Author: paige laevy

Before you reach the corner of Bishopsgate on a rainy Tuesday, you will hear at least four different languages as you leave Liverpool Street Station. Bengali, Turkish, a dialect of English spoken by a teenager on the phone that would confuse his own grandfather, and something that sounds somewhat like Polish but isn’t. The experience is nearly identical when you cross the Atlantic and stand outside the 74th Street-Roosevelt Avenue station in Queens, but with more Spanish, more Tagalog, and the distinct sound of someone arguing about parking in two languages at once. The Globalization and World Cities Research Network…

Before the third cup of coffee arrives on a Tuesday afternoon, you can frequently hear at least four languages being spoken in a small café off Lamb’s Conduit Street. One of the regulars, a fifty-year-old woman who translates legal contracts between Polish and English, once said that she occasionally dreams in the language she is learning. She said it in a casual manner, similar to how someone might bring up forgetting to buy bread. It’s the kind of detail that sticks with you, in part because it sounds like a metaphor and in part because you realize it’s not one…

You’ll notice something that wasn’t really there five years ago if you walk past the rope outside a Mayfair club on a Friday near midnight. The doorman isn’t merely counting heads and nodding. He’s chatting quietly in Russian with a group of twentysomething women, then turning to a coworker and saying something briefly in what sounds like Italian before switching to English to greet a couple behind them. It’s a brief moment that is simple to overlook. However, it reveals a lot about the future of London’s nightlife. Once thought of as silent, broad-shouldered individuals who stamped hands, bouncers are…

Enter a Houston kindergarten classroom on a Tuesday morning, and you will hear something that is rarely captured in the Washington policy debate. A Spanish story is read aloud by a teacher. A boy responds in English. Like her grandmother at the dinner table, another girl, perhaps five years old, switches in mid-sentence without giving it any thought. No one corrects her. The lesson continues. It’s a brief scene that’s easy to overlook, but it reveals nearly everything about the state of the nation and how far behind the law it has fallen. Bilingualism has been viewed as a problem…

On most Saturday afternoons, you can hear at least four different languages being spoken among the patrons of a small café on Bethnal Green Road. When her mother enters, a young woman in her early twenties quickly switches from English to Sylheti in the middle of her sentence. She chuckles at something, apologizes, and then laughs once more. It’s difficult not to wonder what’s going on beneath the surface when you watch a moment like this—what it costs, what it gives back, and whether anyone outside that table truly gets it. For years, descriptions of London’s bilingual youth have been…

Early in nearly every papal visit, the pope is seen on camera leaning into a microphone and attempting a phrase in a language that is obviously not his native tongue. There are moments when the accent is off. There are moments when the grammar falters. Nevertheless, the audience responds as though they have been given something personal. It is too frequent to be a coincidence. It seems that the contemporary papacy has realized, whether consciously or unconsciously, that words in a person’s mother tongue have a significance that translation is unable to fully capture. The Catholic Church relied on Latin…

The biggest tech companies in the world have rediscovered something almost embarrassingly outdated: the cartoon mascot, somewhere between Clippy’s quiet retirement and the emergence of voice-enabled chatbots. This time, however, the mascot is multilingual. Without hesitation, it switches between Spanish and English. At breakfast, it greets the user in Hindi, and by lunchtime, it switches to Mandarin. The industry seems to have stumbled into a strange new era where the most linguistically adept artificial intelligence is also its friendliest face. You’ll notice it if you stroll through any tech expo in late 2026. The booths have a softer feel. More…

The long shadow of Tyson Foods headquarters and the chicken plants are not the first things you see when you drive into Springdale on a Tuesday morning. The bumper stickers are the cause. My son is bilingual. My kid speaks two languages. Twenty years ago, it would have been difficult to locate a single Spanish-language pamphlet in the front office of elementary schools where they are stranded on minivans parked outside. Here, something has changed subtly, almost without anyone in the rest of the nation taking the time to notice. The majority of Americans do not associate Arkansas with bilingual…

On a weekday morning, you might not notice the difference if you stroll down Cromwell Road. There are still crossing guards. The parents are still gathered outside the gates of the Lycée Franço Charles de Gaulle, their coats pulled tight as they speak the short, clipped Parisian French that used to give South Kensington the impression that the 7th arrondissement had subtly taken over a portion of west London. However, there are fewer people. The rambling is quieter. Additionally, the head teachers no longer act as though everything is alright when you ask them off-the-record. Since the First World War,…

There is a peculiar mood inside federal buildings in Ottawa these days, somewhere between curiosity and quiet anxiety. Walk through the corridors near Place du Portage on a weekday morning and you can almost hear the conversation that nobody wants to start out loud. A junior analyst stares at a translation tool open on a second monitor. A director leaves a French-language meeting still uncertain whether she caught every nuance. Somewhere down the hall, a manager is studying, again, for the dreaded oral exam known simply as the “C.” It’s hard not to notice how much of a public servant’s…