Urdu – Language on the Move

Linguistic landscapes

Finding Pakistan in Global Britain

Man wearing shalwar kameez in Tooting A friend of mine wanted me to accompany them to give my verdict about the Pakistani food in Tooting, London. They are non-Pakistani and…

Alia AmirApril 2, 2024

Covid-19

Mismatched public health communication costs lives in Pakistan

Editor’s note: The language challenges of the COVID-19 crisis have held much of our attention this year. Here on Language on the Move, we have been running a series devoted to language…

Kinza Afraz AbbasiDecember 11, 2020

Language politics

“I regret having named him Sahil”: Urdu names in India

Akhlaq Ahmad at work on the mural in Shahdara for the ‘Delhi, I Love You’ project. (Image Credit: Delhi, I Love You) On July 8, 2020, The Wire published an…

Rizwan AhmadJuly 24, 2020

Language and globalization

Language policy for China-Pakistan cooperation

(Image credit: Farooqi & Aftab, 2018) Editor's note: As Confucius Institutes are closing in western countries, as Jeffrey Gil analysed recently, Chinese language learning continues to expand across the global…

Kashif RazaJuly 20, 2020

English as a global language

Language work in the internet café

A locutorio shop front in Barcelona (Source: El Periodico) There is now a well-established body of work exploring the language work provided by service workers in call centres and tourist…

Ingrid PillerSeptember 22, 2014

Linguistic landscapes

Multilingual mismatch

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

Language learning

Bilingualism delays onset of dementia

Multilingual Hyderabad (Source: Wikimedia) It is by now widely known that bilingualism delays the onset of dementia. What is less widely known is the fact that this knowledge is almost…

Ingrid PillerNovember 11, 2013

News

Social meanings of language policy in Pakistan

Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development presents global research seminar about language-in-education policy in Pakistan The Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development presents a global research seminar: Topic:…

Lg_on_the_moveMarch 21, 2013

English as a global language

Italy in Karachi

Pompei Restaurant, Karachi (Source: fcpakistan.com) A few days ago I had an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Having lived all my life in Karachi, I had until then never heard of the Pompei…

Muhammad Ali KhanJuly 6, 2012

Language learning

Tyranny of Poverty

Pakistan Swat Valley 2009 Ingrid briefly mentioned Zubeida Mustafa’s new book Tyranny of Language in Education: The Problem and its solution recently. Since then, we’ve had numerous enquiries about the…

Muhammad Ali KhanJuly 1, 2011

Language, education and poverty

Last year the British Council initiated a dialogue about language policy and particularly language-in-education policy in Pakistan, and their report was recently published. The introduction includes the following two statements:…

Muhammad Ali KhanFebruary 5, 2011

Multilingual histories

Accent and history

This is the story of a young Pakistani man, let’s call him Reza. Reza spent his early years in what was then East-Pakistan and what is today a different country,…

Muhammad Ali KhanJune 10, 2010

Research reflections

Fostering Multiliteracies: 2nd conference day

Our two plenary speakers It’s easy to have a good time at a conference on the spectacular campus of the American University of Sharjah and with such a great group of…

Ingrid PillerDecember 19, 2009