The term literary multilingualism primarily refers to the more or less extended mix of two or more languages in the same text, entailing a cross-cultural or experimental effect. Besides intratextual multilingualism, or mixtilingualism, there is an intertextual multilingualism between heteroglot works of different authors linked to each other in a specific way (like those of the European and Lat...

There are perhaps seven thousand languages in the world, ranging from the largest with hundreds of millions of speakers, to the smallest, with one speaker. On a different axis, languages can be ranked according to the quantity and quality of computational resources. Not surprisingly, there are correlations between these two axes: languages like English and Mandarin have substantial resources, w...

In Arabic, the language used for everyday conversation ('spoken Arabic' - SA) differs markedly from literary Arabic (LA), which is used for written communication and formal functions. This fact raises questions regarding the cognitive status of the two varieties and their processing in the brain. Previous studies using auditory stimuli suggested that LA is processed by Arabic native speakers as...

The present paper describes the experience gained at LDC in the collection and transcription of conversational dialectal Arabic. The paper will cover the following: (a) Arabic language background; (b) objectives. principles, and methodological choices of dialectal Arabic transcription, (c) design features of LDC‟s „Arabic MultiDialectal Transcription Tool‟ (AMADAT) and metalanguage transcriptio...

This paper introduces and discusses Occitan sociolinguistics as it evolved from the 1970s onward a theory of language contact conflict. It was developed in conjunction with its Catalan counterpart reaction to Joshua Fishman's allocational model diglossia, came response conditions swift social linguistic change Southern France after Second World War. model, proposed mainly at first by Robèrt Laf...

In Arabic speech communities, there is a diglossic gap between written/formal Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and spoken/casual colloquial dialectal Arabic (DA): the common spoken language has no standard representation in written form, while the language observed in texts has limited occurrence in speech. Hence the task of developing language resources to describe and model DA speech involves ext...

Ancient Greek clusters of nasal (N) plus voiceless unaspirated (T) or voiced stop (D), merged to ND in Middle Greek, yielding ND or D in different modern dialects. Impressionistic studies suggest that currently there is stylistic variation between D and ND in all dialects, with ND as the high variant. Our study reveals that age, not style, is the most important factor in ND/D variation, with sp...

Hong Kong is a homogeneous community both in terms of race (98% Chinese) and language (over 80% speak Cantonese as their mother tongue). However, the historical and sociolinguistic dynamics there are such that English is the dominant medium of instruction at secondary level and above, while Modern Mandarin, a non-indigenous Chinese (standard) dialect, provides the norms for both the use of Chin...