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...

the question of who is and who is not a bilingual is more difficult to answer than it first appears. bilingualism was long regarded as the equal mastery of two languages, a definition that still prevails in certain glossaries of linguistics. however, today's complex world requires a more exact definition and analysis of the competencies that community members require to interact with speakers o...

India is said to be a socio-linguistic giant and the nerve system of this giant is multilingualism. “Indian multilingualism is huge in size, having 1620 mother tongues reduced to 200 languages.... With the population of many of minorities larger than European countries”(Annamalai E. 2001) . This multilingual character of India is represented by Mumbai City, the industrial capital of India, wher...

Research on individual multilingualism and third language acquisition has expanded greatly in recent years. A theoretical correlate of this is the recognition of the fact that humans are potentially multilingual by nature, that multilingualism is the normal state of language competence, and that this in turns has implications for an adequate theory of language competence, use and acquisition. T...

Multilingualism is common offline, but we have a more limited understanding of the ways multilingualism is displayed online and the roles that multilinguals play in the spread of content between speakers of different languages. We take a computational approach to studying multilingualism using one of the largest user-generated content platforms, Wikipedia. We study multilingualism by collecting...

In a context of the internationalisation of Higher Education (HE) driven by the high mobility of international Higher Degree Research candidates (HDRs), it is important to consider the value of HDRs’ multilingual capabilities for their learning and making of original contributions to knowledge. This article reports on a literature study regarding conceptualisations of multilingualism and multil...

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 ...