Introduction: Receptive multilingualism

Charlotte Gooskens * and Wilbert Heeringa The role of dialect exposure in receptive multilingualism

Previous investigations of inter-Scandinavian intelligibility have shown that, in general, Norwegians are better at understanding the closely related languages Danish and Swedish than Danes and Swedes are at understanding Norwegian. This asymmetry is often explained by the strong position that dialects hold in Norway as opposed to in Denmark and Sweden. In Norway, the general public is more exp...

Multilingualism on the Internet

According to a September 2004 compilation (Almanac 2004), the number of the world’s population now online is approaching an extraordinary one billion. Fifteen countries account for about 70% of the total individuals online today. The United States has the largest single proportion online of any country, or 20% of the total. This reflects not merely its relatively large population size and advan...

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 ...

Editorial: The Grammar of Multilingualism

Generative linguistics is primarily concerned with providing formal models of the linguistic competence of human beings. The goal is to adequately characterize and explain the structures of the grammar that each individual has constructed in his/her mind. This involves providing a formal description of the possible structures, which at the same time also rules out structures that do not occur. ...