Towards multilingualism

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. ...

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...