Annastacia Palaszczuk and members of her family (Source: Couriermail) Would Kirk Douglas be a Hollywood legend if he had kept his birth name Issur Danielovitch? Would Bob Dylan have achieved…
Ingrid PillerFebruary 4, 2015
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken (Source: quotesnpoems.com) It is not unusual for bilingual parents to experience a sense of bewilderment when it comes to language choice in the family.…
Shiva Motaghi TabariDecember 5, 2014
Linguistic diversity in Sydney (Source: Sydney Morning Herald) The media in Anglophone countries regularly engage in a bit of a bragfest about the linguistic diversity of their cities. In Sydney,…
Ingrid PillerAugust 20, 2014
German International School Sydney It is one of the great narratives of our time that the market will fix everything. In education this means that parental choice is assumed to…
Ingrid PillerJuly 31, 2014
Auburn parking ticket (left: quadrilingual on back; right: city logo on front) In Australia with its persistent monolingual mindset coming across any kind of official institutional multilingual communication always feels…
Ingrid PillerJuly 7, 2014
Website of the German Club Montevideo, founded in 1866 The current issue of Begegnung (“Encounter”), the magazine of German International Schools, has a feature about the German School in Montevideo,…
Ingrid PillerJune 4, 2014
The challenges of providing equitable services in linguistically diverse societies A few years ago, emergency service provision to speakers of languages other than English in Australia came under scrutiny when…
Ingrid PillerFebruary 6, 2014
Losing their heritage language decreases the earning potential of 2nd-generation migrants In most countries of immigration, linguistic diversity is by and large ignored by policy makers. If there are language-related…
Ingrid PillerDecember 4, 2013
Two events exploring diversity, including linguistic diversity, in a multicultural society are coming up in Sydney next week. Cultural Diversity @ Work This one-day symposium is organized by the Cultural…
Lg_on_the_moveDecember 2, 2013
"Speak English or Die!" Vilification on a Melbourne bus caught on camera About a year ago, a video of a language-related altercation on a Melbourne bus was widely reported in…
Ingrid PillerNovember 19, 2013
“Have you heard that young Japanese have stopped having sex? Have you read the recent BBC article? Young men are having virtual girlfriends on smart phones. How weird! Not really…
Kimie Takahashi 高橋君江November 5, 2013
Carnatic singer Prema Anandakrishnan and her accompanists performing for the monthly Sydney Music Circle concert An important element of language relates to its aesthetic use, in other words, how we…
Mahesh RadhakrishnanSeptember 5, 2013
Yasemin Yildiz (2012) Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham University Press. This book review was originally published in Language in Society 42 (4), 463-466. Access pdf version of…
Ingrid PillerAugust 30, 2013
Bilingual Swedish-Finnish monument in Helsinki commenmorating globally beloved children's author Tove Jansson, a Swedish-speaking Finn (Source: vanderkrogt.net) 50,000 people have signed a petition against mandatory Swedish classes in Finnish schools,…
Dave SayersAugust 26, 2013
Barely legible today but evidence of 'super-diversity' in the 9th century: Runic graffiti in Hagia Sophia On a parapet in Hagia Sophia’s gallery there is an obscure little graffiti written…
Ingrid PillerJune 21, 2013
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