La Alabarda (the halberd symbol of Trieste, Italy) has featured as a sticker on every car I have owned. I expect the symbol, a white lance on a striking red background, would be unfamiliar to most motorists who view it on my back windshield.

With the rise of social media, we can now see how people use English in different contexts. Along with this visibility comes a wave of grammarians in Indonesia, giving judgmental critiques on others’ use of English.

Our world has become very interconnected. There are more speakers of English as an additional language than speakers considered to use

In Iran, we commonly use the term zaban [literally translated as language/tongue] to refer exclusively to the English language. When someone

Recently, I had a blast from the past when my former Iranian English teacher, Mitti, kindly sent me a few of my English writings from about 17 years ago. It was both eye-opening and quite hilarious reading a very young me trying to express myself in English. First of all, let me tell you about Mitti. She had this magical quality where she encouraged us to speak English in class but never gave us the side-eye if we threw in a Persian word here and there. Looking at the youthfu

Born and raised in Vietnam, I learned and later taught English as a foreign language. My monolingual background significantly shaped my perspective, and I was particularly influenced by two key experiences during my learning and teaching journey. The first pivotal experience was being selected to attend a provincial high school where students were trained to become leaders in the province. At the welcoming ceremony, the head teacher, a renowned Russian language instructor, ad

I was born and raised during a golden era of English language education in China. By the time I was in the third grade, English had become a compulsory subject in our curriculum. However, many children were exposed to English even before that, through extracurricular classes. I was one of them. At just five years old, my parents enrolled me in a weekend English training program.   The 2008 Beijing Olympics elevated the English language to unprecedented prominence in China. ‘E