On Friday, November 13, Crispin Thurlow gave a talk at the Berkeley Language Center entitled Language, Tourism, and Banal Globalization, in which he “examine[d] some of the ways that language is commonly taken up in tourism’s search for difference, exoticity, and authenticity.” Using a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, Thurlow discussed [...]

The newly constituted Maharashtra Assembly in India was the site of an eventful brawl when Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) workers prevented Samajwadi Party legislator Abu Azmi from taking his oath of office in Hindi: as soon as he began taking the oath, the workers snatched his mike and attempted to shred the [...]

This evening, Sunehri Market, the local bazaar, was awash in green, white, and deep saffron, the colors of the Indian flag. There were tricolor kites, delicate (miniature) paper flags, exercise wristbands, streamers, paper caps, garlands, towelettes, artificial flower bouquets, and cloth flags. Tomorrow is Independence Day, the 62nd anniversary of Indian freedom from [...]

In an effort to buy chairs in bulk from a warehouse for my project in a city in North India, we ended up in a rather remarkable part of town that I have never had occasion to visit before. We didn’t have the exact address when we started; my mother’s friend’s daughter’s husband had [...]

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” [...]

Devotees of தமிழ் (Tamil) are getting ready to build a temple in honor of the language in southern Tamil Nadu, the Indian state. Here’s a little more about it:

It will have a hall for conducting Tamil discourses and debates, a library comprising famous Tamil books, a free Siddha medical centre and pillars in [...]

A couple of days ago, I chanced upon a very provocative piece entitled “I’m In Ur Base, Imitatin Ur Doodz!” posted by Ta-Nehisi Coates on his blog at The Atlantic Online, where he’s a contributing editor. Here’s what caught my attention:

Often when a white person wants to give his opinion on something [...]

Living in the United States for the past five years, the extensive circulation of the word “sorry” is something I generally take for granted. However, I was revisiting some of the stories I collected while with some kids at an orphanage in a suburb of New Delhi, India, when it struck me how odd, or [...]

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 [...]

A new study to be published in Science magazine, regarding the stone tablet inscriptions from the Indus Valley region four thousand years ago, is a topic of hotly contested debate:

Did the people of the Indus Valley civilization have a written language? According to the researchers who conducted the latest analysis, the answer is [...]

My mother often tells me stories of growing up in pre-Independence Calcutta (Kolkata), India, and I am always fascinated by details about Bengali (Bangali)* cuisine. I grew up in a (primarily) vegetarian household (where food was niramish), whereas the defining aspect of traditional Bangali cuisine is (traditionally freshwater) fish curry (machher jhol) and [...]

The popular daily Hindustan Times carries a recent article on how patients in the major Indian metropolises are sending MMS’s (Multimedia Messaging Service) for diagnoses to their doctors. Money quote:

“It reflects the changing face of the doctor-patient interaction. I’ve been sent clips of the symptoms – a kid with stomach cramps bawling [...]

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 [...]

Last Thursday, UNESCO unveiled the new (online) Atlas of World Languages, claiming that 2,500 (36%) of the 6,900 languages spoken worldwide are endangered. The top three countries facing the loss of the most languages are: 1. India (with 196 endangered languages); 2. The United States (with 192); and Indonesia (with 147).

Nearly 200 languages [...]

ए. आर. रहमान को बहुत बहुत बधाई हो. उनकी वजह से आज बहुत लोगों की ज़बान पर हिन्दी है.

जय हो!

This past Thursday, I attended Language Matters: Strengthening Asian and Pacific Islander Language Education at Berkeley. The stated aim of the event, according to the program brochure, was “to promote the creation of majors and minors for marginalized API languages like Korean, Tagalog, Thai, Tamil, Vietnamese, Khmer, etc, and to promote labor equity for [...]