Multilingual San Francisco: You don’t have to leave your town to learn a new...
No more excuses about not having the money to go to the country of the language you want to speak. If you live in a metropolitan area, you are likely to find ethnic, cultural...
Will there be more military linguists when homosexuals can serve in the military?
As I was driving home and listening to the news on the radio about the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell", the military's ban on homosexual military service people, I realized that this may...
Multilingual California beaten by Rhode Island, offering trilingual school
I live in Silicon Valley where Mandarin Chinese is widely spoken by the large Taiwanese and mainland Chinese community in the area. However, the schools in Cupertino only offer Mandarin immersion programs from Kindergarten...
Mutlilingual identity: diversity of languages and ways of being
Scientific American magazine published an article about how speaking various languages can alter the personality of the speaker:
Polyglots Might Have Multiple Personalities
People take on different character traits depending on which language they are using
This...
I don’t “speak white”. Multilingualism is my identity.
For those of us who are bilingual or multilingual, our languages may shape our identities and cultural affiliations more so than race, economic status or religion.
With about 20% of children in the US population...
Famous Women who speak foreign languages, Do you know of any?
As I am thinking of ways to promote women and girls learning foreign languages and showing their linguistic prowess, I compiled a list of famous and powerful women who are multilingual.
Some of them use...
Being Bilingual May Boost Your Brain Power
Last week, National Public Radio (NPR) reported a story, Being Bilingual May Boost Your Brain Power, that bilingual children may have more brain power and that Alzheimer's disease may be delayed or averted if one...
Special “foreigner treatment”: please no! I’m a heritage speaker.
Usually, I don’t want to attract attention to my not being a local by asking for special treatment when I am in a Russian speaking country. Because as soon as I tell...
How to raise a bilingual or multilingual kid
I am typing this just after having a trilingual conversation with my nephew who just came back from Ecuador. When I speak to him in Russian, he responds in Spanish. When I speak to...
Multilingualism: Being a Russian heritage speaker in the former USSR
Professor François Grosjean, the Emeritus Professor of psycholinguistics at Neuchâtel University, Switzerland is a specialist in bilingualism, multilingualism and heritage language speakers. Last week, he wrote a blog piece, Portraying Heritage Language Speakers: Heritage...
