Language, Ethnicity, and Separatism: Survey Results from Two Post-Soviet Regions

Scholars often use language to proxy ethnic identity in studies of conflict and separatism. This conflation of language and ethnicity is misleading: language can cut across ethnic divides and itself has a strong link to identity and social mobility. Language can therefore influence political preferences independently of ethnicity. Results from an original survey of two post-Soviet regions support these claims. Statistical analyses demonstrate that individuals fluent in a peripheral lingua franca are more likely to support separatism than those who are not, while individuals fluent in the language of the central state are less likely to support separatist outcomes. Moreover, linguistic fluency shows a stronger relationship with support for separatism than ethnic identification. These results provide strong evidence that scholars should disaggregate language and ethnic identity in their analyses: language can be more salient for political preferences than ethnicity, and the most salient languages may not even be ethnic.

Cross-Cultural Neuropsychology in Historical Perspective: Origins, Echoes, Challenges, and Future Directions

Clinical neuropsychology is cross-cultural “when there are significant cultural or language differences between the examiner, examinee, informants, tests, and/or social context” (Judd et al., 2009, p. 128). Clinical neuropsychology, therefore, has been cross-cultural from the earliest examples of cognitive and mental (IQ) testing in the early 20th century, with the translation of the Binet scales from French to English by the American psychologist H. H. Goddard and the administration of the translated battery (by non-Hispanic White psychologists, via oral interpreter) to European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. This chapter reviews that remote history; the earliest cultural neuropsychological research by A. R. Luria and colleagues in Uzbekistan, Central Asia, in the 1930s; and the more recent decades of “modern” cross-cultural neuropsychological research and practice, from the 1990s to 2018. Unfortunately, the field has most commonly downplayed or ignored the influences of culture and language on neurocognitive testing and clinical neuropsychological assessment in favor of a quantifiable, empiricist, and “universalist” view of brain-behavior relationships. This, in turn, has been problematic for the clinical assessment of rapidly increasing populations of ethnoculturally and linguistically diverse patients. A serious paucity remains of clinical neuropsychologists who are ethnoculturally and linguistically diverse and/or who possess the cross-cultural psychometric knowledge and linguistic fluency to evaluate such patients. Although there are reasons for optimism based in recent decades of research and clinical progress, the extent to which this health care specialty will remain viable and useful to increasingly large portions of US and world populations is uncertain.

Eloquence Embodied

Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, this book answers the long-standing question of how and how well Indigenous Americans and Europeans communicated with each other during colonial encounters. French explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century noticed that Indigenous peoples from Brazil to Canada used signs to communicate. The newcomers, in response, quickly embraced the nonverbal as a means to overcome cultural and language barriers throughout French America. Céline Carayon's close examination of French accounts, combined with her multidisciplinary methodology, enables her to recover these sophisticated Native practices of embodied expression. In a colonial world where communication and trust were essential but complicated by the multiplicity of Indigenous languages, intimate and sensory communications ensured that colonists and Indigenous peoples understood each other well. Understanding, in turn, bred both genuine personal bonds and violent antagonisms. Nonverbal communication shaped Indigenous resistance to colonial pressures across the Americas just as it fueled the French imperial imagination and strategies. Challenging the notion of colonial America as a site of misunderstandings and insurmountable cultural clashes, Carayon shows that Natives and newcomers used nonverbal means to build relationships before the rise of linguistic fluency--and, crucially, well afterward.

Spatially exploring the intersection of socioeconomic status and Canadian cancer-related medical crowdfunding campaigns

ObjectivesMedical crowdfunding is a rapidly growing practice where individuals leverage social networks to raise money for health-related needs. This practice has allowed many to access healthcare and avoid medical debt but has also raised a number of ethical concerns. A dominant criticism of this practice is that it is likely to increase inequities in access to healthcare if persons from relatively wealthy backgrounds, media connections, tech-savvy and educational attainments are best positioned to use and succeed with crowdfunding. However, limited data has been published to support this claim. Our objective in this paper is to assess this concern using socioeconomic data and information from crowdfunding campaigns.SettingTo assess this concern, we present an exploratory spatial analysis of a new dataset of crowdfunding campaigns for cancer-related care by Canadian residents.ParticipantsFour datasets were used: (1) a medical crowdfunding dataset that included cancer-related campaigns posted by Canadians, (2) 2016 Census Profile for aggregate dissemination areas, (3) aggregate dissemination area boundaries and (4) forward sortation area boundaries.ResultsOur exploratory spatial analysis demonstrates that use of crowdfunding for cancer-related needs in Canada corresponds with high income, home ownership and high educational attainment. Campaigns were also commonly located near city centres.ConclusionsThese findings support concerns that those in positions of relative socioeconomic privilege disproportionately use crowdfunding to address health-related needs. This study was not able to determine whether other socioeconomic dimensions such as race, gender, ethnicity, nationality and linguistic fluency are also correlated with use of medical crowdfunding. Thus, we call for further research to explore the relationship between socioeconomic variables and medical crowdfunding campaigning to explore these other socioeconomic variables and campaigns for needs unrelated to cancer.

Sociolinguistic research with endangered varieties: The case of Louisiana French

This article outlines the differences in goals, methods and results that variationist researchers may encounter when exploring and/or documenting a threatened language variety, and underscores special considerations and aspects of the research program that linguists must work to control for when working with endangered varieties of Western languages. In particular, it examines questions and strategies for dealing with sparse data for longitudinal studies; fewer speakers for stratified samples; the inverse relation between linguistic fluency and age; social network constraints in small speech communities; literacy-centric exercises in oral language communities; and larger project protocols designed for stable linguistic communities. Throughout the paper, the collection and analysis of Louisiana French liaison data from 1939, 1977, and 2010 provide an application of the proposed methods.

Enhancing Grammatical Accuracy and Linguistic Fluency

This chapter introduces a new paradigm of Web-based language learning, experimental Computer-Assisted Language Learning (eCALL) and its application in ESL and EFL grammar instruction. eCALL methods provide online training that complements classroom practice, while integrating second language acquisition theories and models. The authors introduce an eCALL tutor that teaches the correct use of the English article system. The authors examined the effectiveness of the tutor in an experimental study with 78 Chinese intermediate-advanced EFL learners. The tutor incorporated Bayesian knowledge tracing and provided individualized and adaptive training of English article usage. Learners' performance was measured by accuracy and response time. The results show that the tutor led to significant learning gains after three hours of tutor training, with gains retained two weeks later. The robust learning effects were documented by a significant improvement in accuracy and fluency of using the article.