Earlier this term I intercepted a note my 7-year-old had written to her teacher: “Ger Ger Ger; Don’t be so rude.” She was objecting to a reading comprehension exercise about…
Ingrid PillerNovember 6, 2010
Commemorative stamp, German Federal Post, 1989: 300 years French School Berlin I’ve been teaching about bilingualism for more than a decade and when I speak about bilingual education and dual-immersion…
Ingrid PillerOctober 26, 2010
If you read English-language news, you could be forgiven for thinking that Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel recently came out strongly against multiculturalism and immigration. You could be forgiven, but you'd…
Ingrid PillerOctober 20, 2010
I had been led to believe that Japan was a very monolingual place interspersed with Engrish ads, commercial signage and T-shirts. Well, that has turned out to be just another…
Ingrid PillerSeptember 28, 2010
This weekend, if you were out shopping, you couldn't escape the electioneering for the 2010 Australian federal election. I do my grocery shopping in Eastwood, one of Sydney’s most multicultural…
Kimie Takahashi 高橋君江July 26, 2010
Rashid is an overseas graduate student at an Australian university. He is a Muslim from the Middle East, and this is the story of how he inadvertently ate pork during…
Ingrid PillerJune 26, 2010
As someone who is concerned about Australia’s monolingual mindset and the damage it does to individuals and our society as a whole, I probably should have been pleased to discover…
Ingrid PillerJune 17, 2010
In his recent post “Accent and History,” Khan asked whether it’s possible to escape the prison of our accent and our language. Looking at the civil war and humanitarian disaster…
Ingrid PillerJune 15, 2010
If you are a student or a guest researcher (like me) in Berlin and you need to get or renew a visa or need to change your visa status, you…
Emily FarrellJune 4, 2010
Installment #4 in the mini-series on multilingual signage Toilets as an object of sociolinguistic research?! Not likely?! Think again! Today, I am going to discuss toilet signage as an indicator…
Ingrid PillerMay 7, 2010
Non-English speakers’ access to emergency services in Australia is in the news again as a Melbourne man has been convicted of the murder of his wife. What makes the case…
Ingrid PillerApril 12, 2010
National holidays are there to celebrate the nation and the opinion pages tend to be full of self-congratulation on such occasions. Australia is no exception and one of the more…
Ingrid PillerFebruary 3, 2010
Deborah Cameron noted in 1995 that “linguistic bigotry is among the last publicly expressible prejudices left to members of the Western intelligentsia.” In the same vein, one could point out…
Ingrid PillerJanuary 22, 2010
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