I had my children watch the Rosa Park’s story. I asked my daughter “What did Rosa Park’s say?” She said “Rosa Parks said that her grandfather taught her that all people were equal. And as long as you had dignity, no matter what race you were no one could take that away from you.”

We’ve just added some language events to the Languages@Berkeley calendar (see the “Calendar” link at the top of the FIT page for a full calendar view, or scroll down and look in the right-hand column for the line-by-line summary).

Here are a few coming up:

“Lecture by Vincent Gillespie: Meat, Metaphor, and Mysticism: [...]

Today @langology on Twitter posted a link from 2006 that still seems pertinent today, as the word “linguist” continues to be misused in popular discourse to mean “language cop”, “polyglot”, or worse. This article from boston.com News introduces the writing, work, and thought of Geoffrey Pullum and Mark Liberman, regular bloggers [...]

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The Berkeley Language Center’s Spring 2010 lecture series–featuring Professors Andrew Cohen (U of Minnesota), Jerrold Cooper, (Johns Hopkins U), Lera Boroditsky (Stanford), and the BLC Fellows Anna Maria Bellezza, Usree Bhattacharya, Minsook Kim, and Jason Vivrette–has been added to the Languages@Berkeley calendar. Check back with the BLC for more details, and [...]

As I’ve watched CNN coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, I’ve seen several public service announcements for an organization I’d never heard of before: National Language Service Corps.  My interest was piqued by the ad that focused on the varieties of language in the US and how those languages might be used to serve [...]

This New York Times article by Anand Giriharadas, “Language as a Blunt Tool of the Digital Age“, makes some interesting associations between the use of digital communication tools like text messaging, Twitter, and blogs, on one hand, and a global business environment in which a ‘simplified’ version of English is in ascendance, on [...]

Several days ago I posted an aside mentioning the UC Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching’s upcoming conference (April 23-25 at UCSD); the deadline’s been extended to Feb. 5 (first extended to Feb. 1), for anyone (like me) who’s been dragging their feet to get the application in.

Hope to see you there!

I’m super glad to be in touch with Juliette Wade recently through discussions at Claire’s and the very cool discussion going on in the recent post on the Na’vi language in Avatar. We’re adding her blog TalkToYoUniverse to the blogroll here–probably something we should have done quite a while ago!–as it [...]

Recently I’ve started following @morsmal‘s tweets on Twitter, and was interested to see this document, a compilation of 50 projects, places, and contexts where languages are being learned and taught to great value. It builds off findings of the LINGO study in Europe–if you’re looking for inspiration, check it [...]

The UC Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching will be having its 5th conference from April 23-25 2010 at UC San Diego, for the first time in partnership with the east coast’s Language Consortium. From the flyer:

We invite submissions for presentations from scholars in all disciplines who are involved [...]

Happy New Year to all!

Forget about ‘tweeting’, ‘friending’ and ‘teachable moments’ in 2010. They’re all on the most recent annual list of banished words. Take a look at what else has fallen out of favor. The 35th annual word banishment list is the brainchild of Lake Superior University. Remember ‘detente’ and ‘at this point [...]

Among other topics, the hit movie Avatar has been getting a lot of attention for the constructed language of the inhabitants of its far-away forested land of Pandora. Called Na’vi (also the name of its speakers), the language is an example of what’s known as “cinematic xenolinguistics” – a language constructed [...]

I spent a couple of hours at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport today, where I’d gone to pick up someone special. Unfortunately, due to a malicious, evil blanket of fog and zero visibility, the flight was diverted to Mumbai, and it won’t arrive for several hours. I remember almost exactly a year ago, when [...]