Language Competition Research Articles

Instytucjonalizacja ruchu polskiego na Ukrainie w latach 1988–1991

The institutionalization of the Polish movement in Ukraine, 1988–1991For a long time the Polish minority in Ukraine was unable to fulfill its religious, cultural, educational, and political needs because of the Soviet communist regime. All institutions were controlled by the Communist Party and state security organs. Nevertheless, the process of the rebirth of Polish institutions and organizations began in 1989 via the former channels of the communist apparatus which was prepared to allow limited concessions. Thus the process was from above and not from below, from the center to the periphery, according to the former command political system. It relied on former organisations, mostly Towarzystwo Łączności i Związków Kulturalnych z Zagranicą.However, the ethnic mobilization of the Polish minority in Ukraine proceeded faster than the equivalent process embracing the Ukrainians themselves, who fought also for sovereignty for the nation. The article describes in detail the phases of forming the Polish organizations for which Polskie Stowarzyszenie Kulturalno-Oświatowe was a precursor, and its forms of activity, later imitated by other social organizations, such as Polish language courses, festivals and competitions, folk dancing, travel to Poland.

Olympiad in the English Language as a Form of Alternative Language Assessment

Although a variety of the English language written olympiads (language competitions) exist, fairly little is known about how they are different from traditional forms of language assessment. In Russia, olympiads in the English language are now gaining currency because they provide an opportunity to reveal creative thinking and intellectual abilities of pupils. The present study examined major differences between language olympiads and traditional forms of language assessment. A comparison of five main olympiads in the English language in terms of their levels, assessed skills and task types is made and their distinctive features are outlined. The results of a testing of a new written olympiad of the Higher School of Economics “Vysshaya proba” (Highest Degree) in the English language are analyzed. A set of test items was developed for 120 secondary school pupils in Moscow to find out whether they can easily cope with non-traditional form of assessment, which is language olympiad. The results indicate that language competition as a form of alternative assessment may be introduced at schools to encourage better learning.

A Study on the Korean Purification and Campaign to Improve Language Culture in the 21st Century

As 21st century is age of globalization and langage competition, disappearance rate of languages is so fast. In this situation, our language culture's reality is serious level. Because public language uses many foreign language, media language is rampant low-class language and adolescents language is commonplace swear word. Also, In internet and mobile, destroying the wording ‘writing culture’ is to zoom in society, the situation in the rate of destruction of the Korean linguistics norm is going very fast. In modern speech community, we face to language competition because of globalization. So we try to use right language in variety of ecological linguistic environment. Therefore this study insist that purified target is vocabulary as well as abusive or violent or vulgar slang expressions. And we need fined korean language movement expanded correct representation and expression across a wide living language including pronunciation, sentence, discourse. So this study consider improvement plan of 21st century language culture as suggesting practice campaign that divided public language, broadcasting language and adolescents language.

Modeling the emergence of contact languages.

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation ecologies. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. We submit that these tools could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena.

Dynamics in atomic signaling games

We study an atomic signaling game under stochastic evolutionary dynamics. There are a finite number of players who repeatedly update from a finite number of available languages/signaling strategies. Players imitate the most fit agents with high probability or mutate with low probability. We analyze the long-run distribution of states and show that, for sufficiently small mutation probability, its support is limited to efficient communication systems. We find that this behavior is insensitive to the particular choice of evolutionary dynamic, a property that is due to the game having a potential structure with a potential function corresponding to average fitness. Consequently, the model supports conclusions similar to those found in the literature on language competition. That is, we show that efficient languages eventually predominate the society while reproducing the empirical phenomenon of linguistic drift. The emergence of efficiency in the atomic case can be contrasted with results for non-atomic signaling games that establish the non-negligible possibility of convergence, under replicator dynamics, to states of unbounded efficiency loss.

MCDM modelling on enrolment determinants of English medium instruction offered by native-speaking teachers

Presently, most Taiwanese colleges provide some English-only curriculums or English medium instruction (EMI) offered by native-speaking teacher (NST), which not only attract the enrolment of foreign students but also enhances domestic students' language competition. However, the enrolment willingness of EMI offered by NST seems not particularly high. What, then, are the enrolment determinants for EMI offered by NST when a college student faces a curriculum decision? Among these determinants, what matters most in their choices? The purpose of this is to paper is to propose a multiple-criteria-decision-making (MCDM) model on EMI enrolment determinants from the perspectives of college in Taiwan. According to the results, respondents rank 'student determinant' the first and 'teacher and determinant' as the second most important dimensions. Among the 16, interest, practicality and challenging are the top-three ranked by respondents. The results provide suggestions for students, teachers, schools, and the related authority with reference to higher-education improvement.

Language competition: an economic theory of language learning and production

AbstractThis article employs game theory to contribute to sociolinguistics (or the economics of language). From both the synchronic and the diachronic perspective, we are interested in the conditions (of language learning and literary production) that make some languages dominate others. Two results are particularly noteworthy: (i) Translations have an ambiguous effect on domination. (ii) We offer three different explanations of how a past language like Latin or Sanskrit can develop into a standard for literary production.

Grammatical category mediates the bilingual disadvantage in word retrieval

Grammatical category mediates the bilingual disadvantage in word retrieval

Language extinction and linguistic fronts

Language diversity has become greatly endangered in the past centuries owing to processes of language shift from indigenous languages to other languages that are seen as socially and economically more advantageous, resulting in the death or doom of minority languages. In this paper, we define a new language competition model that can describe the historical decline of minority languages in competition with more advantageous languages. We then implement this non-spatial model as an interaction term in a reaction–diffusion system to model the evolution of the two competing languages. We use the results to estimate the speed at which the more advantageous language spreads geographically, resulting in the shrinkage of the area of dominance of the minority language. We compare the results from our model with the observed retreat in the area of influence of the Welsh language in the UK, obtaining a good agreement between the model and the observed data.

THE ROLE OF BILINGUALS IN LANGUAGE COMPETITION

We study the role played by bilinguals in the competition between two languages and in the formation of a bilingual community. To this aim we introduce a simple three-state model that combines the Minett–Wang model, in which the bilinguals do not affect directly the probability of transition of an individual from monolingualism to bilingualism, and the Baggs–Freedman model, in which such a transition probability only depends on bilinguals. The model predicts the possibility for the existence of a stable bilingual community though no particular conditions are assumed for the two competing languages: the asymptotic stability of the bilinguals community is only due to the type of dynamics regulating the transitions between different linguistic groups. The proposed model and the obtained results give some suggestions for the conditions necessary for the formation of a stable bilingual community. First of all, it is important that the bilinguals are valid representatives of the two languages, in the sense that they are regarded by monolinguals also as speakers of the other language. Besides that, the transition from bilinguals to monolinguals must be smaller than the opposite transition. Unless both these conditions are fulfilled, the stable equilibrium solution of the language competition is a monolingual society.

History and current state of subjectivation of the russian minority in the context of bilingualism in Ukraine: theoretical and empirical contexts

The article is dedicated to analyzing the problems of history and current state of subjectivation of the Russian minority in the context of bilingualism in Ukraine, in particular in theoretical and empirical contexts, especially at the background of events that took place in Ukraine after 2013-2014. It has been stated that bilingualism is really inherent in Ukraine, in particular in the format of coexistence of Ukrainian and Russian languages as the most wide- spread (in the same order) native languages and languages of everyday communication. At the same time, it has been observed that the language issues do not correspond to the ethnic issues and the composition of the population of Ukraine, since there are many more ethnic Ukrainians than Ukrainian language everyday speakers and users. On this basis, it has been proved that the language issue subjects and politicizes the Russian minority in Ukraine, even though the latter often denies the fact that language competition in a national space inevitably leads to a split in society on the basis of language. The main reason is that the balance between understanding the language as a symbol of identity and a means of communication is disturbed in Ukraine.

Perception of success among participants to the national contest in Italian ad a foreign and as second language

The paper aims, first, to offer a brief sketch of the history of the national foreign- language competition in Slovenia, and, second, to describe the structure of the competition in Italian as a foreign and second language. In the main part of article, some results of the questionnaire given to the participants of the 2013 competition are presented and discussed, focusing specifically on the perceptions of success (or lack of it) in relation to the participants’ performance in the following areas: reading comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, intercultural knowledge, oral communication (in written form) and written composition.Key words: Italian, foreign/second language, language testing, successful learners, perception of success.

The Receptive and Productive Knowledge of a Foreign and Second Language​​ - Analysis of the 2013 Italian Language Competition Tasks

The purpose of this paper is to analize the subsets and the tasks of the competition in Italian as a foreign and second language in 2013. We were particularly interested in the share of the subsets and in the balance of receptive and productive tasks in the exams as well as in each particular subset. With the analysis of the subsets, it was found that in some of the four exams the subsets were unevenly represented. With a more detailed analysis of the tasks regarding the balance of receptive and productive tasks it was discovered that at levels A1 and A2 the exams were appropriately balanced, whereas at levels B1 and B2 the balance was not so good. While there were as many as two-thirds of the tasks in the exam for the level B1, which is intended for students that do not come from a bilingual area, productive, there were such only half of the tasks in the exam for the level B2, intended for students living in the bilingual area. In addition, the subset „communication“ consisted of almost exclusively receptive tasks.In the future, the shares of the sections and the balance of receptive and productive tasks will need some further consideration regarding two criteria: the students competing in the competition are the best students in Italian so the share of productive tasks should not fall below 50% and in addition, the difference between students coming from bilingual area and the others should be taken into account. Key words: Italian, foreign / second language, testing, receptive tasks, productive tasks.

Schelling-voter model: An application to language competition

In this work we analyze the language competition problem by using an interacting agent-based model which interpolates the classical Schelling and Voter models. Briefly, an agent may change its place of residence or his language when he is surrounded by more individuals of the other kind than the ones he can tolerate. We analyze this dynamic process in terms of the free space to move in, the pressure to change the language, and the propensity to change location. We identify the different regimes and the relationship with the language competition problem.

An analytic solution of a model of language competition with bilingualism and interlinguistic similarity

An in-depth analytic study of a model of language dynamics is presented: a model which tackles the problem of the coexistence of two languages within a closed community of speakers taking into account bilingualism and incorporating a parameter to measure the distance between languages. After previous numerical simulations, the model yielded that coexistence might lead to survival of both languages within monolingual speakers along with a bilingual community or to extinction of the weakest tongue depending on different parameters. In this paper, such study is closed with thorough analytical calculations to settle the results in a robust way and previous results are refined with some modifications. From the present analysis it is possible to almost completely assay the number and nature of the equilibrium points of the model, which depend on its parameters, as well as to build a phase space based on them. Also, we obtain conclusions on the way the languages evolve with time. Our rigorous considerations also suggest ways to further improve the model and facilitate the comparison of its consequences with those from other approaches or with real data.

STRATEGI PEMERTAHANAN BAHASA JAWA DI PROVINSI DAERAH ISTIMEWA YOGYAKARTA

This study aims to describe the factors causing the Javanese language use shift and the maintenance strategies and attempts. It employed the qualitative approach with a focus on the mapping of maintenance models in the Province of Yogyakarta Special Territory. The findings are as follows. First, the factors causing the shift include: (a) perceptions of the Javanese language, (b) complexity of societal life, (c) the number of Javanese speakers, and (d) the use of Javanese in the family. Second, the attempts made include: (a) the strengthening of the philosophy of the Javanese culture and language, (b) the Javanese language competitions and festivals, (c) the dissemination of moral values in Javanese expressions, (d) the development of Javanese performance arts, and (e) the use of Javanese in institutions. Third, the maintenance strategies include the uses of Javanese as: (a) a means of communication, (b) a factor uniting language and culture, (c) a local wisdom, (d) a local government’s policy, (e) a subject in education, (g) NGO activities,and (h) Javanese journalism.

Principles of parametric estimation in modeling language competition

It is generally difficult to define reasonable parameters and interpret their values in mathematical models of social phenomena. Rather than directly fitting abstract parameters against empirical data, we should define some concrete parameters to denote the sociocultural factors relevant for particular phenomena, and compute the values of these parameters based upon the corresponding empirical data. Taking the example of modeling studies of language competition, we propose a language diffusion principle and two language inheritance principles to compute two critical parameters, namely the impacts and inheritance rates of competing languages, in our language competition model derived from the Lotka-Volterra competition model in evolutionary biology. These principles assign explicit sociolinguistic meanings to those parameters and calculate their values from the relevant data of population censuses and language surveys. Using four examples of language competition, we illustrate that our language competition model with thus-estimated parameter values can reliably replicate and predict the dynamics of language competition, and it is especially useful in cases lacking direct competition data.

Correlation between social and linguistic parameters in modeling language contact: evidence from endangered Finnic varieties

AbstractThis article discusses a case of language competition between two minority languages, Votic and Ingrian. We analyze the sociolinguistic situation in the contact area, and the contact-induced linguistic changes in both languages. Although the two languages had a very similar fate, and the same premises for language competition, Ingrian appears to have been more socially prestigious and was for a long period of time gradually replacing Votic. It is shown that the two languages chose different strategies for interaction. The Ingrians preserved their strong identity but transformed their language significantly, and thus achieved an easier understanding with their neighbors. On the other hand, the Votes were unwilling to adapt their language to contact influence, but shifted easily to their neighbors' identity. We suggest distinguishing between two types of volatility: social volatility, which describes the willingness of a nation to shift to a new language and identity; and linguistic volatility, which denotes the readiness of speakers to adopt innovations from a neighboring language. In minority vs. minority competition, the two types of volatility often demonstrate inverse tendencies: high volatility on the linguistic level corresponds to low volatility on the social level, and vice versa.

Agent-based models of language competition

AbstractThis article uses computer simulations as a means of assessing two different models for the competition between two languages from the interdisciplinary perspective of complex systems. These models allow for the analysis of the role of bilingual speakers and they consider two of the basic factors determining the use of each language: their relative prestige and the language loyalty of their speakers. Here we assess the effect of these parameters in different social networks, with the aim of contributing to the understanding of the role of bilingualism and social networks in processes of language contact. We first present a qualitative analysis based on a simulation tool that we have designed, in order to visualize the dynamics of the models. Secondly, we consider a qualitative analysis of the role of complex networks, identifying mechanisms for the rapid extinction of a language and for situations of language segregation. Finally, we present a quantitative analysis which shows, counter-intuitively, a transition from a final scenario of language maintenance to one of language shift as language loyalty increases. Other findings are: (i) that the scenario of language coexistence is reduced in the presence of bilingual agents; and (ii) that networks which allow for local effects reduce further the situations for which language maintenance is possible.

Creolizing Globalization: Pan-Cultural Identities and Language in Saint Lucia

Saint Lucie, le comme la plupart du reste de la Caraïbes, est une société créole. Vue les circonstances spécifiques de la région, l’identité culturelle antillaise créole est fluide. Les résidents de l’île connaissent des réalités culturelles communes entre leur île et les Caraïbes francophones utilisant le créole à base lexicale française, et d’ autre part, celle des anglophones. Ils valorisent les différentes langues de son héritage colonial- le français, le kwéyòl et l’anglais- tant pour des raisons intangibles relatives aux valeurs de l’identité locale et pan-culturelles, que pour certaine opportunité économique et sociale que ces langues favorisent. Sous l’influence de la globalisation, une hiérarchie a été définie dans le cadre de la valorisation de ces langues. Les habitants de l’île valorisent l’anglais parce qu’il représente un plus grand bénéfice sur le plan socio-économique tant qu’à l’intérieur qu’à l’extérieur de Sainte Lucie. Ils considèrent le français comme une langue secondaire et complémentaire et, à cause de sa versatilité communicative avec les voisins, l’affluence de la Martinique et son secteur touristique. Même si la majeure partie des résidents confesse l’importance de leur créole à base lexicale française, kwéyòl, ce symbole exceptionnel de la nationalité de Sainte Lucie, il reste toujours un grand perdant au point de vue de la compétence l’ère postcoloniale et de façon globale. Vue l’influence de la globalisation et comme une société en état de changement, l’orientation de la tradition culturelle de Saint Lucie est entrain train de changer, car le kwéyòl se fait supplanter par l’anglais. Cependant, de nouvelles formes culturelles et linguistiques sont entrain de surgir. L’anglais vernaculaire, un anglais créolisé kwéyòl traversé par une forte influence du kwéyòl, est transforme en une nouvelle forme de langue franche de la nation, utilisée spécialement parmi les travailleurs urbains et les jeunes.