I have been taking French for 7 years now, since my freshman year of high school. I attended a French American school where I was learning how to say “Bonjour” while my many of my new friends were taking math and chemistry in French since they had been there since kindergarten — or maternelle as […]

J’ai grandi dans une famille juive. J’ai passé mes trois dernières années de lycée dans une banlieue de Chicago à majorité juive. Il n’y avait pas moyen, donc, d’ignorer le Shoah. On en parlait. À la télé, on passait un téléfilm avec le Capitaine Spock en vedette et qui s’appelait “Never Forget.” Et, […]

Last week I had the opportunity to go and talk with the students in Claire Kramsch’s UGIS 120 class, the introductory course for the new Applied Language Studies minor being offered out of the College of Letters & Science. The topic of the day was medium, discourse, and multimodality, and while my presentation […]

A new circular from the Department of Official Language, part of the Indian Home Ministry, encourages the use of popular English words in place of difficult Hindi terms in official Hindi communications. The circular states that Hindi words such as “misil” (for “file”), “pratyabhuti” (for “guarantee”), “kunjipatal” (for “keyboard”), and “sanganak” (for “computer”) […]

For Friday’s presentation at the Berkeley Language Center’s Moving Between Languages colloquium, I was really looking forward to moving beyond the world of Powerpoint or Keynote as a way of having visual support for my talk. But it didn’t look to be easy. Heck, even in that first sentence, I couldn’t write […]