Just finished reading a somewhat alarmist article in the Indian national newspaper, The Times of India, entitled Does Hindi have a future? In that article, the fate of Hindi in the Indian urban landscape is considered precarious; the writer, Mohammed Wajihuddin, asserts that “An unsettling reality of metros and towns [...]

The International House (endearingly truncated as “I-House“) at Cal affords an unparalleled multicultural and multilingual experience for residents, staff, members/visitors, and cafe regulars. In my six months here, I’ve witnessed and been engaged in numerous cross-cultural and cross-linguistic exchanges that have amused, moved, and confounded me. This blog focuses on linguistic interactions between a group [...]

The teacher laughingly criticizes that: “Of course all the food is 好吃.” We laugh with her and don’t mention the fact that out of the twenty-odd students in the class, probably none of us will actually speak Mandarin in a restaurant to someone who works there. Someone who actually knows how to speak Mandarin — or worse, in my opinion, anyway, someone who doesn’t.

I’m studying abroad in France this semester, and just to keep in touch with my Russian interests, I decided to take a Russian history course. The first hour of the first class was all in French, and I was able to follow most of what was going on, as well as take notes (there have [...]

Not your typical question that teases the intellect at a late hour on a rainy Saturday in Berkeley, but then is anything typical on a precipitative night? So, is Sanskrit, the language which is considered “Quite dead, really,” living on purportedly only in liturgical services or in classical literature, really, honestly, extinct?

Before I hit my [...]

I’m inspired by Usree’s posts and will try to post a little more regularly here too…hope that others join in! I’ll get back to an old post on “Raspberry Jam” soon, but am immediately moved to write about my crash course experience in French 1 for a research project I’m involved in. It’s been a [...]