Janny HC Leung – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

COVID-Sensitive Kanji. Guest post by Janny H. C. Leung.

New words or phrases, such as covidiot and Zoom fatigue, cropped up in the English language in the past year as a creative response to the pandemic. Yet, the most Covid-complaint neologism may be found in a non-alphabetical language. The winner of the 11th round of the Sousaku Kanji Contest is a redesigned character that separates the two persons (人) in a seat (座) to make sure that they comply with social distancing measures in 2020.

Download the entire post, which includes discussion of several other kanji, as a PDF.

Janny H. C. Leung is Dean of Liberal Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she is also Professor of Law and Society and Professor of English. She was Professor of Linguistics in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She obtained her M Phil and PhD in English and Applied Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, an LLB from the University of London, and an LLM from Yale Law School.

Janny Leung

She was a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Yenching Institute, the Faculty of Law of McGill University, and a Luce East Asia Fellow at the National Humanities Center (USA).

Broadly speaking, her research has revolved around the study of meaning. Her first line of research, developed from her doctoral work, focuses on the mapping between meaning and linguistic form in the acquisition and processing of language, using a psycholinguistic approach and a quantitative methodology. She was a founding member of the University of Hong Kong’s Speech, Language and Cognition Laboratory.

Her second and most current line of research lies in the emergent interdisciplinary area of language and law. She has published a monograph and a series of papers on challenges, ideologies and paradoxes in multilingual legal practice. She has also written about language rights, legal interpretation, unrepresented litigation, courtroom discourse, legal translation, and representations of law in the media. Her current government-funded project deals with the evolution of law in the modern communication environment.

Selected publications:

Leung, J. (2019) Shallow equality and symbolic jurisprudence in multilingual legal orders. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Leung, J. (2019). Does the world need more Canada? Legal multilingualism and strategic pluralism. Sherbrooke Law Review / Revue de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 47 (2-3), 193-226.

Leung, J., & Durant, A. (Eds.) (2018) Meaning and power in the language of law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Durant, A., & Leung, J. (2016) Language and law. London, UK: Routledge.

Work for CID:

Janny Leung wrote a guest post on COVID-sensitive kanji.