher education, World Englishes and sociolinguistics, linguistically and culturally responsive teaching and learning, and language and intercultural communication. Her current research explores the visual signage and symbols of Qatar Foundation’s international branch campuses and the homegrown Hamad Bin Khalifa University and how they project identity, values, and belonging.

Aishwaryaa Kannan is a third-year Electrical and Computer Engineering student at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ). Alongside her studies, she has been deeply engaged in student leadership and research, serving as the Founding President of the Management & Marketing Association and as a student research partner on the campus closure study led by Dr. Sara Hillman. Having experienced the TAMUQ-to-HBKU transition firsthand, she connects personally with the paper’s themes of identity and belonging. Her interests span technology, education, and human connection, and she is passionate about how innovation and culture shape everyday experiences on campus.

Tim Billy Tizon is a third year Electrical and Computer Engineering undergraduate student at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ). In addition to his studies, he has been actively involved in campus life through student leadership and research. He served as Secretary of the Leadership Experience Club for two years and is currently a member of the Management and Marketing Association. He has also participated in research across several disciplines, including communications and machine learning.

(Image credit: © Gert Albrecht für DIE ZEIT, Stiftung Lesen, Deutsche Bahn Stiftung)

Editor’s note: Shared reading – the practice where adults read to children – has many benefits: it improves children’s language and literacy development, as well as their interactive and communicative skills. Additionally, shared reading can be a lot of fun and, like any joint enjoyable activity, strengthens emotional bonds.

In Germany, shared reading is promoted through a dedicated annual “Vorlesetag” (“Shared Reading Day”). In this post, Larissa Cosyns explains more about the event and shares a reading recommendation.

This post was first published on the Literacy in Diversity Settings (LiDS) Research Center website.

***

This year’s “Vorlesetag” (“Shared Reading Day”) will take place today (November 21) under the motto “Shared Reading Speaks Your Language.” The initiative aims to highlight the unifying power of shared reading and show that every language and every voice counts. Let’s use our voices and read together!

If you’re still looking for a suitable book, you’ll find it in the Global Digital Library. As part of the Global Book Alliance, the digital library wants to provide more reading material in underserved languages. Whether it’s video books in Kenyan sign language or first reader books in Bahasa Indonesian, the digital library offers numerous stories.

I would like to recommend this children’s book from the Global Digital Library: “Making Tormo for the Festival“ by Buddha Yonjan Lama.

Have fun reading together!

Related content

• Multiculturalism alive and well in Austria
• Are we killing the joy of reading?
• Lessons learnt from schoolbooks
• Libraries and social inclusion
• Why are academic lectures so weird?

Cindy is passionate about inclusion, helping other educators develop leadership in EAL/D and cater for the academic and wellbeing needs of multilingual learners, including students from refugee backgrounds. She is an author of professional publications, served as President of the Association for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ATESOL) NSW and is Member of the Board of Directors of Primary English Teaching Association of Australia known as PETAA.

Cindy Valdez teaching in Cambodia (Image credit: Cindy Valdez via SBS)

Additional materials

• “They changed me”: Filipina educator on helping refugee students survive peace, SBS Filipino (2023)
• Valdez Adams, C. (2022) “Including” English as and Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) Learners in Your Classroom. Journal of Professional Learning 2

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.

Transcript (to follow soon)

The president of University of Hamburg, Prof Dr Hauke Heekeren, welcomes the new members of Ingrid Piller’s Humboldt Professorship Team

Attentive readers will remember that in May this year we advertised six doctoral and postdoctoral positions to conduct research related to “Linguistic Diversity and Social Participation across the Lifespan” in the Literacy in Diversity Settings (LiDS) Research Center at University of Hamburg, as part of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship awarded to Ingrid Piller.

In response, we received 270 applications. While it was exciting to see that there is so much interest in our work, it was also heart-breaking to have to make so many tough decisions from an amazing pool of highly qualified candidates.

After conducting Zoom and on-campus interviews in July and August, I am now pleased to report that the Dream Team has started their work at the beginning of November. We have six extremely talented and accomplished early career researchers joining the Language-on-the-Move community, and in this post, they are introducing themselves in their own words.

Jenia Yudytska

I’m Jenia Yudytska, a Ukrainian-Austrian postdoc. I did my PhD in computational sociolinguistics at the University of Hamburg, investigating the influence of technological affordances on language in online communication. My current research interest focuses on how migrants use language technologies, particularly machine translation, as a resource in their everyday life. Since 2022, I have also been heavily involved in the organisation of grassroots mutual aid online communities for Ukrainian forced migrants in Austria.

I’m particularly excited for this chance to jump into applied linguistics, and the chance to combine both my love for research and my desire to make a social impact!

Juan Sánchez

¡Hola!

I’m Juan Felipe Sánchez Guzmán, a Colombian student and researcher based in Hamburg. In my home country, I conducted research on gender diversity and language teaching, as well as on the implementation of the Colombian Ministry of Education’s bilingualism programs involving foreign tutors in public institutions within a predominantly monolingual context. Building on my passion for languages, my own migration experience, and those of fellow immigrants, my Master’s research explored the integration of Latinx nurses into the German healthcare system.

I look forward to showcasing through research the values and strengths that multilingual communities bring to education, healthcare, and society as a whole.

Mara Kyrou

My name is Mara Kyrou and I hold an MA degree in Linguistics and Communication from the University of Amsterdam. My Masters research explored language policies, practices and ideologies as perceived by teaching professionals in multilingual non-formal education settings in Greece and the Netherlands. My research interests also include professional and intercultural communication in transnational work contexts, gender theory and theater education. I have also contributed to the design and implementation of language learning programs for students with a (post-)migrant background with international NGOs.

In this research group we are working with (auto-)ethnographies and focusing on globally emerging topics hence we don’t just study things as they are but as we humans are.

Martin Derince

Roj baş!

I am Martin Serif Derince. I carried out my PhD research on Kurdish heritage language education in Germany at the University of Potsdam. I have conducted research and have publications on bilingualism and multilingualism in education, language policy, heritage language education, statelessness, and family multilingualism. After long years of professional work in municipality, non-governmental organizations and community associations dedicated to promoting multilingualism in various contexts, I am excited to explore new terrains in academia, grow together intellectually, and contribute to efforts for social transformation and justice.

Nicole Marinaro

My name is Nicole Marinaro, and I did my PhD at Belfast’s Ulster University’s School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences, focusing on addressing communication difficulties between patients and healthcare professionals. My research interests include language policy, sociolinguistics and linguistic justice, with a focus on the inclusion of linguistically diverse speakers. I am also passionate about language teaching and dissemination of academic knowledge.

I am particularly excited to become part of a diverse and interdisciplinary team, to learn from each other over the next years and to make a real contribution to a more linguistically just society.

Olga Vlasova

My name is Olga Vlasova. My research journey started in Prague at the Charles University where I obtained my BA degree in sociology. Later, I completed my Master’s degree in social policy at the University of Bremen and University of Amsterdam. During these years I have been contributing to research in the fields of migration and labour studies, with a particular focus on solidarity practices with migrant workers in the European labour markets. Apart from that, I’m a passionate volunteer and help newcomers with their integration into Hamburg society.

One thing my life journey has taught me is: “Be brave and follow your ideas and passions!”

What’s next?

Over the next 4 years, our work will be in the following five areas:

• We will conduct a set of interlinked ethnographies to better understand linguistic diversity and social participation across the lifespan
• We will make a novel methodological and epistemological contribution related to qualitative multilingual data sharing
• We will build capacity in international networked education research (see also WERA IRN Literacy in Multilingual Contexts)
• We will work with community stakeholders to help improve language policies and practices and make institutional communication more accessible
• We will share knowledge and contribute to a greater valorization of linguistic diversity

Along the way, we will keep you all posted, of course. Watch this space!

Early next year, we will also advertise another researcher position on our team so that’s another reason to follow our work

Related content

Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship Awards 2025

Have you ever listened to a language you don’t know and thought you recognized a word—only to realize later that you were completely mistaken? Our ears play tricks on us.

A while ago, I ran a small experiment with my German students. I played them two short sentences in Czech, my native language, and asked them to transcribe what they heard. The results were fascinating.

For example, about 90% of the forty students wrote down the Czech word malí [maliː] ‘small’ as mani [maniː]. To me, this seems puzzling—there is no n in the word! But for my students, the Czech l-sound somehow resembled the German n-sound. None of the Czech speakers I consulted ever had this impression.

This little classroom experiment shows something important: we don’t all hear sounds the same way. Our ears—or better said, our brains—are tuned by the language(s) we grow up with.

Why do we hear differently?

Image 1: Oscillogram and spectrogram of the Italian words papa ‘Pope’ and pappa ‘porridge’

Long before we speak, we are already great language users. Research shows that newborn babies can already distinguish speech sounds from noises. Even more surprisingly, they are able to recognize the rhythm of their native language from a non-native one before birth.

After birth, infants are surrounded daily by an enormous amount of speech input. Step by step, they build categories for the sounds of their native language. Up until around 8 to 12 months they can distinguish nearly all of the world’s speech sounds, even those that never appear in their environment.

A Japanese baby, for example, can hear the difference between r and l just as well as American or German babies can. But this ability does not last. As children grow, their brains focus on the categories that matter in their own language and ignore the rest—like the difference between r and l. This is why many Japanese adults often find it notoriously difficult to distinguish the two consonants in languages like English. What was once easy for the baby can become very challenging for the adult.

We perceive foreign languages through native filters

Learning the sound system of a language doesn’t stop with vowels and consonants. It also includes rhythm and intonation. And even for individual sounds like a or o, it’s not only about how you articulate them but also how long you hold them. This brings us to segmental quantity, or length. It refers to the use of duration (short vs. long) of vowels or consonants to distinguish lexical meaning. Quantity shows remarkable cross-linguistic variation.

The case of long consonants in Italian

Image 2: Soundproof cabins at the Free University of Berlin (left) and University of Helsinki (right)

What feels natural in one language may not exist in another. Take Italian. It belongs to just 3.3% of the world’s languages that distinguish short from long consonants (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996).

This contrast appears in more than 1,800 Italian words, such as papa /ˈpapa/ ‘Pope’ versus pappa /ˈpapːa/ ‘porridge’ (Image 1). To be understood and to speak well, learners must get long consonants (called geminates) right—although it can be very challenging (e.g., Altmann et al. 2012).

Cross-linguistic differences in learners

In our project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language”, we examine how Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish learners acquire this feature.

The selection of these languages is not random. They all handle consonant length differently. German, for example, has no consonant length but contrasts short and long vowels in stressed syllables (e.g., Stadt [ʃtat] ‘city’ vs. Staat [ʃtaːt] ‘state’). Czech, like German, distinguishes vowel length, but unlike German, it does so in both stressed and unstressed syllables (e.g., nosí [ˈnosiː] ‘(s/he) carries’ vs. nosy [ˈnosɪ] ‘noses’). Finnish is the most similar to Italian, since it has both vowel and consonant length (e.g., muta [ˈmutɑ] ‘mud’ vs. mutta [ˈmutːɑ] ‘but’). And finally, Spanish has no length contrasts at all.

This diversity allows us to test how a learner’s native language shapes the way they hear and produce length in Italian.

How good are learners at perceiving length in Italian?

In a laboratory setting (Image 2) and by means of a perception experiment, we tested and compared 20 Czech, 20 Finnish, 20 German, and 20 Spanish learners of Italian.

We used 45 short nonsense words that followed Italian spelling and sound rules but had no meaning. Each word had two versions, differing only in whether a consonant was short or long (e.g., sàpolo vs. sàppolo; milèta vs. millèta).

The words covered different consonants and stress positions and were recorded by a native Italian speaker. In every trial, participants had to answer the question: “Does the audio pair you hear belong to the same or different word?”

What we found

Image 3: Learner accuracy in perceiving Italian consonant length in comparison to native listeners

First language has great impact! Finnish learners, whose native system is closest to Italian, were the most accurate in hearing the difference between short and long consonants.

Czech learners followed, while German and Spanish learners struggled more (Image 3). Other factors also played a role. Learners heard contrasts more easily when the crucial sound appeared in stressed syllables, and some consonants were easier to notice than others.

Proficiency helped too—advanced learners did much better than beginners.

However, it is unexpected that the German group scored lower than the Spanish group—sometimes research simply surprises us!

Many factors could explain this, since every learner has their own story. Things like previous language experience, weekly study time, exposure to Italian, time spent in Italy, Italian friends, motivation, and personal talent can all play a role.

In our case, German learners had spent fewer hours per week learning Italian and had less experience studying or staying in Italy. Immersion—the experience of being surrounded by a language in real-life settings—seems a plausible factor behind their performance.

Why perception matters in language learning?

Why does pappa sometimes turn into papa in the ears of Italian learners? Because we all hear foreign languages through the features we are familiar with.

Our experiment showed that perception is difficult—but it can be improved. The key is to notice what is different and to train your ears. This means: Pronunciation training must start with perception (e.g., Colantoni et al. 2021).

In the end, learning a language is not just about new words—it’s about learning to hear differently.

References

Altmann, H.; Berger, I., & B. Braun (2012). Asymmetries in the perception of non-native consonantal and vocalic contrasts. Second Language Research 28(4), 387–413.
Colantoni, L., Escudero, P., Marrero-Aguiar, V., & J. Steele (2021). Evidence-based design principles for Spanish pronunciation teaching. Frontiers in Communication, 6, 639889.
Ladefoged, P., & I. Maddieson (1996). The sounds of the world’s languages. Oxford: Blackwell.

Acknowledgement

This blog post was written as part of the DFG-project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language: Czech, Finnish, German and Spanish learners in contrast”, funded by the German Research Foundation (Project number 521229214) and executed at the Free University of Berlin. Project website: https://italiangeminates-project.com/