I said kaddish for the first time this past Saturday. It was to mourn a dear aunt who recently passed away. Growing up, my parents and siblings would stay at her place when we visited Israel, and we experienced her kindness and generosity in countless ways. My aunt spoke little or no English. We used [...]

What I find interesting is how different companies use different methods to make themselves appealing to consumers.  The same company can even market its products differently simply because of a different neighborhood having a different type of people.  Something that is interesting is how clothing brands market their products differently to people based on location.  [...]

The inspiration for our project was our mutual love for food and our propensity to dine out almost all the time. We decided to take our love of restaurants and show how there are multiple factors that contribute to the reputation that a restaurant develops in the minds of its patrons.

Our choice of restaurant to [...]

This past semester, students in a new Sophomore Seminar offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Berkeley Language Center have taken significant steps toward understanding the complexity of language in multilingual environments like Berkeley.

Rather than focus on the speech or writing practices of bilingual individuals, however, participants [...]

At a presentation I was fortunate enough to give a little over a week ago at the BLC (“Where is the language classroom today?: Reconsidering the place/s of language learning with technology”), I opened with a comment about the stage fright I was feeling at the outset of an hour-long presentation, one which [...]

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. [...]

It was the first day of school.  As I stood near the front entrance of Mr. Larry’s 6th grade all-boy advisory an African American mother walks in with her son who was on crutches. Mr. Larry was speaking to another parent and student and so I took it upon myself to welcome this [...]

I’m at the 19th Sociolinguistics Symposium, being held August 21-24 at Berlin’s Freie Universität, and wanting to report out some of the happenings here. As is the case at any conference, there are far too many sessions going on to experience or report on anything but a fraction of the totality (I [...]

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 [...]

As a follow up to my recent post “a fish out of water” I want to provide some
context for my experience in Boston by pointing out that I walked the Black Heritage
Trail through the Beacon Hill district today. This trail begins at the monument
for the 54th regiment who fought the Civil War for no [...]

Last night I found myself feeling unsettled as I walked a long with a small group of junior research associates that I met this week at the Digital Media and Learning hub’s Summer Institute in Cambridge, MA. Having grown up in the Bay Area and having spent some time in the south I have experienced [...]

I ran across this ad for the Pimsleur language learning audio materials on an electronic Japanese dictionary (denshijisho.org). As  a Language Center administrator, I interact with dozens of language professors, lecturers, and graduate student instructors here at Berkeley as well as at other institutions. I can’t remember ever hearing any disparaging remarks about Dr. [...]

This past Friday and Saturday in Sutardja Dai Hall (the home of CITRIS, near North Gate), the Berkeley Center for New Media hosted a symposium, “Digital Inquiry: Forms of Knowledge in the Age of New Media”.

True to the plural form in its title, speakers gave many visions of knowledge online [...]

This post from LinguistList has just announced a major celebration of Professor Robin Lakoff‘s work:

In recognition of Robin Tolmach Lakoff’s many contributions to linguistics, a day-long symposium in her honor will be held on the University of California, Berkeley, campus Friday, May 4, 2012. Robin’s former students and colleagues [...]

The news of the arrest of Ambikesh Mohapatra, professor of physical chemistry and kinetics at Jadavpur University (West Bengal, India) spread like wildfire across the nation over the last week. People rallied together, on the streets and on social networking sites, to protest what has been popularly called a “fascist” [...]

Last Friday, as several Berkeley folks were busy discussing innovations in language and literacy education at AERA in Vancouver, and others were re-visioning the present and future of multilingual subjects and societies at the Multilingual, 2.0? symposium in Tucscon, I had these topics in mind as I joined dozens of [...]

It’s common practice to publish blog posts after a significant event–to question, re-interpret, and basically put a new spin on what happened and what was said. For today’s BLC lecture by H. Douglas Brown, Faculty Emeritus from San Francisco State University’s M.A.-TESOL program, I thought I would give this blog format [...]

“Should Kareena Kapoor lose weight?” screamed a headline on my Hindustan Times app. For those of you unfamiliar with Bollywood cinema, Ms. Kareena Kapoor is a top actress, and hails from one of the most famous and powerful film khandaans (families). I’m not a fan of hers: but I had to read the article. [...]

Thanks to Steven L on Facebook for bringing this to my attention: Matt Meyer at ReignDesign narrates his presentation “Love Hotels and Unicode” from a recent tech “unconference” in Shanghai. After reviewing some of the convergences that led to a single standard for representing many of the world’s scripts and [...]

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 [...]