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Language on the Move
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- February 13, 2011
- 06:09 PM
- 1,240 views
Do you speak Swiss?
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
A most amazing book has just landed on my desk: Do you speak Swiss, edited by Walter Haas, is the final report on a Swiss National Research Project devoted to Linguistic Diversity and Language Competence in Switzerland. Initiated by the … Continue reading →... Read more »
Walter Haas (Ed.). (2010) Do you speak Swiss? Sprachenvielfalt und Sprachkompetenz in der Schweiz. Nationales Forschungsprogramm NFP 56. NZZ Libro. info:/
- February 17, 2011
- 04:08 PM
- 1,212 views
Long-term English language learners
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
When I first started teaching in Australia, I had a Korean-Australian student in one of my undergraduate classes who sounded like most of the other students in my class, like a native speaker of Australian-English. The daughter of Korean immigrants, … Continue reading →... Read more »
Menken, K., & Kleyn, T. (2010) The long-term impact of subtractive schooling in the educational experiences of secondary English language learners. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13(4), 399-417. DOI: 10.1080/13670050903370143
- May 22, 2010
- 01:37 AM
- 1,188 views
The f-word on the move
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
Installment #7 in the mini-series on multilingual signage
When I lived in Basel in Switzerland, my then-preschool child was just learning to make sense of the alphabet and to sound out words – a development I obviously encouraged as much as I could by seizing every literacy opportunity. Generally speaking, pretty much everything can be a [...]... Read more »
Jørgensen, J. (2008) Urban Wall Languaging. International Journal of Multilingualism, 5(3), 237-252. DOI: 10.1080/14790710802390186
- December 25, 2009
- 03:56 AM
- 1,073 views
The burning children of globalization
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
I’ve been wondering what would be an appropriate Christmas post for the Language on the Move blog. Seeing that I’m deeply skeptical about all those claims about the wonderful advantages of bilingualism, a good news story à la “bilingualism helps to ward off dementia” was never going to be an option. That’s when the first [...]... Read more »
Abdelmajid Hannoum. (2009) The Harraga of Tangier. Encounters: an international journal for the study of culture and society, 231-246. info:/
- May 19, 2010
- 02:17 AM
- 1,049 views
French – the brand
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
Installment #6 in the mini-series on multilingual signage
Multilingualism sells! Some forms of multilingualism that is. In the world of marketing, languages operate like brands: they are a signifier for something else but they are devoid of substance. To phrase it in Marxist terminology: the exchange value of languages has in some contexts come to overshadow [...]... Read more »
LEE, J. (2006) Linguistic constructions of modernity: English mixing in Korean television commercials. Language in Society, 35(01). DOI: 10.1017/S0047404506060039
PILLER, I. (2001) Identity constructions in multilingual advertising. Language in Society, 30(2), 153-186. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404501002019
- August 1, 2010
- 11:10 PM
- 1,041 views
Multilingualism 2.0
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
The social networking market research site Inside Facebook has some intriguing language stats. In July, the fastest-growing languages on Facebook were Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and French. The Portuguese growth rate was a staggering 11.8%. Arabic grew by 9.2%, Spanish by … Continue reading →... Read more »
Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010) Metrolingualism: fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3), 240-254. DOI: 10.1080/14790710903414331
- April 3, 2010
- 10:51 AM
- 1,021 views
French Language Day
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
I missed the UN’s French language day! It’s not the fact that I missed it that bothers me – I’m late for pretty much everything – it’s the fact that there is such a thing as a UN-sponsored French language day that I find surprising to say the least. Why the French language?! I mean [...]... Read more »
Alexandre Duchêne. (2008) Ideologies Across Nations. Mouton de Gruyter. info:/
- November 6, 2010
- 02:44 AM
- 1,016 views
German is so funny. Not.
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
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 sneezing, which included the following information: If someone nearby sneezes, … Continue reading →... Read more »
Roberts, C. (1997) Transcribing Talk: Issues of Representation. TESOL Quarterly, 31(1), 167. DOI: 10.2307/3587983
- July 21, 2010
- 12:58 AM
- 1,002 views
Refugee children left behind as eagle lands on the moon
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
Yesterday, the New York Times carried a heart-breaking story about an exceptional school principal forced from her position under No-Child-Left-Behind legislation in order for the school district to obtain federal funding. It’s an instructive tale about the standardized-assessment tail wagging … Continue reading →... Read more »
Ruairc, G. (2009) 'Dip, dip, sky blue, who's it? NOT YOU': children's experiences of standardised testing: a socio-cultural analysis. Irish Educational Studies, 28(1), 47-66. DOI: 10.1080/03323310802597325
- July 19, 2010
- 02:43 AM
- 958 views
English-Only at Bon Secours
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
From what I read, there is a nursing shortage in the Global North. From North America to Japan and from Europe to the Gulf countries, rich societies suffer from a “care deficit,” which they fill by importing – mostly female … Continue reading →... Read more »
Piller, Ingrid, & Takahashi, Kimie. (2011) At the intersection of gender, language and transnationalism. Nik Coupland. Ed. Handbook of Language and Globalisation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 540-554. info:/
- August 5, 2010
- 12:16 AM
- 942 views
Language and inflation
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
Some Language-on-the-Movers based here in Sydney had the opportunity to attend Professor Masaki Oda’s lecture about the current state of the English language in Japan yesterday. With major Japanese companies announcing a switch to English as their official company language … Continue reading →... Read more »
Park, Joseph S.-Y. (2009) The local construction of a global language: ideologies of English in South Korea . Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110214079
- April 28, 2010
- 09:17 AM
- 941 views
English, the non-language
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
Installment #2 in the mini-series on multilingual signage
Much of the signage that can be found in contemporary public spaces is commercial. It is a form of advertising, and language choice in commercial signage such as shop names is a good indicator of the values associated with a particular language. The basic idea is that the [...]... Read more »
Piller, I. (2003) ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254
Ritzer, G. (2007) The globalization of nothing 2. Thousand Oaks, CA, . info:/
- August 26, 2010
- 11:22 PM
- 936 views
Bad faith migration programs
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
In the past couple of years, I have been a passenger in Sydney taxis driven, inter alia, by an agricultural engineer from India, a civil engineer from Somalia, a surgeon from Vietnam, an MBA graduate from Pakistan, an architect from … Continue reading →... Read more »
Creese, G., & Wiebe, B. (2009) ‘Survival Employment’: Gender and Deskilling among African Immigrants in Canada. International Migration. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2435.2009.00531.x
- December 10, 2009
- 01:53 PM
- 925 views
The monolingual sniffer dog and the lonely rabbi
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
The current global order has thrown up yet another bewildering language problem: the monolingual sniffer dog!
I glean the following from a recent NYT article about Rabbis in Montana: with all the concerns about homeland security, the US has an expanding need for sniffer dogs. Training sniffer dogs locally is costly (the article quotes US$ [...]... Read more »
Duchêne, A. (2008) Marketing, management and performance: multilingualism as commodity in a tourism call centre. Language Policy, 8(1), 27-50. DOI: 10.1007/s10993-008-9115-6
Piller, Ingrid, & Pavlenko, Aneta. (2007) Globalization, gender, and multilingualism. Helene Decke-Cornill and Laurenz Volkmann (Eds.), Gender Studies and Foreign Language Teaching. Tübingen: Narr, 15-30. info:/
- March 3, 2011
- 06:29 PM
- 925 views
National Languages Curriculum
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
My daughter attends a public elementary school in NSW where the children are taught French for one hour each week. In 2009, she was away from her school for one year and did not receive any French instruction during that … Continue reading →... Read more »
Clyne, Michael. (2005) Australia's Language Potential. UNSW Press. info:/
- December 4, 2010
- 07:35 PM
- 922 views
Happy birthday, UAE!
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
The United Arab Emirates are celebrating their 39th national day this month. Trucial Oman, as it was then known, became independent from their semi-colonial relationship with Britain in December 1971 and the country has since experienced some dramatic changes: its … Continue reading →... Read more »
Karmani, S. (2005) Petro-Linguistics: The Emerging Nexus Between Oil, English, and Islam. Journal of Language, Identity , 4(2), 87-102. DOI: 10.1207/s15327701jlie0402_2
- May 6, 2011
- 02:26 AM
- 897 views
Can foreign languages drive you crazy?
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
On The Science Show they recently had a program about how unfamiliar sounds, rhythms and tonalities can drive people crazy. I learnt that neuroscientists have been experimenting with the idea that when confronted with unfamiliar musical patterns the brain releases … Continue reading →... Read more »
Lehrer, Jonah. (2007) Proust was a neuroscientist. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. info:/
- October 25, 2010
- 07:23 PM
- 896 views
Providing bilingual education since 1689
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
I’ve been teaching about bilingualism for more than a decade and when I speak about bilingual education and dual-immersion programs I draw on examples from Canada and the USA. These are the examples that fill the literature and the textbooks. … Continue reading →... Read more »
Meier, G. (2010) Two-way immersion education in Germany: bridging the linguistic gap. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13(4), 419-437. DOI: 10.1080/13670050903418793
Sugimoto, Yoshio. (2010) An Introduction to Japanese Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. info:/
- May 19, 2011
- 08:22 PM
- 892 views
Glocalization à la Suisse
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
When I lived in Basel, a city in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, I often found myself performing an involuntary field experiment in language attitudes. As likely to speak English as German in public, I was regularly confronted with strangers’ … Continue reading →... Read more »
Moser, Urs . (2010) Entwicklung der Sprachkompetenzen in der Erst- und Zweitsprache von Migrantenkindern. Do you speak Swiss? Verlag Neue Zuercher Zeitung, 105-107. info:/
- January 9, 2010
- 01:47 PM
- 873 views
Multilingual diversity marketing
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
As the UAE is still abuzz with the opening of the Burj Khalifa, I thought a post to mark the occasion might be in order. Seeing that I’m blogging on social aspects of multilingualism and language learning, the Tower of Babel myth obviously comes to mind – except that it seems a bit premature to [...]... Read more »
Piller, I. (2003) ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254
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