Contesting Language in the Seventeenth Century—and Now
From Milton to modern politics, this blog explores how language in the seventeenth century influenced struggles over authority, belief, and freedom.
An Introduction to the Journal of Arabic Sociolinguistics
by Reem Bassiouney When my monograph Arabic Sociolinguistics was published in 2008, it provided an overview of a growing, but still not widely recognized field of research. In the years that elapsed until 2020 (when the second edition of the…
Decentering France, Recentering Brittany
By Heather Williams and David Evans On 8 April 2021, a new law was passed in France to allow teaching in state schools to take place by immersion in the various regional languages of the country. Proposed by Paul Molac,…
Using digital technology to uncover ‘invisible’ patterns in language and society
By Adnan Ajšić If you have seen the 1999 movie The Matrix, you will remember the green code tumbling down the black screen like digital rain from the title scene. Later in the movie, Tank, one of the characters, ‘reads’…
Freedom of Speech as Well as Listening: From Thinking with Words to Listening Through Language
By Igor R. Reyner It is evident that we are living in a particularly challenging time, where transformative and empathic ways of listening, as well as of understanding, are much needed. Surrounded by fake news and intransigent behaviour, isolated in…
Translation and Literature Reaches Thirty: A Little History
By Stuart Gillespie I was one of the two founding editors of this journal in 1992. Anyone involved with a publication for this long will have travelled far, and when I look back over the thirty-year lifespan of Translation and…
Finding a Language of My Own – Maya Issam Kesrouany on the Making of Modern Egyptian Literature
Much like the translators in my book (Prophetic Translation: The Making of Modern Egyptian Literature), I have also found myself speaking in languages that felt simultaneously very familiar and extremely alien. When I was in Cairo in 2006, I recognized…
Literature and Psychoanalysis: Open Questions
A special issue of journal, Paragraph, guest edited by Elissa Marder, creatively re-imagines Shoshana Felman’s groundbreaking 1977 volume of Yale French Studies (Nos 55/56), Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, in which Felman opened up the question of…
‘I Am My Language’
In May 2017, the Israeli Knesset passed the nation-state bill in its first round. This bill emphasizes Israel being Jewish and democratic. A casualty of this bill is the Arabic language. Arabic has been an official language in a law…