non-European Languages Research Articles

Sociolinguistic Awareness in Galician Bilinguals: Evidence from an Accent Identification Task

The inclusion of European minority languages in public spaces such as education, administration and the media has led to the emergence of a new profile of speakers, “new speakers”, who typically acquire a minority language through education, but vary in terms of their language experience and use. The present study investigated whether a distinctive variety spoken by Galician new speakers (neofalantes) has emerged in the community and whether listeners’ language background influences accent identification abilities and patterns. Galician-Spanish bilingual listeners completed an accent identification task and were asked to comment on factors influencing their decision. Results demonstrated that all listeners could identify Galician-dominant better than Spanish-dominant bilinguals but could not identify neofalantes. Neofalantes were categorised as both Spanish- and Galician-dominant, supporting the idea that neofalantes have a hybrid variety. This finding suggests that listeners have a gradient representation of language background variation, with Galician-like and Spanish-like accents functioning as anchors and the neofalantes’ accent situated somewhere in the middle. Identification accuracy was similar for all listeners but neofalantes showed heightened sensitivity to the Galician-dominant variety, suggesting that evaluation of sociophonetic features depends on the listener’s language and social background. These findings contribute to our understanding of sociolinguistic awareness in bilingual contexts.

Evaluating the Language ENvironment Analysis System for Korean.

Purpose The algorithm of the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system for calculating language environment measures was trained on American English; thus, its validity with other languages cannot be assumed. This article evaluates the accuracy of the LENA system applied to Korean. Method We sampled sixty 5-min recording clips involving 38 key children aged 7-18 months from a larger data set. We establish the identification error rate, precision, and recall of LENA classification compared to human coders. We then examine the correlation between standard LENA measures of adult word count, child vocalization count, and conversational turn count and human counts of the same measures. Results Our identification error rate (64% or 67%), including false alarm, confusion, and misses, was similar to the rate found in Cristia, Lavechin, et al. (2020). The correlation between LENA and human counts for adult word count (r = .78 or .79) was similar to that found in the other studies, but the same measure for child vocalization count (r = .34-.47) was lower than the value in Cristia, Lavechin, et al., though it fell within ranges found in other non-European languages. The correlation between LENA and human conversational turn count was not high (r = .36-.47), similar to the findings in other studies. Conclusions LENA technology is similarly reliable for Korean language environments as it is for other non-English language environments. Factors affecting the accuracy of diarization include speakers' pitch, duration of utterances, age, and the presence of noise and electronic sounds.

Economy and Funding in Celtic Monority Language Communities of the United Kingdom: The Public Media Model as Paradigm

This article investigates the monolingual media in three Celtic minority language communities of the United Kingdom and Ireland, at the end of the economic crisis that began in 2008, from the perspective of the public interest media model, prevalent in the media systems of European minority language media. The main areas of study are the economic volume, the funding system and the qualitative evaluation of editors and media directors regarding the effect of the economic crisis and the importance of public aid. The three minority Celtic languages analyzed are Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic. The methodological design is based on the techniques of systematic quantitative comparison between communities and a qualitative approach.

КОЛІЗІЙНІ АСПЕКТИ ПРАВОЧИНІВ З МІЖНАРОДНИМИ ОБЛІГАЦІЯМИ

Abstract. As for most countries of the world, the problem of preservation and protection of regional or minority languages is relevant for modern Ukraine. It should be noted that there are no universal special international legal instruments on this issue. Today, European states under the leadership of the Council of Europe have achieved more significant results in this area. The main purpose of its work on this subject is to preserve and protect regional or minority languages in Europe as an integral part of Europe's cultural heritage. Analysing the legal situation with minority languages in Ukraine and the remarks of the monitoring bodies of the Council of Europe on this issue, we note that there is an urgent need to direct national lawmaking to improve national legislation and eliminate shortcomings and inconsistencies with European international legal standards in this area. The article examines the issues of cooperation between Ukraine and the Council of Europe on the protection and promotion of historical regional or minority languages, which contributes to the development of cultural wealth and traditions of Europe. The author examines the purpose of the adoption of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, its main provisions, and the particularities of the object of application. The reform of the monitoring mechanism of the Charter dated July 1, 2019 is analyzed. Special attention is paid to the application by Ukraine of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the problematic issues of its implementation. Key words: The Council of Europe, Ukraine, regional or minority languages, language rights, language standards, multinational and multilingual population.

Thinking Gender in the Age of the Beijing Consensus

Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 341 Petrus Liu Thinking Gender in the Age of the Beijing Consensus Originally formulated to dispute biologically deterministic explanations of women’s subordination, the analytical distinction between sex and gender has developed in unexpected ways in transitions from one language to another. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from John Money’s sexological writings to Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum, “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” Anglophone feminists in the 1970s developed the distinction between sex (understood as anatomy) and gender (understood as social identity) to argue that a woman’s biological sex ought not dictate the kind of work she should do or the kind of life she should live.1 In her landmark 1975 essay, “The Traffic in Women,” Gayle Rubin coined the phrase “sex/gender system” to examine “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”2 In more recent years, however, the distinction 1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Paris: Gallimard, 1949; New York: Knopf, 1993), 281. Citations refer to the Knopf edition. For an account of feminist reformulations of John Money and Robert Stoller, see Jennifer Germon, Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 2. Gayle S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 34. It is worth mentioning that sex in Rubin’s sex/gender system refers to sexual practice rather than the distinction between male and female. This understanding forms the basis of her theoretical disagreements with Judith Butler, who preserves the semantic ambiguity of sex (as 342 Petrus Liu between sex and gender has taken on an entirely different meaning as it comes to inform transgender movements and politics seeking to decouple a person’s sex assignment at birth from their future gender identity. At the same time, theories of intersectionality, women-of-color feminisms , and transnational feminisms have all developed their own theses of gender variability to contest the myth of the universal woman. The life of gender—in academic theory, politics, and social movements— has confounded the original intentions of its American theorists. It is clear that there is no singular or stable account of gender; rather, gender is always in a state of flux, incessantly rethought and reforged by the demands of an increasingly complex and asymmetric world.3 Gender is always a translation—from one discipline, context, or language to another—ineluctably intertwined with the geopolitical problems created by the violences of imperialism, colonialism, and transnational capitalism. The translation of gender into non-European languages, such as Chinese, raises questions about whether spaces previously resistant or exterior to world capitalism are now being assimilated and enfolded into the structure of neoliberal globalization defined by the Washington Consensus. Against this view, some critics maintain that China’s precipitous ascent presents an alternative model of development for the Global South called the Beijing Consensus. Considering how gender has entered different languages, including Chinese, to create new coinages that may at times appear as instruments of an imperial takeover , Judith Butler argues that the translation of gender actually offers a path of linguistic humility for English, a reminder that we cohabit a multilingual world in which no one ever owned the term.4 But how exactly do we describe that complex, multilingual world and how does gender both gender and sexuality) as the point of departure for a different kind of feminist inquiry. See Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, “Interview: Sexual Traffic ,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 67. 3. See Heather Love, ed. “Rethinking Sex.” Special issue, GLQ 17, no. 2 (2011): 1–221. This collection of essays conveys a sense of how Rubin’s methodological distinction between sex and gender has given rise to new ways of thinking across different disciplines about sex radicalism, crip sexuality, Black feminism, and sex trafficking. 4. Judith Butler, “Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism,” philoSOPHIA 9, no. 1 (Winter 2019). Petrus Liu 343 transform it? How is the translation of gender inflected by the material conditions...

Thinking Gender in the Age of the Beijing Consensus

Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 341 Petrus Liu Thinking Gender in the Age of the Beijing Consensus Originally formulated to dispute biologically deterministic explanations of women’s subordination, the analytical distinction between sex and gender has developed in unexpected ways in transitions from one language to another. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from John Money’s sexological writings to Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum, “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” Anglophone feminists in the 1970s developed the distinction between sex (understood as anatomy) and gender (understood as social identity) to argue that a woman’s biological sex ought not dictate the kind of work she should do or the kind of life she should live.1 In her landmark 1975 essay, “The Traffic in Women,” Gayle Rubin coined the phrase “sex/gender system” to examine “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”2 In more recent years, however, the distinction 1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Paris: Gallimard, 1949; New York: Knopf, 1993), 281. Citations refer to the Knopf edition. For an account of feminist reformulations of John Money and Robert Stoller, see Jennifer Germon, Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 2. Gayle S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 34. It is worth mentioning that sex in Rubin’s sex/gender system refers to sexual practice rather than the distinction between male and female. This understanding forms the basis of her theoretical disagreements with Judith Butler, who preserves the semantic ambiguity of sex (as 342 Petrus Liu between sex and gender has taken on an entirely different meaning as it comes to inform transgender movements and politics seeking to decouple a person’s sex assignment at birth from their future gender identity. At the same time, theories of intersectionality, women-of-color feminisms , and transnational feminisms have all developed their own theses of gender variability to contest the myth of the universal woman. The life of gender—in academic theory, politics, and social movements— has confounded the original intentions of its American theorists. It is clear that there is no singular or stable account of gender; rather, gender is always in a state of flux, incessantly rethought and reforged by the demands of an increasingly complex and asymmetric world.3 Gender is always a translation—from one discipline, context, or language to another—ineluctably intertwined with the geopolitical problems created by the violences of imperialism, colonialism, and transnational capitalism. The translation of gender into non-European languages, such as Chinese, raises questions about whether spaces previously resistant or exterior to world capitalism are now being assimilated and enfolded into the structure of neoliberal globalization defined by the Washington Consensus. Against this view, some critics maintain that China’s precipitous ascent presents an alternative model of development for the Global South called the Beijing Consensus. Considering how gender has entered different languages, including Chinese, to create new coinages that may at times appear as instruments of an imperial takeover , Judith Butler argues that the translation of gender actually offers a path of linguistic humility for English, a reminder that we cohabit a multilingual world in which no one ever owned the term.4 But how exactly do we describe that complex, multilingual world and how does gender both gender and sexuality) as the point of departure for a different kind of feminist inquiry. See Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, “Interview: Sexual Traffic ,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 67. 3. See Heather Love, ed. “Rethinking Sex.” Special issue, GLQ 17, no. 2 (2011): 1–221. This collection of essays conveys a sense of how Rubin’s methodological distinction between sex and gender has given rise to new ways of thinking across different disciplines about sex radicalism, crip sexuality, Black feminism, and sex trafficking. 4. Judith Butler, “Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism,” philoSOPHIA 9, no. 1 (Winter 2019). Petrus Liu 343 transform it? How is the translation of gender inflected by the material conditions...

Modern Chinese Literature and World Literature from a European Perspective

Modern Chinese Literature and World Literature from a European Perspective Theo D'haen (bio) I have pointed out in Concise Routledge History of World Literature that the main European languages and literatures have formed the core of what used to pass for Weltliteratur, notwithstanding the fact that Goethe first mentioned the term when reading a Chinese novel in translation (D'haen, Concise 1). Indeed, the 1911 book by Richard Green Moulton, World Literature and Its Place in General Education, the very first book on the subject in English, argues that world literature looks different according to one's particular native literature perspective. As he was English but taught in the United States, his intention was to trace the "literary pedigree" of the "English-speaking peoples." (Moulton v) As Moulton claims, world literature would be the "autobiography of civilization." However, we surmise that only what he deems to be of interest to the growth of Englishlanguage literature can contribute to such an "autobiography," a term that then appears not only as relative to English-language literature but truly absolute or universal. And then, of all the other literatures that have been linked to "major" civilizations, Moulton singles out the Chinese and Japanese as not having contributed anything to world literature. Obviously and happily, things have changed almost beyond recognition over the last forty years. These days, when I visit comparative literature departments in the US at higher-ranked universities, it is common to find graduate students studying non-European languages, and less who concentrate exclusively on European languages. The study of Chinese, language and literature, is one of the fields of study to have benefited from this most. This change of choices and preferences has to do with larger changes in the world, changes that have to do with geo-economics and geo-politics, with the diminished weight of Europe in [End Page 153] demographic, economic, and political importance after World War II, and with the vastly increased importance of especially China in all these respects. As far as the "American" situation is concerned, it has had to deal with demographic shifts, such as the growing weight of the Pacific states with their large and growing populations of East-Asian provenance and strategic decisions in the economic, political, and even military fields, which has compelled the US to direct its gaze towards the Pacific and away from the Atlantic. Though perhaps to a lesser or at least immediate degree, these same shifts manifest themselves in European academe, where attention to what happens in the United States, though still considerable, has certainly waned in favour of attention given to developments elsewhere, and particularly in East Asia. At the same time, interest in things Western, and particularly American, has greatly increased in China following Deng Xiaoping's 1978 Reform and Opening-Up of China. Specifically, in literary studies Western theory, almost invariably filtered through American academe, has set the tune for much, if not most, Chinese literary theory during the last few decades. Aspects of this have been the subject of recent issues of Neohelicon (vol. 46, 2019), MLQ (vol. 79, no. 3, September 2018), and the European Review (vol. 24, no. 2, May 2016), all of them edited or co-edited by Wang Ning. With the present issue of JML Wang Ning, along with his co-editor Peng Qinglong, continues in this same vein. The essays gathered in this JML issue foreground the interesting factor that Henrik Ibsen played a huge role in the renewal of Chinese literature in the first half of the twentieth century as well as the influence Russian, and later Soviet-Russian literature exerted during different parts of that same twentieth century. Ibsen was not an isolated exception. We are reminded of how China's most famous twentieth-century writer, Lu Xun, began by absorbing French, German, and English literature, translating novels by Jules Verne and reading Nietzsche, Walter Scott, Stuart Mill, and Harriet Beecher Stowe alongside Chinese writers introducing Western scientific ideas, and in the 1909 collection Fiction from Abroad (Yuwai xiaoshuo ji) he edited with his brother Zhou Zuoren also focused on Russian or East-European works that highlighted the plight of the oppressed and subjugated...

Barriers and opportunities for cinema distribution in European minority languages. The case of O que arde in the Digital Single Market

The barriers which exist for European cinema distribution - problems with international distribution, and different practices of audiovisual translation - have a great impact in films produced in European minority languages, meaning that they find it hard to compete with larger-scale productions. Although minority and regional languages are protected by EU legislation and diversity is a key element in the Union's narrative, audiovisual policies do not directly address this protection. This article examines legislation connected with minority languages, on the one hand, and cinema, on the other, and presents a case study on the film produced in Galician O que arde (Oliver Laxe, 2019) to analyse the challenges that small cinemas face in the Digital Single Market.

Economy and funding of European minority language media: Reality and impact of digitalization and economic crisis

This article investigates the economy of monolingual media systems in nine European minority language communities during 2009–2015, a period of strong economic crisis and accelerated digitalization. The main areas of study are three: The economic volume or weight of those media systems and its variation between 2009 and 2015; the current funding structure of the four media types (press, radio, TV and cybermedia); and the qualitative evaluation of media editors and managers on the effect of those two crises as well as the significance of the public aid. The nine European minority languages are Basque, Welsh, Galician, Irish, Breton, Frisian, Sámi, Corsican and Scottish-Gaelic. As for the findings, it can be highlighted that the economic volume or revenue of European minority language media is close to five hundred million euros per year, of which over ninety per cent is public funding, mostly devoted to broadcasting media. The conclusion set forth is that public funding should not be framed as aid but as a social, cultural and economic investment.

Learning Arabic in Scandinavia: Motivation, metacognition, and autonomy

Rising levels of immigration, especially from the Middle East and North Africa, have led to significant socio-demographic changes and increasing levels of linguistic diversity in Scandinavian countries. In parallel with these developments, a growing number of students in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have started to learn Arabic at school and university. Learning Arabic presents both challenges and opportunities. For example, it furthers the goal of states to develop multilingual citizens, yet it also tasks educational institutions with designing Arabic courses that reflect the interests and aspirations of their students and provide them with the tools to make sustained progress. In order to accomplish this, it is important to first understand what motivates students to learn Arabic and the extent to which they use self-regulatory strategies to enhance their learning. This article reports on a study that explored the self-regulation and language learning motivation of university students (N=96) learning Arabic in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The findings revealed that the Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish participants differed statistically significantly in their motivation to learn Arabic. Statistically significant gender differences were also found with respect to the participants’ self-regulation. The study provides important insights into student metacognition, autonomy, and motivation to learn non-European languages in the Scandinavian context.

Classifiers in non-European languages and semantic impairments in western neurological patients have a common cognitive structure

We compared two non-overlapping data sets: (a) the semantic categories in representative samples of nominal classification languages (N=334); and in a non-overlapping population (b) semantic category-specific impairments of European neurological patients (N=121). Each of these appears to organize world objects in natural kinds (e.g., animal, body part, plant, fruit and vegetable, liquid) or manmade kinds (e.g., food, clothing, tool, vehicle, furniture). We show that whenever a specific semantic category is found as a cognitive impairment, this category also exists in some language as a semantic classifier. Since all of the existing semantic impairments reports are with speakers whose languages lack semantic nominal classification systems, the present regularities between grammar and cognitive deficit suggests the idea that cognitive universals may constrain how the neural substrate of knowledge is organized and can break apart but also how they can become expressed in different grammars.

The extension of the application of Part III of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in the Czech Republic

The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is a treaty of the Council of Europe which aims to protect and promote the historical regional or minority languages of Europe. The Czech Republic ratified the Charter on the 15th of November 2006. The Charter was enforced on the 1st of March 2007 and applies to five languages: Part II (Art. 7) and Part III (Art. 8-14) of the Charter apply to Polish and Slovakian, while only Part II applies to German, Moravian Croatian and Romani. On the 18th of July 2019, one of the two umbrella organisations of the German minority - with support of the other umbrella organisation - applied in a letter to the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic for the application of 42 provisions of Part III to the German language. The Czech authorities have set up a working group to examine the application. The present analysis assesses the application of the German minority from the perspective of the Charter. It first considers the procedure, in general terms, for adopting further provisions of the Charter and then the suitability of the German language in the Czech Republic for the application of Part III in the light of its situation.

«Принцип Златовласки» в романе С. Рашди «Кишот» (2019): соотношение прецедентных имён, лингвокультурем и экзотической лексики

The twelfth novel (“Quichotte”) by the English-speaking writer of Indian origin Salman Rushdie was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2019. Like many other literary works by the Booker Prize winner of 1981, the analyzed novel testifies to the necessity of following the Goldilocks Principle when resorting to precedent names, culturally-loaded words and loanwords from non-European languages. In order to effectively convey his ideas to the target reader the author juggles with exotic loanwords (84 lexemes), culturally-loaded words (52 lexemes) and over 100 allusions to European and North American texts, persons and phenomena. The exotic loanwords and the culturally-loaded words contribute to the depiction of the place, time and characters; however, the intertextual elements perform an evaluation function and an aesthetic function.

Expressing equality, similarity, and pretense in Even (Northern Tungusic, Siberia)

In recent decades, considerable work has been done on the cross-linguistic comparison of comparatives, superlatives, and to a lesser extent, equatives, while similatives remain largely understudied. As pointed out by Haspelmath (2017), this is largely due to the lack of descriptions of similative constructions in reference grammars. Providing first-hand data on similatives and related constructions in non-European languages can therefore still fill important gaps in our knowledge of this linguistic domain. In Even, a North Tungusic language spoken in northeastern Siberia, a large domain of equality of gradable properties, similarity of manner, and similarity of actions and states are expressed by a Similative suffix and/or relational noun. In addition, there is a dedicated marker that expresses equality of measurable properties.

ОМАНСКИЙ ДИАЛЕКТ АРАБСКОГО ЯЗЫКА: ИСТОРИКО-ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКОЕ ОПИСАНИЕ

The article consistently examines the phonetic, grammatical and lexical features of Omani Arabic as a dialect strongly contrasting the literary variant ( al-fuṣḥā ) compared to other dialects of the Arabian Peninsula. For the first time the authors propose a thesis that the basic factors of Omani Arabic formation were associated with the key historical events that occurred in this part of the Arabic world in the last centuries - from the settlement of the genuine Arabic tribes in the Arabian Peninsula to migration waves to Oman from the Asian region. The authors show the uniqueness of Omani Arabic, which easily assimilates lexical units borrowed from the non-European languages and emphasize the relevance and incompleteness of this process.

Tagalog Missionary Grammars as a Translation Resource: Translation, Book History and the Production of Linguistic Knowledge in the Spanish Philippines

This article looks into missionary grammars as a resource for investigating translation and its entanglements with book publishing in the Spanish Philippines. Although current research directions tend to use them for studying early forms of non-European languages or for historicizing the initial stages of linguistics as a discipline, I argue that these grammars can also be examined as a translational corpus. Translation was an underlying procedure in their composition and, ultimately, in the production of linguistic knowledge under the colonial condition. This article shows how the Spanish-language grammars of Tagalog, the basis of the modern-day national language called Filipino, were produced as an academic and material response to colonialism. It traces the evolution of these grammars alongside the establishment of the printing press in the Philippines and the intricacies of Catholic missionary work. It proceeds to analyse the paratextual and linguistic contents of the grammars and the translation strategies employed in their creation. The article finally describes how the erosion of the theological foundations of language in the nineteenth century was manifested in later missionary grammars and how this coincided with the secularisation of book publishing.

Present Absence Book Circulation, Indian Vernaculars and World Literature in the Nineteenth Century

More books from India in Indian languages circulated in Europe in the nineteenth century than now – partly thanks to the efforts of book importers like Trübner & Co. Trübner’s monthly American & Oriental Literary Record (1865–) shows pages and pages of imported Sanskrit books, but also books in Hindi, Hindustani, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati, Arabic, Persian, and so on. Trübner also imported Peruvian, Argentinian, Brazilian, Yucatanese and other books from Latin America. Yet this impressive circulation and presence of books did not translate into their recognition as world literature. Voluminous compendia like John Macy’s The Story of World Literature (1927) cover “Asian Literature” in merely thirteen pages (out of five hundred), and fail to mention any modern Indian writer apart from Rabindranath Tagore, damning him with faint praise. Why was this material presence and circulation of books in non-European languages in Britain and other parts of Europe matched by their absence as modern literary texts from the imagination of world literature? This essay examines the “technologies of recognition” (Shih) that made modern Indian literatures virtually invisible though materially present in Europe, and the conditions of visibility that occasionally allowed them to be seen.

Language policy in multi-level systems: A historical institutionalist analysis

Efforts are underway to develop a stronger political science perspective regarding the practice of language policy to establish language policy as a distinct field of public policy studies. The article’s original theoretical contribution is to develop a framework, grounded in historical institutionalism, to analyse the multi-level institutional factors that influence language policy choices relating to regional or minority languages within European multi-level states. The framework is tested by applying it to analyse the multi-level factors that condition language policy decisions regarding the Welsh language, and through further investigating the framework’s significance and robustness to analyse language policy trajectories in two contrasting European cases. Overall, the article makes the case for the strengths and adaptability of the framework in producing convincing explanations of the multi-level dimensions of language policy development in different institutionalised contexts and calls for greater investigation of its ability to analyse other regional and minority languages in Europe.

Early Mandarin loanwords in contemporary English

English vocabulary has expanded over centuries by ‘borrowing’ lexical items from other languages (Katamba, 2005; Durkin, 2014). Compared with European languages, non-European languages are never major sources of word borrowing in English, with Chinese staying even more peripheral. Scholars have recorded no more than a few hundred English words of Chinese origin. This, however, does not make it easier to study the etymology and semantics of Chinese loanwords. The complication arises from the various source dialects from which Chinese words were borrowed (Mandarin, Cantonese, Amoy, Hokkien, etc.) and also from transcription processes, in which Chinese logograms are ‘romanised’ into phonetic representations so as to be readable for English speakers. It is a procedure easily affected by the transcribers' own cognition and the transcription systems employed, and the arbitrariness of the above variables contributes much to the fact that the orthography of Chinese loanwords, especially those entering the English language early, are prone to changes. This article aims to shed some light on how the ways of transcription may affect the spelling of Chinese loanwords.

Jewish Languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Promise and Reality of the Language Rights Protection Regime

Abstract The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992) seeks to protect and promote regional and minority languages in Europe. The objectives and principles defined by the Charter include the recognition of regional and minority languages as cultural assets. The Charter also commits the signatories to promote the study of, and research on, regional and minority languages. Bosnia and Herzegovina signed the Charter in 2005 and officially ratified it in 2010, applying it to seventeen regional and minority languages including Ladino and Yiddish. This paper examines the disparity between the obligations entered into and the actual state of affairs. It also investigates the linguistic repertoire and language ideologies of the Jewish community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the extent and nature of its interest in revitalizing Ladino.