Assessing and diagnosing language impairment in bilingual children : a minority language study

Diagnosing specific language impairment (SLI) in monolingual children is a complex task, with some controversy regarding criteria. Diagnosis of SLI in bilinguals is made more complex by the lack of standardized assessments and poor understanding of clinical markers in languages other than English. There is an added complexity when one of the languages being acquired is an endangered one, where the domains of use and input are restricted, and where input is affected by convergence with the majority language. This article explores the challenge facing speech and language therapists and psychologists in diagnosing SLI in bilingual children acquiring Irish and English. Six speech and language therapists and four psychologists took part in semi-structured interviews exploring the impact of the bilingual environment, the nature of bilingual language impairment, current practices and the needs of these children. Thematic analysis was carried out and here three of the main themes emerging in the areas of assessment, the bilingual environment and characteristics of language impairment in this population are discussed. For assessment, an overriding theme was the requirement of standardized testing to secure additional educational and therapy resources for these children. However, because there are no standardized tests available in Irish, both professions end up translating existing English-based language and psychological assessments, using the norms provided to achieve standard scores. Both professions expressed strong dissatisfaction with this practice but saw little choice, given the Department of Education’s approach to allocation of supports. Language impairment in Irish was characterized by lexical difficulties, particularly with verbs and prepositions, tense errors, and significant borrowing and code-switching with English. Other themes that emerged were the growing influence of English as the children became older, which affected both attitudes to the minority Irish language as well as the content and structure of the language itself. The implications for service provision for bilingual populations in general are outlined.Foras na GaeilgeTS 27.08.1

Investigating language policy in social media: translation practices on Facebook

This chapter is concerned with the Facebook Translations application (app) through which the social network site has internationalised its website. Despite its international reach, with over 70% of Facebook users being from outside the United States of America, the site was only available in English until February 2008. Following the development of the Translations app, the site was first opened to Spanish, and was quickly followed by French, German and another 21 languages in 2008 (Facebook, 2012). Since then the Translations app has continued to be ‘released’ to more languages and, at the time of writing (November 2012), is available in 110 languages including minority or regional languages, such as Irish and Welsh; the national varieties of US English and UK English1; and other languages and varieties such as Leet Speak, Esperanto and Pirate English

A Celtic view on minority language dynamics: support, transmission, education and target language varieties

When we talk of the modern Celtic languages today we refer to the Insular Celtic varieties that have maintained (or indeed regained) a degree of their linguistic vitality and that are practised, to varying extents and in various forms, by users of the Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh languages. Further to their common linguistic derivation, the Celtic languages share a number of additional characteristics that lend themselves well to a common analytical framework (features that they indeed share with many other ‘small’ languages). Each of the languages has, for a long time, been functioning in a bilingual, if not multilingual, environment. Consequently, in global terms, each of the languages is reliant on a relatively small pool of speakers for their survival. Perhaps unsurprisingly for those familiar with the dynamics of minority languages, then, language maintenance, revitalisation and revival projects have been among of the hallmarks of the Celtic-language experience for some time. This speaks to a familiar appetite among at least some users, as well as non-users, to go against the grain of language loss and to try to ensure that the Celtic languages are used into the future despite an extremely challenging climate