New Books in Language and Translation

Metasemantics studies the foundations of meaning, asking what makes it the case that certain words have the meanings that they do. But what makes metasemantic theories true? This question has been all but ignored in philosophy of language. In this book, Cohnitz and Haukioja address this issue and argue that just as in metasemantics, both internalist and externalist answers are available for this f...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick sits down with Dr. Nelson Flores to discuss his 2024 book entitled Becoming the System: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of Bilingual Education in the Post-Civil Rights Era, published by Oxford University Press. In his book, Dr. Flores examines the ways that institutionalizing bilingual education in the post-Civil Rights Era in the United...

There is an academic interest in the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidm...

Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new way to understand why conspiracy theories grow and persist. Rather than treating them as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of echo chambers, Rao and Greve analyze conspiracy theories as linguistic constructions, that is as stories built from recognizable semantic patterns. Drawing...

A roadmap for enhancing students' equitable access to biliteracy development Monolingual ideologies have driven US educational policy for centuries. Despite the benefits of multilingualism, policies have often prioritized English and reduced children's access to their home languages. The "Seal of Biliteracy" is a language education policy that recognizes students' proficiency in two languages as a...

I had the privilege of speaking with writer Samantha Ellis about her deeply moving new book, Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture (Pegasus Books, 2026). Our discussion explored not only the story of a disappearing language, but also the broader questions of memory, identity, and what it means to inherit a fragile cultural legacy. At the heart of Ellis’s book is Judeo-Iraq...

Surrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India (Oxford UP, 2026) explores the role of languages in the intellectual landscape of second-millennium India by way of six theological treatises composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, each written by a key intellectual figure: Vātsya Varadaguru, Periyavāccān Pillai, Meghanādari Sūri, Pillai Lokācār...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Oludamini Oguannaike, Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. Tazin and Oludamini talk about his work into how languages, such as English, express concepts that originate from onto-epistemic perspectives that are not historically associated with the English lang...

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over ma...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Dr Santiago Betancor Falcón (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) about his 2025 paper, Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain. The conversation focuses on minoritised languages, autonomous language lea...

With Taiwan Travelogue winning the 2026 International Booker Prize, Taiwanese literature in translation has achieved new heights of visibility in the Anglosphere. In this episode of the New Books Network, we chat with writer and translator Kevin Wang about his English language rendition of Spent Bullets (HarperCollins, 2025), another Taiwanese novel that Taiwan Travelogue’s translator Lin King her...

The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. It’s a word that Elizabeth Pryor has not only contemplated, it’s one that she has taught and observed up close. When a white student quoted her father and blurted out the N-word in the middle of a class she was teaching, Professor Pryor’s worlds collided. In that moment, she was forced to confr...

Names are incredibly powerful things and are a crucial part of the way we see and classify the world around us. Plant names are especially fascinating in this respect. Some are simply descriptive or speak of ancient uses and remedies, whilst others have religious origins or roots in wider folklore, and some are very recent inventions. Scottish Plant Names: An A–Z (Birlinn, 2026) by Dr. Gregory Ken...

Sh. An-ski (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, 1863-1920) was a writer in Russian and Yiddish, a revolutionary, a wartime relief worker, and an ethnographer who studied the Jews of the Russian Empire. During his 1911-1914 expeditions to shtetls in Ukraine—he would report—he and his co-workers took 1000 photographs, recorded 1000 Yiddish songs and 1500 stories, and purchased 400 objects for a Jewish museum....

Sanskrit-Speaking' Villages, Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development (Routledge, 2026) is a recollection of the McCartney's journey across 'Sanskritland, ' which is the term coined to refer to the utopian landscape within which the 'Language of the Gods' is thought to be spoken. There are three destinations on the author's journey. This study sheds light on how, why, and where Sanskr...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Yeong Ju Lee about her new book Social Media and Language Learning: Using TikTok and Instagram (Routledge, 2025). Lee, Y. J. (2025). Social Media and Language Learning: Using TikTok and Instagram. Taylor & Francis. This book explores creative uses of social media for informal language learning. It focuses on the under...

In 362/363 the Roman emperor Julian composed a treatise titled Against the Galileans in which he set forth his reasons for abandoning Christianity and returning to devotion to the traditional Greco-Roman deities. Sixty years later Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, composed a response. His resulting treatise Against Julian would dwarf the size of Julian's original work and in fact serves as our primary...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Elina Penner about her translated novel, Nightberries (CMU Press, 2026, translated by Bradley Schmidt).  Where is your husband? Nelli doesn’t seem to be in crisis—or does she? The quiet youngest daughter in a noisy, tangled German Mennonite family who fled from Russia in the 1990s, does she even know where she belongs? Marriage, loyalty, faith,...

How Deeply Human Is Language? Chomsky, the Brain, and the AI Fantasy (MIT Press, 2026) is Yosef Grodzinsky’s exploration of the criticality of the linguistic theories to the design of LLMs. The book dwells on the significance of the marriage between computational and theoretical fields, specifically “engineering and science” on the development of unique Language Learning Models. Yosef maintains t...

In Rainforest Radio: Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian Amazon (U Arizona Press, 2025), Dr. Georgia C. Ennis provides a comprehensive ethnographic exploration of Amazonian Kichwa community media, offering a unique look at how Indigenous broadcast and performance media facilitate linguistic and cultural reclamation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This work offers a critical analys...

In this episode of the Vault, we revisit the Italian writer Italo Calvino’s James Lecture, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on March 30, 1983. Italo Calvino was one of the most inventive and widely read Italian authors of the twentieth century. Born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy, he began his literary career as a journalist and fiction writer after World War I...

Jeffrey Shandler’s new book, Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford UP, 2020), presents the story of Yiddish, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the present. Shandler relates the multifaceted history of Yiddish in the form of a biographical profile. Through a series of thematic chapters—from “Name” and “Date and Place of Birth” to “Religion” and “Life Expectancy”—he...

Aya Elyada is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on German and German-Jewish cultural history, Yiddish-German encounters, and the social history of language and translation. She is the author of A Lingering Legacy: The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture (SUP 2026) and A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and th...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Professor David Palfreyman (United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain) about his 2023 book Bilingual writers and corpus analysis. Palfreyman, D. M., & Habash, N. (2023). Bilingual writers and corpus analysis. Routledge. Link here Bilingual writers and corpus analysis is one of the first to represent the usage of bilingua...

Lyrical Translation: The Creation of Modern Poetry in Colonial Korea (U Hawai'i Press, 2026)is a literary history of modern Korean poetry's origins and its development through translation. As the use of Korean became increasingly restricted during the Japanese occupation, translation was not a choice but a necessity for higher education and intellectual labor. Yet it also had an expansive, creat...