New Books in Language and Translation

Brynn Quick speaks with Dr Christian Ilbury about his new book, Researching Language and Digital Communication: A Student Guide, published by Routledge. The book is an introduction to research on language and digital communication, providing an overview of relevant sociolinguistic concepts, analytical frameworks, and methodological approaches commonly used in the field. It’s a practical guide desi...

What makes one sentence easy to read and another a slog that demands re-reading? Where do you put information you want readers to recall? Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, psychology and psycholinguistics, Writing for the Reader’s Brain (Cambridge University Press, 2025) provides a practical, how-to guide on how to write for your reader. It introduces the five 'Cs' of writing - clarity, continuit...

Syriac Lexis and Lexica: Compiling Ancient and Modern Vocabularies (Gorgias Press, 2024) publishes the papers presented at the round table on Syriac lexicology and lexicography held at the 13th Symposium Syriacum (Paris, 2022). An international group of scholars approaches this field from several new angles and shows how much remains to be done, from the creation of new lexical databases to the up...

Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Lauren Gawne, about cross-cultural variation in gesture use. In this episode, Brynn and Lauren discuss a paper that Lauren wrote in 2024 with co-author Dr. Kensey Cooperrider entitled “Emblems: Meaning at the interface of language and gesture”. Brynn and Lauren talk all about how emblems are different to gestures, cultural uses of emblems, emoji, and how emblems might b...

Between the study of specific languages and the philosophy of language lies what Ryan Nefdt calls a “Goldilocks zone” of theoretical issues related to language. In The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Nefdt introduces and explores the elements in this zone, including different theories of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and differing views of how languag...

Written by a self-taught grammarian, A Few Words About Words (Beaufort Books, 2021) offers an accessible and engaging guide to mastering the English language. A simple mistake, like writing your instead of you’re or there instead of they’re, can make the difference between winning or losing an opportunity. A missing comma can spark a PR disaster, while a well-crafted sentence can be remembered for...

Have you ever heard of Lingua Napoletana or Neapolitan, the language of Naples? In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks to Massimiliano Canzanella, a Neapolitan language activist. The conversation delves into the history of the Neapolitan language and the interplay of culture, race, and national identity that have contributed to the oppression of the language and...

Ian Rapley’s Green Star Japan: Esperanto and the International Language Question, 1880-1945 (U Hawaii Press, 2024) is a sociopolitical history of the “planned” language of Esperanto in the Japanese Empire. Esperanto was invented in the nineteenth century to address the problem of international communication. This was an issue of great and growing interest to various groups within the burgeoning Ja...

The Language of Climate Politics (Oxford UP, 2024) offers readers new ways to talk about the climate crisis that will help get fossil fuels out of our economy and save our planet. It's an analysis of the current discourse of American climate politics, but also a critical history of the terms that most directly influence the way not just conservatives but centrists on both sides of the political di...

Brynn Quick speaks with Dr Amy McHugh, an Academic Facilitator at the National Centre for Cultural Competence at the University of Sydney. Dr McHugh’s research focuses on the roles of technology and motivation in the continuous pursuit of cultural competence, and she facilitates workshops for both staff and students at the University of Sydney on these topics while working as the unit coordinator...

Our ability to find meaning in things is one of the most important aspects of human life. But it is also one of the most mysterious. Where does meaning come from? What sorts of things have meaning? And how do we grasp the meaning others want to convey? This Very Short Introduction is shaped by exploring possible answers to these questions. Human societies have one particularly important device for...

Alexandra Grey speaks with Karen McAuliffe about multilingual law-making. Karen is a Professor of Law and Language at Birmingham Law School in the UK. The conversation is about the important legal opinions delivered by the Advocates General at the European Court of Justice, and the effects of Advocates General drafting those opinions in their second or third language and with multilingual support...

In this episode of the Language-on-the-Move podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh speaks with Dr Prashneel Ravisan Goundar about his new book, English Language-Mediated Settings and Educational Inequality: Language Policy Agendas in the South Pacific published by Routledge in 2025. In this book, Goundar explores how educational inequalities are responsible for the way students perform in English language-mediat...

Verbal aspect in the Greek language has been a topic of significant debate in recent scholarship. The majority of scholars now believe that an understanding of verbal aspect is even more important than verb tense (past, present, etc.). Yet there still are no alternative accessible textbooks, both in terms of level and price. In the second edition, Constantine R. Campbell investigates the function...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Jia Li, Professor of Applied Sociolinguistics at Yunnan University, China. Tazin and Jia discuss crisis communication in a linguistically diverse world and a new book co-edited by Dr. Jia Li and Dr. Jie Zhang called Multilingual Crisis Communication: Insights from China (Routledge, 2024) that gives us insights into...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Gerald Roche, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Media, and Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia and head of research for the Linguistic Justice Foundation. Tazin and Gerald discuss his research into language oppression and focus on his recent book The Politics of Language Oppress...

This week on Madison’s Notes, we sit down with philosopher and author Charles Taylor to discuss his latest work, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Belknap Press, 2024) . Taylor dives into the profound role of poetry in reconnecting us to a sense of wonder and meaning in a world often characterized by disillusionment. Drawing on his vast expertise in philosophy, Taylor explo...

How does analyzing video games as hypertexts expand the landscape of research for video game rhetoricians and games studies scholars? This is the first book to focus on how hypertext rhetoric impacts the five canons of rhetoric, and to apply that hypertext rhetoric to the study of video games. It also explores how ludonarrative agency is seized by players seeking to express themselves in ways that...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Alexandra Grey about Dr. Grey’s book entitled Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study (De Gruyter, 2021). China has had constitutional minority language rights for decades, but what do they mean today? Answering with nuance and empirical detail, this book examines the rights thro...

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Laura Smith-Khan about language and accents in children’s media, from Octonauts to Disney to Bluey, and they investigate what a choice as seemingly banal as a character’s accent has to do with whiteness, standard language ideology, and securing a nation’s borders. They then reflect on Laura’s most recently published p...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Hannah White, a Postdoc researcher at Macquarie University in the Department of Linguistics. She completed her doctoral research in 2023 with a thesis entitled “Creaky Voice in Australian English”. Brynn speaks to Dr. White about this research along with a 2023 paper that she co-authored entitled “Convergence of Creak...

Popular discourse around British Muslims has often been dominated by a focus on Muslim women and their sartorial choices, particularly the hijab and niqab. British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End: The Changing Landscape of Dress and Language (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Fatima Rajina takes a different angle and focuses on Muslim men, examining how factors like the global war on terror influenc...

How can school communications become more accessible to multilingual families? In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Dr Agnes Bodis talks to Professor Margaret Kettle about the Multilingual Glossary of School-based Terms. This is list of school-related terms selected and translated to help multilingual families connect with schools. The research-based glossary was developed jointly...

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanisation of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled...

How do street-level bureaucrats in Austria’s public service deal with linguistic diversity? In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Dr Clara Holzinger (University of Vienna) about her PhD research investigating how employment officers deal with the day-to-day communication challenges arising when clients have low levels of German language proficiency. For add...