: language political realities

selection of communications given in a workshop hold at university of Pretoria 2007issues in language use in education in South Afric

Constructing an inclusive speech community from two mutually excluding ones: The third Afrikaans language movement

The article deals with the aim of leaders in the Afrikaans community to maintain Afrikaans as a language of high-function formal contexts in post-1994 South Africa through the construction of a community which meaningfully includes all its speakers as members, referred to as a “speech community”. Basing the concept “speech community” on Johnson and Milani’s description of such a language as “a complete and society-bearing language” and on Pavlenko and Blackledge’s notion of “a public”, it lists the obstacles which the development of an “inclusive Afrikaans community” need to deal with and discusses five issues which have to be debated in such a developmental process. The article also provides a brief overview of activities which the Afrikaans establishment have organised since 2003 (referring to them as “the third Afrikaans language movement”) to restore the language-political status of Afrikaans, and asks whether the emphasis on constructing an inclusive speech community is a creative way of addressing the problem with which they wish to deal. Key words:, language-poli Language appropriationtical restoration and maintenance, linguistic exclusion, speech community

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-