Author: paige laevy

The majority of bilingual office workers in London are familiar with a specific moment. When a foreign-language email arrives in the general inbox—perhaps from a client in Paris, a supplier in Madrid, or a question in Mandarin or Arabic—the room’s attention subtly moves toward the person who can handle it without anyone’s express consent. There is an interruption to the meeting. The spreadsheet remains visible on the screen. With an internal sigh, the unofficial interpreter takes on the task that wasn’t specified in the job description. It is a small annoyance that only occurs once. It turns into a texture…

The radio in the kitchen is doing what has always characterized the Latino neighborhoods of East Los Angeles on a weekend morning: switching. The DJ’s voice switches between Spanish and English, sometimes in the same sentence, just like a conversation between cousins during a family meal. The audience fully comprehends this, and the station, 96.3 La Mega, has been doing this since 2005. They have spent their entire lives switching codes. They might not be aware that AI is increasingly present in the room with them, listening, analyzing, and occasionally responding. Over sixty million Americans listen to Spanish-language radio, which…

On a gloomy Tuesday morning in Canary Wharf, the glass towers lining the north bank of the Thames absorb any available light and scatter it in broken pieces back at the pedestrians below. By seven-thirty, the coffee shops are packed. Above them, the trading floors are already operational. A group of analysts are conversing outside the HSBC building in a mix of Mandarin and English. This is the kind of effortless code-switching that hardly stands out here because it’s not unusual in this specific square mile of the world. No single piece of infrastructure or regulation is as close to…

A recruiter from a financial services company is doing something that would have seemed out of the ordinary five years ago on a Tuesday afternoon at a mid-sized university career fair in the Midwest. She doesn’t really care about her GPA. She doesn’t care which accounting program a student is familiar with. Carefully and directly, she is inquiring as to whether the junior across the folding table speaks Mandarin, Arabic, or Spanish at home. The instant the response is in the affirmative, the conversation warms. This is the 2026 job market. Additionally, businesses that comprehend it have already begun to…

On a warm June evening in 2018, an audience of young, affluent Londoners was doing something that had never been done on the West End: watching a play switch between English and French, following surtitles projected in various locations around the stage, and calling for encores at the end. The Theatre Royal Haymarket is one of London’s oldest and most formally beautiful theatres, the kind of place where the red carpet and the gilded ceiling suggest a certain decorum is expected. Even though they were seated in the same room, the newspaper critics’ experiences differed.The Times described it as “Merde,…

The Navajo Nation’s capital, Window Rock, Arizona, has a red sandstone arch that rises from the high desert like a natural monument to something eternal. The road leading in from Gallup is lined with billboards encouraging young Navajos to attend college, earn degrees, return to their homeland, and support their people. The scenery is stark and striking, with a wide sky, red rock, and juniper scrub. They were supposed to be motivating signs. They also started to contribute to the issue at some point in the decades since they went up. In the past, about 90% of tribal first-graders spoke…

There is a startling lack of second language proficiency in the majority of mid-sized American businesses. Meetings are conducted in English, emails are sent in English, negotiations take place in English, and when a client calls from Warsaw or São Paulo, someone discreetly looks for a translator app. It seems typical. By international standards, it is highly uncommon and getting more expensive. Although the phrase “monolingual tax” has been around for a while in language policy and labor economics circles, it is gaining more traction in 2026 than it has in the past. The basic argument is fairly straightforward: individuals…

Anyone who grew up in a multilingual household will recognize the specific moment when an elderly relative abruptly switches between languages in the middle of a sentence—from Polish to Yiddish, from Hindi to Punjabi, or from English to Spanish—just like breathing. It has always appeared to be a peculiar memory, a lovely remnant of a multilingual existence. As it happens, it might be among the most potent things a brain can do for itself. Large patient studies from Toronto, Hyderabad, and Montreal, as well as neuroimaging studies highlighted by organizations like Stanford’s Longevity Center, have been used in research over…

The first thing you’ll notice when you get off the train in Maida Vale on a Saturday afternoon is the conversation rather than the architecture. Arabic somehow blends into the rhythm of the city without anyone noticing, spilling out from a corner café and blending with the rumble of buses on Elgin Avenue. These sounds are absorbed by London in the same way that rain is absorbed. Silently. Without remarks. Even when no one seems to be listening, it’s difficult to ignore how effortlessly the city carries its many voices. Project & City ProfileDetailsProject NameTube TonguesCreatorOliver O’BrienAffiliated InstitutionUniversity College London…

When I first saw a toddler in a Karachi living room switch between Urdu and English in the middle of a sentence—asking for paani and then, practically in the same breath, demanding “the blue cup, not that one”—I didn’t think it was confusing. It appeared to be fluency. A four-year-old who was still learning how to tie her shoes managed two systems that were operating in parallel. I was reminded of that moment when I read the most recent discussion surrounding the so-called 30-million-word gap, the well-known 1995 discovery that has influenced early childhood policy for nearly thirty years. Topic…