The Origin and Diffusion of World Languages
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Language, Culture, and National Identity
Language, Culture, and National Identity BY ERIC HOBSBAWM LANGUAGE, culture, and national identity is the ·title of my pa per, but its central subject is the situation of languages in cul tures, written or spoken languages still being the main medium of these. More specifically, my subject is "multiculturalism" in sofar as this depends on language. "Nations" come into it, since in the states in which we all live political decisions about how and where languages are used for public purposes (for example, in schools) are crucial. And these states are today commonly iden tified with "nations" as in the term United Nations. This is a dan gerous confusion. So let me begin with a few words about it. Since there are hardly any colonies left, practically all of us today live in independent and sovereign states. With the rarest exceptions, even exiles and refugees live in states, though not their own. It is fairly easy to get agreement about what constitutes such a state, at any rate the modern model of it, which has become the template for all new independent political entities since the late eighteenth century. It is a territory, preferably coherent and demarcated by frontier lines from its neighbors, within which all citizens without exception come under the exclusive rule of the territorial government and the rules under which it operates. Against this there is no appeal, except by authoritarian of that government; for even the superiority of European Community law over national law was established only by the decision of the constituent SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. -
Transfer Learning for Singlish Universal Dependencies Parsing and POS Tagging
From Genesis to Creole language: Transfer Learning for Singlish Universal Dependencies Parsing and POS Tagging HONGMIN WANG, University of California Santa Barbara, USA JIE YANG, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore YUE ZHANG, West Lake University, Institute for Advanced Study, China Singlish can be interesting to the computational linguistics community both linguistically as a major low- resource creole based on English, and computationally for information extraction and sentiment analysis of regional social media. In our conference paper, Wang et al. [2017], we investigated part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing for Singlish by constructing a treebank under the Universal Dependencies scheme, and successfully used neural stacking models to integrate English syntactic knowledge for boosting Singlish POS tagging and dependency parsing, achieving the state-of-the-art accuracies of 89.50% and 84.47% for Singlish POS tagging and dependency respectively. In this work, we substantially extend Wang et al. [2017] by enlarging the Singlish treebank to more than triple the size and with much more diversity in topics, as well as further exploring neural multi-task models for integrating English syntactic knowledge. Results show that the enlarged treebank has achieved significant relative error reduction of 45.8% and 15.5% on the base model, 27% and 10% on the neural multi-task model, and 21% and 15% on the neural stacking model for POS tagging and dependency parsing respectively. Moreover, the state-of-the-art Singlish POS tagging and dependency parsing accuracies have been improved to 91.16% and 85.57% respectively. We make our treebanks and models available for further research. -
Portuguese Language in Angola: Luso-Creoles' Missing Link? John M
Portuguese language in Angola: luso-creoles' missing link? John M. Lipski {presented at annual meeting of the AATSP, San Diego, August 9, 1995} 0. Introduction Portuguese explorers first reached the Congo Basin in the late 15th century, beginning a linguistic and cultural presence that in some regions was to last for 500 years. In other areas of Africa, Portuguese-based creoles rapidly developed, while for several centuries pidginized Portuguese was a major lingua franca for the Atlantic slave trade, and has been implicated in the formation of many Afro- American creoles. The original Portuguese presence in southwestern Africa was confined to limited missionary activity, and to slave trading in coastal depots, but in the late 19th century, Portugal reentered the Congo-Angola region as a colonial power, committed to establishing permanent European settlements in Africa, and to Europeanizing the native African population. In the intervening centuries, Angola and the Portuguese Congo were the source of thousands of slaves sent to the Americas, whose language and culture profoundly influenced Latin American varieties of Portuguese and Spanish. Despite the key position of the Congo-Angola region for Ibero-American linguistic development, little is known of the continuing use of the Portuguese language by Africans in Congo-Angola during most of the five centuries in question. Only in recent years has some attention been directed to the Portuguese language spoken non-natively but extensively in Angola and Mozambique (Gonçalves 1983). In Angola, the urban second-language varieties of Portuguese, especially as spoken in the squatter communities of Luanda, have been referred to as Musseque Portuguese, a name derived from the KiMbundu term used to designate the shantytowns themselves. -
Grammatical Gender in Hindukush Languages
Grammatical gender in Hindukush languages An areal-typological study Julia Lautin Department of Linguistics Independent Project for the Degree of Bachelor 15 HEC General linguistics Bachelor's programme in Linguistics Spring term 2016 Supervisor: Henrik Liljegren Examinator: Bernhard Wälchli Expert reviewer: Emil Perder Project affiliation: “Language contact and relatedness in the Hindukush Region,” a research project supported by the Swedish Research Council (421-2014-631) Grammatical gender in Hindukush languages An areal-typological study Julia Lautin Abstract In the mountainous area of the Greater Hindukush in northern Pakistan, north-western Afghanistan and Kashmir, some fifty languages from six different genera are spoken. The languages are at the same time innovative and archaic, and are of great interest for areal-typological research. This study investigates grammatical gender in a 12-language sample in the area from an areal-typological perspective. The results show some intriguing features, including unexpected loss of gender, languages that have developed a gender system based on the semantic category of animacy, and languages where this animacy distinction is present parallel to the inherited gender system based on a masculine/feminine distinction found in many Indo-Aryan languages. Keywords Grammatical gender, areal-typology, Hindukush, animacy, nominal categories Grammatiskt genus i Hindukush-språk En areal-typologisk studie Julia Lautin Sammanfattning I den här studien undersöks grammatiskt genus i ett antal språk som talas i ett bergsområde beläget i norra Pakistan, nordvästra Afghanistan och Kashmir. I området, här kallat Greater Hindukush, talas omkring 50 olika språk från sex olika språkfamiljer. Det stora antalet språk tillsammans med den otillgängliga terrängen har gjort att språken är arkaiska i vissa hänseenden och innovativa i andra, vilket gör det till ett intressant område för arealtypologisk forskning. -
Dialects, Standards, and Vernaculars
1 Dialects, Standards, and Vernaculars Most of us have had the experience of sitting in a public place and eavesdropping on conversations taking place around the United States. We pretend to be preoccupied, but we can’t seem to help listening. And we form impressions of speakers based not only on the topic of conversation, but on how people are discussing it. In fact, there’s a good chance that the most critical part of our impression comes from how people talk rather than what they are talking about. We judge people’s regional background, social stat us, ethnicity, and a host of other social and personal traits based simply on the kind of language they are using. We may have similar kinds of reactions in telephone conversations, as we try to associate a set of characteristics with an unidentified speaker in order to make claims such as, “It sounds like a salesperson of some type” or “It sounds like the auto mechanic.” In fact, it is surprising how little conversation it takes to draw conclusions about a speaker’s background – a sentence, a phrase, or even a word is often enough to trigger a regional, social, or ethnic classification. Video: What an accent does Assessments of a complex set of social characteristics and personality traits based on language differences are as inevitable as the kinds of judgments we make when we find out where people live, what their occupations are, where they went to school, and who their friends are. Language differences, in fact, may serve as the single most reliable indicator of social position in our society. -
A Comparative Phonetic Study of the Circassian Languages Author(S
A comparative phonetic study of the Circassian languages Author(s): Ayla Applebaum and Matthew Gordon Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Languages of the Caucasus (2013), pp. 3-17 Editors: Chundra Cathcart, Shinae Kang, and Clare S. Sandy Please contact BLS regarding any further use of this work. BLS retains copyright for both print and screen forms of the publication. BLS may be contacted via http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/. The Annual Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society is published online via eLanguage, the Linguistic Society of America's digital publishing platform. A Comparative Phonetic Study of the Circassian Languages1 AYLA APPLEBAUM and MATTHEW GORDON University of California, Santa Barbara Introduction This paper presents results of a phonetic study of Circassian languages. Three phonetic properties were targeted for investigation: voice-onset time for stop consonants, spectral properties of the coronal fricatives, and formant values for vowels. Circassian is a branch of the Northwest Caucasian language family, which also includes Abhaz-Abaza and Ubykh. Circassian is divided into two dialectal subgroups: West Circassian (commonly known as Adyghe), and East Circassian (also known as Kabardian). The West Circassian subgroup includes Temirgoy, Abzekh, Hatkoy, Shapsugh, and Bzhedugh. East Circassian comprises Kabardian and Besleney. The Circassian languages are indigenous to the area between the Caspian and Black Seas but, since the Russian invasion of the Caucasus region in the middle of the 19th century, the majority of Circassians now live in diaspora communities, most prevalently in Turkey but also in smaller outposts throughout the Middle East and the United States. -
Convergence and Divergence in Language Contact Situations
Sonderforschungsbereich Mehrsprachigkeit International Colloquium on Convergence and Divergence in Language Contact Situations 18–20 October 2007 University of Hamburg Research Centre on Multilingualism Welcome On behalf of our Research Centre on Multilingualism (Sonderforschungsbereich Mehrsprachigkeit), generously supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and the University of Hamburg, we would like to welcome you all here in Hamburg. This colloquium deals with issues related to convergence and divergence in language contact situations, issues which had been rather neglected in the past but have received much more attention in recent years. Five speakers from different countries have kindly accepted our invitation to share their expertise with us by presenting their research related to the theme of this colloquium. (One colleague from the US fell seriously ill and deeply regrets not being able to join us. Unfortunately, another invited speak- er cancelled his talk only two weeks ago.) All the other presentations are re- ports from ongoing work in the (now altogether 18) research projects in our centre. We hope that the three conference days will be informative and stimulating for all of us, and that the colloquium will be remembered for both its friendly atmosphere and its lively, controversial discussions. The organising commit- tee has done its best to ensure that this meeting with renowned colleagues from abroad will be a good place to make new friends or reinforce long-stand- ing professional contacts. There will be many opportunities for doing that – during the coffee breaks and especially during the conference dinner at an ex- cellent French restaurant on Thursday evening. -
Capeverdean Words Derived from Portuguese Non-Infinitive Verbal Forms: a Descriptive and Comparative Study Nicolas Quint
Capeverdean words derived from Portuguese non-infinitive verbal forms: a descriptive and comparative study Nicolas Quint To cite this version: Nicolas Quint. Capeverdean words derived from Portuguese non-infinitive verbal forms: a descriptive and comparative study. Papia, 2015, 2 (25), pp.189 - 215. halshs-01482124 HAL Id: halshs-01482124 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01482124 Submitted on 8 Mar 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. PAPIA, São Paulo, 25(2), p. 189-215, Jul/Dez 2015. Capeverdean words derived from Portuguese non-infinitive verbal forms: a descriptive and comparative study Palavras do cabo-verdiano derivadas de formas verbais não-infinitivas: um estudo descritivo e comparativo Nicolas Quint1 llacan, Villejuif, France [email protected] Abstract: This article focuses on Santiaguense Capeverdean words derived from Portuguese non-infinitive verbal forms and among these, more specifically on those elements which were not recently borrowed from modern Portuguese and do not compete with Capeverdean more basilectal items. In section 1, the category of Capeverdean words under scrutiny is defined contrastively with other similar types of words. In section 2, all known members of this category are examined in turn and according to the characteristics of their respective Portuguese sources. -
Everything You Need to Know About Luxembourg
Everything you need Everything you need toto know about knowLuxembourg about Luxembourg Luxembourg at a glance ATAt A a GLANCE glance Name Languages Official name: National language: Grand Duchy of Luxembourg luxembourgish (lëtzebuergesch) National holiday: Administrative languages: 23 June french, german and luxembourgish Geography Area: 2,586 sq. km Of which: agricultural: 49% wooded: 34% Neighbouring countries: Germany, Belgium and France Main towns: Luxembourg and Esch-sur-Alzette Administrative subdivisions: 3 districts (Luxembourg, Diekirch and Grevenmacher) 12 cantons, 118 town council areas (communes) Climate Temperate From May to mid-October, the temperatures are particu- larly pleasant. Whereas May and June are the sunniest months, July and August are the hottest. In September and October Luxembourg often experiences his own “Indian Summer”. Population Total population: 451,600 inhabitants, 81,800 of whom live in the City of Luxembourg. Over 174,200 (38.6%) people out of the total population are foreigners. (Source: STATEC January 2004) The capital City of Luxembourg Government Useful addresses : Form of government: Service information et presse du Gouvernement constitutional monarchy under a system of (Government Information and Press Service) parliamentary democracy 33, boulevard Roosevelt, L-2450 Luxembourg Head of State: Tel.: (+352) 478 21 81, Fax: (+352) 47 02 85 HRH Grand Duke Henri (since October 7, 2000) www.gouvernement.lu Head of government: www.luxembourg.lu Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister [email protected] Parties in power in the government: coalition between the Christian-Social Party (CSV) Service central de la statistique et des études and the Socialist Workers’ Party of Luxembourg (LSAP) économiques (STATEC) Parties represented in the Chamber of Deputies: (Central Statistics and Economic Studies Service) Christian-Social Party (CSV), 13, rue Erasme, bâtiment Pierre Werner, Socialist Workers’ Party of Luxembourg (LSAP), B.P. -
Managing France's Regional Languages
MANAGING FRANCE’S REGIONAL LANGUAGES: LANGUAGE POLICY IN BILINGUAL PRIMARY EDUCATION IN ALSACE Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Michelle Anne Harrison September 2012 Abstract The introduction of regional language bilingual education in France dates back to the late 1960s in the private education system and to the 1980s in the public system. Before this time the extensive use of regional languages was forbidden in French schools, which served as ‘local centres for the gallicisation of France’ (Blackwood 2008, 28). France began to pursue a French-only language policy from the time of the 1789 Revolution, with Jacobin ideology proposing that to be French, one must speak French. Thus began the shaping of France into a nation-state. As the result of the official language policy that imposed French in all public domains, as well as extra-linguistic factors such as the Industrial Revolution and the two World Wars, a significant language shift occurred in France during the twentieth century, as an increasing number of parents chose not to pass on their regional language to the next generation. In light of the decline in intergenerational transmission of the regional languages, Judge (2007, 233) concludes that ‘in the short term, everything depends on education in the [regional languages]’. This thesis analyses the development of language policy in bilingual education programmes in Alsace; Spolsky’s tripartite language policy model (2004), which focuses on language management, language practices and language beliefs, will be employed. In spite of the efforts of the State to impose the French language, in Alsace the traditionally non-standard spoken regional language variety, Alsatian, continued to be used widely until the mid-twentieth century. -
THE RISE of ENGLISH AS the GLOBAL LINGUA FRANCA Is the World Heading Towards Greater Monolingualism Or New Forms of Plurilingualism?
Lingue e Linguaggi Lingue Linguaggi 15 (2015), 129-154 ISSN 2239-0367, e-ISSN 2239-0359 DOI 10.1285/i22390359v15p129 http://siba-ese.unisalento.it, © 2015 Università del Salento THE RISE OF ENGLISH AS THE GLOBAL LINGUA FRANCA Is the world heading towards greater monolingualism or new forms of plurilingualism? THOMAS CHRISTIANSEN UNIVERSITY OF SALENTO Abstract – English has become the most influential language for international discourse (Weber 1997; Graddol 2006) and it is tempting to foresee a largely monolingual future at the international level, where other languages become irrelevant. Such a simplistic view sees the adoption of English as something univer- sal and uniform with little room for variation, local identity, or other lingua francas. Data shows that other lingua francas are not inevitably in decline. Diverse languages – e.g. Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, French – continue to be important regionally or in certain discourse contexts (Weber 1997; Ostler 2010; Ro- nen et al. 2014) and on the internet. In this paper, we look at recent data from a variety of sources (Ronen et al. 2014; Olivié et al. 2015), in an attempt to examine the situation regarding languages and their influences in the world today. In particular, we will attempt to take into account the fact that much language distribution is today no longer tied in with territorial dimensions. New media such as the internet, as well as mass migra- tion between countries, have made it less easy to identify specific languages with precise geographical areas. Furthermore, although the world is increasingly globalised, significant regional divisions still exist in the use of media (especially in the case of China) making it difficult at present to make direct comparisons about language use. -
Essentials of Language Typology
Lívia Körtvélyessy Essentials of Language Typology KOŠICE 2017 © Lívia Körtvélyessy, Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky, Filozofická fakulta UPJŠ v Košiciach Recenzenti: Doc. PhDr. Edita Kominarecová, PhD. Doc. Slávka Tomaščíková, PhD. Elektronický vysokoškolský učebný text pre Filozofickú fakultu UPJŠ v Košiciach. Všetky práva vyhradené. Toto dielo ani jeho žiadnu časť nemožno reprodukovať,ukladať do informačných systémov alebo inak rozširovať bez súhlasu majiteľov práv. Za odbornú a jazykovú stánku tejto publikácie zodpovedá autor. Rukopis prešiel redakčnou a jazykovou úpravou. Jazyková úprava: Steve Pepper Vydavateľ: Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika v Košiciach Umiestnenie: http://unibook.upjs.sk Dostupné od: február 2017 ISBN: 978-80-8152-480-6 Table of Contents Table of Contents i List of Figures iv List of Tables v List of Abbreviations vi Preface vii CHAPTER 1 What is language typology? 1 Tasks 10 Summary 13 CHAPTER 2 The forerunners of language typology 14 Rasmus Rask (1787 - 1832) 14 Franz Bopp (1791 – 1867) 15 Jacob Grimm (1785 - 1863) 15 A.W. Schlegel (1767 - 1845) and F. W. Schlegel (1772 - 1829) 17 Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 – 1835) 17 August Schleicher 18 Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker) 19 The name for a new linguistic field 20 Tasks 21 Summary 22 CHAPTER 3 Genealogical classification of languages 23 Tasks 28 Summary 32 CHAPTER 4 Phonological typology 33 Consonants and vowels 34 Syllables 36 Prosodic features 36 Tasks 38 Summary 40 CHAPTER 5 Morphological typology 41 Morphological classification of languages (holistic