Multilingual Literature submission deadline: 12/15/09!

The White House website announced that the State Department has prepared translations of President Obama’s major “A New Beginning” speech delivered at Cairo University .

There are translations into 13 languages so far: Arabic, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, Urdu and Portuguese. And at the [...]

The fourth annual Urdu Show is comin’ up!

The event will take place Sunday, May 3rd, from 4:00 pm to 7:30 pm in 155 Dwinelle.

Hope to see you there!

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 [...]

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 [...]

After being gently prodded to do a “post” on this, rather than simply offer an “aside,” I thought I’d write up “25 Language-Related Random Things” about me, inspired by the Facebook phenomenon taking the Internet by storm.

1. Sometimes when I am writing quickly in Bengali, I use Hindi letters.
2. When I was [...]

The Mudra Institute of Communications in Ahmedabad (MICA) recently organized a popular conference on the phenomenon known as Hinglish. According to conference organizer Rita Kotharu, “Hinglish has been around for some time now, but it tends to be dismissed as the preserve of those who know neither English nor Hindi well. It now [...]