LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AND LANGUAGE SHIFT

In language shifts, ancestral tongues are abandoned by their speakers and replaced, in one way or another, by dominant languages. Such changes in language use will ultimately lead to the irreversible suppression of the world's language diversity. Language maintenance attempts to counter these processes. Linguists may assist ethno linguistic minorities in safeguarding their threatened languages in many different ways, including establishing orthography when necessary, but speakers decide to abandon their heritage languages within a broad socio-political and economic context. Communities uphold or give up languages, so only the speakers of endangered languages themselves can opt for and execute language maintenance activities. Linguists might have to accept that some communities may no longer care for their heritage languages

Deconstructing the instrumental/identity divide in language policy debates

Debates about language and literacy policies are increasingly constructed at national levels in relation to their potential contribution to the ‘knowledge economy’, and to the ability of nation-states to compete economically in an increasingly globalised world. Invariably, this instrumental approach to language privileges the role of English as the current world language. Thus, in contexts where English is not spoken as a first language, English is increasingly viewed as the most important and/or useful additional language. In English-dominant contexts, monolingualism in English is seen as being a sufficient, even an ideal language model, while literacy in English comes to stand for literacy (and related social mobility) per se. Where other languages are countenanced at all in these latter contexts, the instrumentalist approach continues to dominate, with so-called international and/or trading languages being constructed as the languages other than English most worth learning, or perhaps even as the only other languages worth learning. The growing dominance of economistic, instrumental approaches to language policy, and the valorisation of English that is associated with them, clearly militate against ongoing individual and societal multilingualism. The languages most at risk here are so-called minority languages, particularly indigenous languages. In the new globalised world dominated by English, and where the perceived ‘usefulness’ of language is elided with language value, such languages are increasingly constructed as having neither. This paper deconstructs and critiques this positioning of indigenous and other minority languages, along with the wider instrumentality of much language and literacy policy of which it forms a part. In light of this, it also explores how such languages can be actively, justifiably and effectively maintained and promoted, particularly in English-dominant contexts

A Characterization for Decidable Separability by Piecewise Testable Languages

The separability problem for word languages of a class $\mathcal{C}$ by languages of a class $\mathcal{S}$ asks, for two given languages $I$ and $E$ from $\mathcal{C}$, whether there exists a language $S$ from $\mathcal{S}$ that includes $I$ and excludes $E$, that is, $I \subseteq S$ and $S\cap E = \emptyset$. In this work, we assume some mild closure properties for $\mathcal{C}$ and study for which such classes separability by a piecewise testable language (PTL) is decidable. We characterize these classes in terms of decidability of (two variants of) an unboundedness problem. From this, we deduce that separability by PTL is decidable for a number of language classes, such as the context-free languages and languages of labeled vector addition systems. Furthermore, it follows that separability by PTL is decidable if and only if one can compute for any language of the class its downward closure wrt. the scattered substring ordering (i.e., if the set of scattered substrings of any language of the class is effectively regular). The obtained decidability results contrast some undecidability results. In fact, for all (non-regular) language classes that we present as examples with decidable separability, it is undecidable whether a given language is a PTL itself. Our characterization involves a result of independent interest, which states that for any kind of languages $I$ and $E$, non-separability by PTL is equivalent to the existence of common patterns in $I$ and $E$

Commutative Languages and their Composition by Consensual Methods

Commutative languages with the semilinear property (SLIP) can be naturally recognized by real-time NLOG-SPACE multi-counter machines. We show that unions and concatenations of such languages can be similarly recognized, relying on -- and further developing, our recent results on the family of consensually regular (CREG) languages. A CREG language is defined by a regular language on the alphabet that includes the terminal alphabet and its marked copy. New conditions, for ensuring that the union or concatenation of CREG languages is closed, are presented and applied to the commutative SLIP languages. The paper contributes to the knowledge of the CREG family, and introduces novel techniques for language composition, based on arithmetic congruences that act as language signatures. Open problems are listed.Comment: In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.527

PRESERVING AND PROTECTING JAVANESE LANGUAGES BY APPLYING CODE SWITCHING AND CODE MIXING IN TEACHING ENGLISH IN CLASSROOM ( SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE ASSIGNMENT OF PRAGMATICS)

Javanese languages are a part of Indigenous languages. They are one of culture’s heritages which Javanese people should preserve and protect them in this globalization era. Javanese languages are considered as the cornerstone of culture and the ultimate expression which Javanese people should know that by using them, culture can be shared and transmitted to further generations to express their identities. However, in the real fact, many indigenous languages in this world are almost extinct, and even, Javanese languages almost disappear at this time in some areas and places. It is crystal clear that there is no special caution from other Javanese people, especially government, in trying to preserve them. Not only government, but also the parents and the elders should take part in this case. Javanese languages should be passed on from generation to the other. Even, it is not strange when the parental generation speaks the Javanese language, they do not often pass it on to their children. Therefore, in an increasing number of cases, Javanese languages are used only by elders. Actually, the loss of some Javanese languages can be caused by some factors, such as irresistible social, political, and economic pressures. In this matter, the relationship and the cooperation between a language planning, language policy, language rights and language education are needed to prevent this phenomena. They are used as vehicles for promoting and perpetuating the vitality, versatility, and stability of Javanese languages. Creating and arranging a better language planning and a better language policy are important to do in Indonesia right now to protect Indonesian language and Indigenous languages, especially Javanese languages. It is, of course, also supported by developing and paying attention to the language rights. Moreover, focusing on language in education for children and young people is a best way to start preserving Javanese languages. Including Javanese children and youth in this discussion on language and education is befitting and appropriate. It needs to know that education in classroom and school areas have also the potential of saving and reviving Javanese languages which are at the brink of extinction. The non-recognition and the prohibition of the use of Javanese languages in the education and work place has impacted the lives of many Javanese people, it has affected them from childhood to adulthood, in the creation of their identity and development of their communities. Education world, in classroom and school areas, which was used as an instrument of assimilation of some languages in Indonesia, especially in Central Java, has impacted in the Javanese languages. Therefore, applying code switching and code mixing in teaching English in classroom should be offered to Javanese people, but also to all students who stay in Java island, as a means of combating prejudices and discrimination and promoting inclusive and respectful societies, is better step to do. However, in order to make it real, the cooperation and the seriousness of government, Javanese people, parents, elders, teachers, and even lecturers must be created in Indonesia, especially in Central Java. It is better for government to make a decision explicitly in keeping and preserving Javanese languages from the extinction through teaching activities in classroom and school areas as the basic formal activity. Keywords : Code mixing, code switching, indigenous languages, Javanes

A Multilingual Study of Compressive Cross-Language Text Summarization

Cross-Language Text Summarization (CLTS) generates summaries in a language different from the language of the source documents. Recent methods use information from both languages to generate summaries with the most informative sentences. However, these methods have performance that can vary according to languages, which can reduce the quality of summaries. In this paper, we propose a compressive framework to generate cross-language summaries. In order to analyze performance and especially stability, we tested our system and extractive baselines on a dataset available in four languages (English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish) to generate English and French summaries. An automatic evaluation showed that our method outperformed extractive state-of-art CLTS methods with better and more stable ROUGE scores for all languages