The world of the early twenty-first century is one divided by factionalism and suspicion, and connected by new channels of communication that are uneditable, instantaneous, and anonymous. Therefore the most important thing a modern president must know in order to be effective is how to use language,  both interpretively and actively, both domestically and globally. [...]

The article, “Hindi, Hinglish: Head to Head” by Ananya Vajpeyi (Assistant Professor of History, UMass Boston), published by the World Policy Journal, jumped out at me from among the sundry language policy related news items in a listserv email I received. While the attempt to parse out delicate and complicated issues related [...]

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2012/03/29/piers-morgan-only-in-america-banned-words.cnn

Piers Morgan examines 50 words that are banned on New York school tests.  Here’s the full list:

Abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, or psychological)
Alcohol (beer and liquor), tobacco, or drugs
Birthday celebrations (and birthdays)
Bodily functions
Cancer (and other diseases)
Catastrophes/disasters (tsunamis and hurricanes)
Celebrities
Children dealing with serious issues
Cigarettes (and other smoking paraphernalia)
Computers in the home (acceptable in a school or [...]

I’m at the BLC one-day colloquium, History and Memory in Foreign Language Study, and though I’ll only be able to be here for part of the day, I’d like to leave a few thoughts. Or, as I’ve tried to indicate in the title, one view.

Before launching into the collection of liveblogging tidbits that [...]

Mr. Manu Joseph, writing “India Faces a Linguistic Truth: English Spoken Here” in a “Letter From India” in the New York Times, makes some incredible claims about the status of English in India, with random bits of “evidence” that wouldn’t pass muster with, I’d wager, most Indians familiar with its linguistic [...]

There’s a certain urgency to the question asked on the blog of The Foreign Language Fourteen, “When did you first realize that knowing a foreign language was cool?” The blog prompts its readers with questions like “Do you know that Spanish won’t get you anywhere in Brazil?” “Can you read Plato [...]

The thinning out, scaling down, and downright elimination of language programs seems to be a normalizing trend in these times of budgetary hardship. While the State University of New York at Albany’s wholesale elimination of its French, Italian, Russian, classics and theater programs this month has received some notice, it hasn’t, [...]

“I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you.”

So starts this campaign ad for Christine O’Donnell, the Republican party nominee for the special Senate election in Delaware, released about a week ago:

And considering the lunacy of the opening and closing lines (especially), I assumed that the good folks over at the [...]

In doing literature review for language socialization research in the Indian context, I found a provocative chapter written by Mohanty (2006) via the good folks at Google Scholar. This paragraph stood out:

In India, presence of many languages is natural and unmarked in all forms of social and individual communicative acts. Quite early [...]

Multilingual Literature submission deadline: 12/15/09!

Reading a provocative post entitled The Abortion Amendment by fellow FITizen Prof. Robin Lakoff on the newly started Berkeley Blog, I was reminded of an event that rattled me a few weeks ago on campus. Berkeley Students for Life (BSL) apparently invited the more→

The newly constituted Maharashtra Assembly in India was the site of an eventful brawl when Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) workers prevented Samajwadi Party legislator Abu Azmi from taking his oath of office in Hindi: as soon as he began taking the oath, the workers snatched his mike and attempted to shred the [...]

Last night I had the privilege of joining Usree for a visit to a language-learning event and screening of Najib Joe Hakim’s film that chronicles the successes of children in bilingual programs in San Francisco schools, Speaking in Tongues.

Held at Beverly Cleary Hall across the street from the Unit 3 residence hall, and [...]

President Obama made some surprising comments today about the blogosphere during an interview with the editors of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Blade:

“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up [...]

Recently I have encountered several analyses of Sarah Palin’s speeches as “found” poetry. One example comes from a wonderful piece by John Lundberg in the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/sarah-palin-the-anti-poet_b_237935.html):

Look at how she turns a simple statement into a mind-numbing puzzle (this is from Hart Seely’s terrific collection of found poems taken from actual Sarah Palin [...]

The White House website announced that the State Department has prepared translations of President Obama’s major “A New Beginning” speech delivered at Cairo University .

There are translations into 13 languages so far: Arabic, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, Urdu and Portuguese. And at the [...]

Samajwadi Party (a regional Indian party) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s campaign promise to abolish the use of English, “angrezi hatao” (Remove English) in UP (Uttar Pradesh, a north Indian state) has been causing quite a bit of tumult. Mulayam specifically promised “to ban English in education and computers in new projects.” My parents [...]

I’ve been sitting on this post for over a week now, after coming back from the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference in San Diego (mentioned in my previous post here). More on that in a bit.

And as other people have said on FIT many times but in different ways ( more→

I got this email from Wolfgang E. Adolph in the Department of Mod. Lang. & Linguistics at Florida State University via the Language Learning and Technology International Information Forum listserv; considering the UC system’s ongoing budget woes and threats to our languages at Cal I thought it’d be good to cross-post in its [...]

I’ve just come down to San Diego for my first-ever AERA (American Educational Research Association) conference, and there’s much to write about. Actually, with probably around 10,000 people spread across 4 giant convention centers and hotels, there’s way too much going on to capture anything more than a tiny fragment. But one thing [...]