Language and the media in Flanders: new developments in a monolingual framework

Though Flemish electronic media (VRT radio and television) are officially monolingual, developments do occur which counter the official policy of homogeneity. Subtitling functions on television as an instrument to integrate anything foreign or uncommon and to serve the specific needs of VRT’s core (Brabant-Antwerp) audience. In commercial messages sundry varieties of Dutch and different languages are used in order to enhance versisimilitude. A number of radio (music) programmes use foreign languages to create a particular atmosphere. Increasingly, the official Flemish electronic media are showing fundamental appropriation of a functional language variation system by language users

Preface

The contributions to this Acta Academica Supplementum result from research related to the Multilingual Information Development Programme (MIDP) of the Unit for Language Management that is funded in its entirety by the Province of Antwerp, Flanders, Belgium. The views expressed in this Supplementum, however, reflect the position of the individual authors

Multilingualism From Below

Aiming to achieve the sum-rate capacity in multiuser multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channels with N t antennas implemented at the transmitter, opportunistic beamforming (OBF) generates N t orthonormal beams and serves N t users during each transmission, which results in high scheduling delay over the users, especially in densely populated wireless networks. Non-orthogonal OBF with more than N t transmit beams can be exploited to serve more users simultaneously and further decreases scheduling delay. However, the inter-beam interference will inevitably deteriorate the sum-rate. Therefore, there is a tradeoff between the sum-rate and the increasing number of transmit beams. In this context, the sum-rate of non-orthogonal OBF with N > N t beams are studied, where the transmitter is based on the Grassmannian beamforming. Our results show that non-orthogonal OBF is an interference-limited system. Moreover, when the inter-beam interference reaches its minimum for fixed N t and N, the sum-rate scales as N ln (N/N-N t) and it decreases monotonically with N for fixed N t. Numerical results corroborate the accuracy of our analyses. © 2011 IEEE.postprintThe IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2011, Kyoto, Japan, 5-9 June 2011. In Proceedings of IEEE-ICC, 2011, p. 1-

Language and the media in Flanders: new developments in a monolingual framework

Though Flemish electronic media (VRT radio and television) are officially monolingual, developments do occur which counter the official policy of homogeneity. Subtitling functions on television as an instrument to integrate anything foreign or uncommon and to serve the specific needs of VRT’s core (Brabant-Antwerp) audience. In commercial messages sundry varieties of Dutch and different languages are used in order to enhance versisimilitude. A number of radio (music) programmes use foreign languages to create a particular atmosphere. Increasingly, the official Flemish electronic media are showing fundamental appropriation of a functional language variation system by language users