Herzberg am Harz, the Esperanto City (Source: Der Spiegel) The rural Bavarian high school I attended in the late 70s and early 80s had two international exchanges going, one with…
Percentage of Europeans who speak three or more languages (2012 Eurobarometer 'Europeans and their Languages', p. 14) The 2012 Eurobarometer Report “Europeans and their languages” was published last month and…
Mehrsprachige Buecher - multilingual books - ketabhaye chand zabane The release of the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011 Census of Population data is an invitation to reflect on the composition…
Ad for ‘English for travel’ classes ( www.gaba.co.jp/ad) A few weeks ago, my family and I went to Jim Thompson’s special sales at BITEC in Bang Na, a short train…
International symbol for deafness from Redeafined Bilingualism has been a media darling of late, and considering the intense focus of the current scientific community on bilingual brains and the breakneck…
Salvador Dali, Gestalt As members of the Language-on-the-Move community know, I was the lucky guest of Ingrid at Macquarie last Wednesday and then the theme of her blog posting. As a…
The high price of multilingualism When society doesn’t value something you, as an individual, do, you, the individual, end up paying for society’s lack of valuation. That’s the case with…
Receptionist: Help yourself to a cap! Shiva: Pardon me? Receptionist: Help yourself to a cap! Shiva: This was a conversation I had in the reception area of a storage company on…
Gay men, English and desire in Bangkok I have recently begun working on my MA thesis on sexuality and second language learning at the Graduate School of English, Assumption University…
Asia’s Chronic English Disease The promotion of English in Asia is a frequent topic here on Language on the Move. Striving for global competitiveness and internationalization, states across Asia strongly…
I’m chatting in English to a medical student from Germany who is visiting Sydney, Australia, and we’ve already talked about how I lived in Germany for a while and speak…
Cabramatta, Australia Last week an email was sent around my office about our upcoming Harmony Day celebration on 21 March. The email suggested that to mark the occasion, interested staff could…
Hungarians in RomaniaUp until a few decades ago, the academic consensus – along with public opinion – was that bilingualism is detrimental to the individual and society. Nowadays, that has…
I know some people think what I am doing with my daughters – speaking German to them one-hundred percent of the time even though German is a second language for…
USD 254,000: that is the cost of raising two children bilingually in English and German in Denver, Colorado. That’s a lot of money, and inspired me to do some number-crunching…
American society places little value on meaningful multilingualism for young people, or for adults for that matter. Nowhere is this lack of valuation more apparent than in the U.S. public…