Heterogeneity: multilingualism and democracy

Homogeneity, Heterogeneity and Direct Democracy: The Case of Swiss Referenda

In his famous dichotomy of consensual versus majoritarian democracies, Lijphart ~1984! claims that “consensual” means are more applicable in heterogeneous societies, while “majoritarian” means are more adequate in homogenous societies. While discussing at length many features of both consensual and majoritarian democracy, Lijphart refrains from reaching a conclusion concerning the desirability ...

Multilingualism, empathy and multicompetence

Multilingualism and Electronic Language Management

The volume aims to inform the implementation of human language technologies (HLTs) in the service of language policy in South Africa. Its 12 papers are organized into five sections whose themes, except for the first, “HLT resources and policy development,” considerably overlap. The contributors, most with backgrounds in computer science, computational linguistics, and language engineering, are ...

Understanding multilingualism and its implications

The world’s demographics are in a state of flux. Approximately half of the world’s population is bilingual (Grosjean, 2010). Just over half of all Europeans speak a language other than the official language in a given country, and 25% of them report that they are able to hold a conversation in at least two additional languages (European Commission, 2012, p. 18). Biand multilingualism are also t...

Geographic Ontologies, Gazetteers and Multilingualism

Different languages imply different visions of space, so that terminologies are different in geographic ontologies. In addition to their geometric shapes, geographic features have names, sometimes different in diverse languages. In addition, the role of gazetteers, as dictionaries of place names (toponyms), is to maintain relations between place names and location. The scope of geographic infor...