This afternoon, I had occasion to visit some “sign stores” in a neighboring village in a New Delhi suburb. We needed stamp pads (it’s a long, dull, inconsequential, and utterly irrelevant story why), and so, this hot afternoon-it was around 104°F, with 25% humidity-we trekked over to the village. The “LADIES TOILET” (or, the “Ladies/महिला”/”Women” […]

मैं दिल्ली में एक अनाथाश्रम गयी दो साल पहले. वहां कुछ बच्चों के साथ मैंने बात की. मैं उन्हें अंग्रेजी सीखने के बारे में पूछ रही थी. सब बच्चे बोल रहे थे की वे सोचते थे कि अंग्रेजी सीखने से ही वे कुछ बन सकते हैं. इंटरव्यू के बीच में एक बच्चे ने पूछा, […]

Samajwadi Party (a regional Indian party) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s campaign promise to abolish the use of English, “angrezi hatao” (Remove English) in UP (Uttar Pradesh, a north Indian state) has been causing quite a bit of tumult. Mulayam specifically promised “to ban English in education and computers in new projects.” My parents […]

From the Lion King, one line from the Hula Song in 17 languages: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Mex. Spanish, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, and Swedish. A video tailor-made for FIT!

So instead of writing a post inspired by a rereading of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, I thought I would have a little more fun with my iMovie, and “vlog” instead of blogging. Here’s a short reflection on habitus through the scripts I have inhabited….and which have inhabited me.

Music: Jacques Dutronc, “Les cactus”

Habitus from […]

On Sunday Jen, a fellow CAL student, and I went to the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) at the Sundance (formerly the Kabuki) to view New Muslim Cool. This film is a documentary about Islam, Muslim youth, identity, and Hip Hop culture. I found out about the screening because it was on my friend’s […]

According to Delta Airlines the price to pay for Islamophobia is $25.00. For those of you who might remember, I posted a blog “Do You Speak English?” about an incident that occurred on a Northwest  ( a Delta subsidiary) flight from Minneapolis to Columbus on April 2, 2009.

During that flight the only attendant questioned me […]

In reading On Phenomenology and Social Relations, I was struck by some glorious lines Alfred Schutz (1970) penned on language. You find these lines in the chapter entitled Social Means of Orientation and Interpretation, which begins by situating language in the context of culture:

“In order to command a language freely as a scheme […]

A Republican Texan legislator, Betty Brown, created an uproar Tuesday by suggesting, during House Elections Committee testimony, that Asian-American voters should use names which are “easier for Americans to deal with.” Ramey Ko, a rep for the Organization of Chinese Americans, had earlier stated “that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have […]

A reminder from the calendar page: Stanton Wortham, Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, will be giving a talk today as part of the Berkeley Language Center’s lecture series:

Hillbilly Spanish and Tarzan English: Ideologies of Mexican Immigrant Language 

The talk is in B-4 Dwinelle Hall, 3-5 p.m., […]

Last night, I was interviewed in a radio segment for a show entitled “Four Elements,” to discuss the importance of “Fire” in Hinduism. The idea behind the show is to explore the importance of the four basic elements-earth, wind, fire, water-in different cultures. First off, Hindus recognize five elements: the four listed above, and sky. […]

Here’s a guest post from Maya Smith in the beginning stages of her voyages across the globe. She’s in India now and as I’ve been pestering her to write about it for FIT she posted this to her blog “Big Bang 2009” and let me cross-post here…amazing stories from a fluent speaker of […]

An article by Neelabh Mishra entitled “An Awadhi Lilt For Obama: Let’s realise that language bridges make for creative cohesion,” appearing in this fortnight’s issue of Outlook, an Indian news magazine, caught my attention today. The title was immediately interesting to me: I was curious about how Awadhi (अवधी), a dialect of Hindi […]

A recent post on Lexiblog has a list of the top ten languages hardest to learn, according to “language enthusiasts”:

1. Icelandic
2. Russian or Mandarin
3. Arabic
4. Mandarin
5. Hungarian
6. English
7. Hindi
8. Cantonese
9. Chinese
10. Tamil

What are some of the hardest languages YOU have acquired? What made them hard?

Or does he? According to the Canadian Globe and Mail,

“Barack Obama’s supposed grammatical gaffes have stirred up the hornet’s nest of disagreement between grammarians and historians, and we’re back to arguing about an old topic: I and me.”

Shall we stand by the president? Between you and I, or…err…you and me, I think […]

Researchers at the University of Reading, led by evolutionary theorist Mark Pagel, claim to have come up with an elementary “Stone Age phrasebook” comprising some of the oldest words, and to have mapped out the evolution of many words through comparisons between the Indo-European family of languages over a 30,000 year period. The […]

One of the most fascinating aspects of my ethnographic work in a orphanage in a Hindu ashram in a satellite town of New Delhi, India, is the multilingual setting. The kids, to recap quickly, are first language Bengali speakers, second language Hindi speakers, attend an English medium school, and take part in mandatory 4 hour […]

This has been a rather eventful month for road signs across the globe, so here’s a short round up of some of the more interesting news that caught my attention in January..

The Birmingham City Council, UK, has decided to drop possessive apostrophes from road signs, to the dismay of many, particularly the Apostrophe […]