Bilingualism in music: a cure or curse for monolingualism?
"In 2017, two of the most popular singles in America were bilingual: ‘Despacito’ and J Balvin’s club classic ‘Mi Gente’ which gained incendiary power thanks to a Beyoncé cameo. In both cases, the English-speaking singers made notable effort to acknowledge the dominance of Spanish-language pop by singing in Spanish. Indeed, despite the commercial benefits that these artists certainly received perhaps the most important outcome of their success is their cultural impact."
“Je ne comprends pas”: learning to love bilingual literature
My first experience of reading a bilingual novel was both painful and involuntary. It was that heady World Cup summer of 2018 – the...
C’est La Vie: the importance of multilingual representations in art and literature
Some hidden gems of the artistic world lay in works that employ multiple languages in a purposeful manner. Algerian singer-songwriter Khaled intertwines both Arabic...
Music in a foreign language: short-lived novelty or here to stay?
When it comes to most music, you realise quite quickly that the language it’s written in isn’t really that important. Maybe you wouldn’t get...
Lost in Translation
In an age of globalised literature and artificial intelligence translation tools, to examine the function of literary translators is to question the substance of...
