Jennifer Runner

Since April 2015 | 106 Contributions

Having grown up in a multicultural and multilingual community, Jennifer has been a language enthusiast and language student for as long as she can remember. She has been a language teacher for nearly two and a half decades, with degrees in Spanish and German, teaching certifications for Spanish and English, and has studied several other languages including Estonian and French.

She has done work as a translation editor for a book of Estonian folk songs (Vana Kannel XII: Vaivara ja Narva regilaulud published by the Estonian Literary Museum, EKM Teaduskirjastus, in 2018), and contributed to a book introducing languages of Papua New Guinea (Welcome to Papua New Guinea: A Greeting Term Lexicon of Papua New Guinea Languages published by the University of Papua New Guinea in 2014). She has also contributed to several English as a Second Language texts as a consultant and reviewer.

Since 1992 Jennifer has been collecting basic phrases and greetings in more than 3400 languages of the world, and since 1995 she has shared them on Jennifer’s Language Page as a way of promoting intercultural communication and increasing awareness of linguistic diversity. Maintaining and adding to this website has given her opportunities to communicate with people around the world regarding their languages, and in particular regarding less-commonly-spoken languages with limited online presence.

She considers her most important work to be as a language teacher, because this allows her to share her love of languages with others. It also exposes her to the many different languages spoken by her students and gives her insight into how those languages differ from the languages she teaches; the majority of her students have been native speakers of Spanish and Hmong Daw, but over the years she has taught English and Spanish to speakers of many other languages including Assyrian, Cantonese, Copala Triqui, Egyptian Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Hmong Njua, Iu Mien, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Mongolian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Samoan, Tamil, Thai, Urdu, and Yemeni Arabic.