Linguistic Unease in Healthcare

Tom Birkett, University College, Cork, joins Jana Byars to discuss his new book, Runes: A Concise History (Oxford UP, 2025) An accessible and illuminating introduction to the history of the runic script, a writing system in use in the medieval North from the Roman Iron Age until the Reformation and beyond. Runes were the only writing system known to Germanic tribes, including those who migrated to England, and they provide a first-hand account of huge social change in the medieval North, including the Viking expansion in Europe and the adoption of Christianity. Often endowed with magical or prophetic properties--the keys to Middle Earth--runes were in fact a workaday script. As this book demonstrates, however, when the myths are stripped away the stories they tell us are no less fascinating.

Cosmopolitan Memories, Vernacular Visions: The Roots of Modern Korean (U Toronto Press, 2026) traces the emergence of vernacular Korean as a distinct subject of study in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Centering on school textbooks as key sites of change, Daniel Pieper reveals how language education became instrumental in forging modern Korean literacy and identity. The book situates this process within broader global patterns of vernacularization and nation-building across East Asia, Europe, and South Asia. Introducing the concept of “transformative bilingualism,” it argues that Korea’s language modernization – while catalyzed by colonial influence – ultimately reshaped both Korean and Japanese literacies.

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah chats with Dr. Priyanka Bose. Priyanka is a lecturer in English Literacy Education at the School of Education at Western Sydney University, Australia and winner of the 2026 Michael Clyne Prize for outstanding postgraduate research into immigrant bilingualism and language contact.

Who has the “right” to learn Mandarin Chinese? In Multiracial Mandarin: Asian Americans and Impossible Language (U Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. David Shuang Song examines how matters of race and privilege shape US Mandarin language education and who has access to it. Through a two-year ethnographic study of two Bay Area high schools where diasporic and heritage speakers learn Mandarin alongside Black and Latinx students, Song advances a sociological and educational–linguistic inquiry into how language interacts with our understanding of identity and equity.

The podcast covers the book Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo (U Washington Press, 2025), which is about satirical speech traditons from Amdo region of Tibet and the role of zurza in Tibetan cultural production and modernity. Tune in to find out more about satire, languages, cultures of what's funny and why.