Inconsistencies and Adjustments in Language Policy: Evidence from the Linguistic Landscape

Taking effect immediately following Tunisia’s independence, Arabization has achieved mixed results with Arabic institutionally empowered but still competing with French. In fact, when examining the linguistic landscape, this monolingual policy is flouted both in terms of the bilingual Arabic-French Street signage but also challenged by people’s preferences. This paper examines inconsistencies between Arabic as the ‘language of the state’ (government-decreed), and the omnipresence of other ‘languages in the state’ (observed in representation and practice) in Tunisia. Street signage artefacts and attitudinal data also illustrate how language policies are responded to and experienced by Tunisians. Data consists of different types of private inscriptions and public signs, governmental decrees, as well as attitudinal surveys and interviews. The juxtaposition of urban signs with the official policy on multilingualism provides an illustrative account of the complexities of the linguistic situation in Tunisia, which blends top-down advocacies of Arabization, ambivalent attitudes to Arabic-French Bilingualism, as well as a growing interest in English as the emergent language of globalization.

Emergence of Writing Systems through Multi-Agent Cooperation (Student Abstract)

Learning to communicate is considered an essential task to develop a general AI. While recent literature in language evolution has studied emergent language through discrete or continuous message symbols, there has been little work in the emergence of writing systems in artificial agents. In this paper, we present a referential game setup with two agents, where the mode of communication is a written language system that emerges during the play. We show that the agents can learn to coordinate successfully using this mode of communication. Further, we study how the game rules affect the writing system taxonomy by proposing a consistency metric.

The Belief Model of Sentience

The media model called “belief” serves as the language by which humans converse with God in the scripture of redemption. Hypothetically, redemption is based on the same cognitive dynamic as healing with dream analysis established by Carl Jung. These dynamics promote coherence within a sentient-cognitive psyche (a combination of conscious/unconscious scales of sentience), universal reality based on unity/energism, and narrative/dramatic structure. Based upon these dynamics, this chapter establishes a correspondence between the cognitive language of the mediated dreamscape and the cognitive language of belief that allows for conversation between God and humanity. The key to understanding this cognitive conversation is the belief model of sentience. Conflicting belief systems are endemic to human experience. Differences in the languages of belief contribute to the most psychotic-hysterical misunderstandings and their resulting mayhem. Due to illiteracy relative to the emergent language of cognitive mediation, the portents for planetary survival are dire.