Foreignness-emotionally charged-is boundless in its capacity to otherize, peripheralize, and silence. It is not limited by the very same boundaries it seeks to draw-the boundaries may be lifted, readjusted, shifted, moved…one can be enforeigned in different ways, through different lenses, lenses that seek to capture the external, in ways that-ironically-internalize the object of foreignizing. We [...]

I was born in the bustling city of Bombay (now Mumbai; ah! language and politics.) in a middle class Indian family. Due to my father’s transferable  job we moved from one place to another quite often. I learnt seven languages in the process and I must say it was quite a learning.

Bhojpuri in Bihar, Punjabi [...]

I wrote it in Egypt in 2005, it is edited by Mm Leila Khoury

Quand les fêtes approchent

Quand les fêtes approchent

Cherche dans tes poches

Une fleur ou des bonbons

Et dans n’importe quel balcon

Jette-les courageusement

Peut-être derrière la fenêtre

Pleure un enfant

Et tendrement ton cadeau

Lui offre la [...]

An interesting aspect of social network sites like Facebook and MySpace is their appropriation of the word “friend.”  I sometimes get email messages from people I hardly know (and sometimes people I don’t know at all) inviting me to friend them (now it seems there is no more need to use the verb “befriend“).

How [...]

Referees are brushing up on swear words in 17 languages for World Cup starting tomorrow, according to this article from the New York Times. The player to listen for in U.S.-England match: English striker Wayne Rooney, say the potty mouth experts.

Translation project, anyone?

特に今回のポスト（日記？）は、始まりもなく、終わりもないように感じます。文章もある意味で川みたいに、「水源」がたくさんで、全てを探り出すのが不可能な作業だと思います。

This post, especially, feels like it has no beginning and no end. Texts are a little like rivers, with so many sources. And it’s impossible to find them all.

数日前、ある友達が子供のころによく聞いていたSPEEDのWhite Loveの初言葉である、「はてしない」の意味を私に尋ねました。「はてしないってどういう意味なのか」という単純な質問でしたが、当時には「”Endless” or “infinite”, something like that」というふう簡単に答えたように覚えています。そして話しが（話しがするように）自然に次へとつづきました。

Several days ago, a friend asked me about the meaning of the word “hateshinai“, the first word in the [...]

The Research Digest blog highlights a recent study, where:

“researchers say we’ve adopted a number of habits of convenience that reflect the frequent use of positive words in our language (in turn reflecting the greater frequency of positivity in the world). For example, positive words tend to be ‘unmarked’ – that is, the positive is [...]

There is a dark blue neon sign that glows in the distance at the entrance to my new apartment building. It’s unreadable: in fact, I do not even know if it has lettering. It is this exotic, inscrutable glow casting a mysterious light, bathing the building before it in a dim glow, a faint glimmer [...]

Christine Kenneally’s NewScientist article (“Language lessons: You are what you speak“) following the work of Nicholas Evans of the Australian National University in Canberra and Stephen Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands points to an age-old (or at least decades-old) question: Do all [...]