Author: paige laevy

I first became aware of it when I was passing the Soho Theatre on a soggy Tuesday in October and noticed a line that encircled the Dean Street corner. It wasn’t Friday. No well-known English headliner was scheduled. The name of a Lebanese-French comic that I had never heard of was written in three scripts on the poster. The first ten minutes were all in Arabic, and the room was crammed to the back wall. No one appeared to be lost. They were doubled over. FieldDetailScene name (informal)London Multilingual / Bilingual Stand-Up CircuitOrigin periodLoosely dated to the mid-2010s; momentum from…

The first time a researcher puts an EEG cap on a bilingual participant while a high-speed eye-tracker hums softly on the desk is a brief, almost theatrical moment in any psycholinguistics lab. The electrodes contain gel. On the monitor, a calibration grid is blinking. The participant is attempting to avoid blinking. As this develops, it is difficult to ignore the fact that scientists’ choices about how to investigate language have changed. The two machines were operated by different people, lived in separate rooms, and asked different questions for decades. The bilingual mind, which has long been studied through deft but…

When you walk through a Bridgeport school hallway on a weekday morning, the noise isn’t the first thing you notice. Languages are the cause. Before the bell rings, there may be three or four languages that overlap: Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Pashto, and Haitian Creole. Such a scene would have been uncommon in a Connecticut classroom twenty years ago. It is now more of the norm in places like Danbury and Stamford. CategoryDetailStateConnecticutImmigrant-background student share (2023)Roughly 30 percent, up from about 15 percent in 2000Most affected citiesBridgeport, Stamford, Danbury — each with majority-immigrant child populationsNational ranking for school funding adequacy5thNational ranking…

Somewhere on a hospital ward in the Midlands, a nurse leans across a bed and tries, for the third time, to explain what a cannula is. The patient gives a nod. She gives a nod in return. What was just agreed upon is unclear to both of them. Once more, a bilingual healthcare assistant is paged from a different floor. She’ll come, eventually. She does it every time. In a way, this is how the NHS translation system operates. The NHS translation system is also at fault. Both things are true at once, and that contradiction sits at the heart…

You’ll hear it before you see it if you stroll down Pont Street on a Tuesday afternoon. A camel-coated mother answers her phone in clipped English while she speaks Mandarin. Near the Cadogan Hotel, a nanny converses in Arabic and French with two young boys wearing matching navy shorts. A family is arguing over lunch outside Harrods while a porter holds the door open in what sounds like Farsi, then Turkish, then Farsi once more. It’s the SW1 soundtrack, and the volume has been increasing. Quick Facts: Bilingual Wealth in Prime Central LondonDetailsAreas with highest concentrationKnightsbridge, Belgravia, Mayfair, South Kensington,…

As is often the case, the executive order was primarily symbolic. In March 2025, President Trump signed it, removing non-binding federal guidelines on language access services and designating English as the official language of the United States. In July, the administration issued new orders directing federal agencies to cease providing translation services and to “prioritize English.” The policy, which was a clear declaration of a long-held conservative position that had been waiting for the right opportunity to become official federal posture, appeared to arrive with the assured energy of a debate that had been won. According to the polling, the…

There is nothing particularly noteworthy about the waiting area of a rural clinic in the Rio Grande Valley. plastic seats. High on the wall is a television. Patients are greeted by a screen in both Spanish and English at the front desk, where they are asked to verify their name, insurance, and whether they have previously visited. Rita is the screen’s name. As patients approach, she can read their facial expressions because she is bilingual and technically proficient in around a hundred languages. The clinic doesn’t act as though she is human. However, she is managing intake, updating electronic health…

Imagine a Latina executive standing in a corporate office building, dressed in a blue shirt and khaki pants. “Excuse me, are you with the cleaning crew?” a coworker asks. “No, I’m not,” she says to the researcher narrating this incident. As it happens, I work as a director. Even though it’s just one conversation, it encompasses a wide range of presumptions about who should be in particular areas, what authority looks like, and who should be given the benefit of the doubt in a professional setting. Variations of that moment recur throughout a career for a large number of Hispanic…

The moment it clicked, according to Tatiana de Rosnay, was like stepping off a peaceful country path onto a busy highway. She had opened two documents on her screen, one in French and one in English, and began writing her book Blonde Dust by freely switching between them, writing in the language that the sentence appeared in, and then transposing it to the other using what she described as the “patient and meticulous fine-tuning used on an antiquated receiver.” Her spouse made a joke about seeing smoke emanating from her ears. She claims that language eventually lost its significance as…

If you look at the hiring pages of any big tech company today, you’ll notice that things have changed even in the last two years. The titles of the jobs have evolved. Not totally; there are still data scientists, product managers, and software engineers. However, there are more and more positions that, until recently, lacked clear titles, such as computational biology researcher, domain AI specialist, and AI integration lead. They are connected by a particular combination that the industry is just now starting to clearly define. AI expertise is not required for these roles. They are seeking individuals with expertise…