A couple of years ago, I mused here on Language on the Move what linguistic theory would look like if its dominant cultural ideas had not been shaped in 1950s…
ESL teachers play an important role in home language maintenance (Image Credit: Macquarie University) Learning the host country’s language is important for migrants but we should not forget that maintaining…
Piller, I. (Ed.) (2016) Language and Migration. London: Routledge. Humans are a migratory species. Although in modern society the dominant imagery we have created about ourselves is that it is…
From inside Jaume Plensa's House of Knowledge, Bordeaux, France (Photo by Shirley Yeung) In much of Western and Northern Europe, we find ourselves in the wake of a widespread retreat…
The Sociolinguistic Economy of Berlin Imagine you want to study language diversity as a phenomenon of contemporary society. Where do you start? You can, for example, ask teachers to count…
The New Books Network has just published an interview with Ingrid Piller about her new book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. The host of the show, Chris Cummins, sums up the…
Front of postcard sent by Private Jacob Isak Sicherman on 1 June 1916 Remember library stacks? Browsing among books? Serendipitously finding on a nearby shelf what you didn’t know you…
Teacher expectations produce self-fulfilling prophecies in student performance: high teacher expectations result in students’ higher academic performance and low teacher expectations result in students’ lower academic performance. The positive effect…
The Linguistic Ethnography Forum will host a free e-seminar devoted to Ingrid Piller’s new book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Please join us for this…
I recently pointed out that the widespread belief that migrants refuse to learn the language of their new country does not stack up against the realities of adult language learning.…
Kifibin’s workplace was a big event centre, which was open to the public only once a week Let me at once introduce you to the main character of this blog…
Albanian-Greek border crossing at Kakavijë (Source: greece.com) Our understanding of the role of language in social life suffers from a particularly intractable problem: the terms we use to speak about…
Asylum seekers practicing German (Source: Schwaebische.de) Germany has discovered a new social type that is causing grief in modern diverse societies: the “Integrationsverweigerer;” literally someone who refuses to integrate, a…
Ingrid Piller, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice, Oxford University Press, March 2016 Oxford University Press has just released Ingrid Piller’s new book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to…
Asylum seekers in Australia face a few very public hurdles. Successive governments have used increasingly restrictive refugee policies to gain votes. Meanwhile, the media often focuses on the issue of…
Murugan Temple, Colombo (Source: Andy Nobes) Do you know which non-Christian religion has grown the fastest in Australia since the new millennium? You might be surprised to hear that it’s…