Factors of Russian language spread in the North Caucasus in the second half of the 19th—early 20th century

The article examines a complex of factors that led to the wide spread of the Russian language in the post-reform North Caucasus. The Russian language as a state language had a high integrative potential, used in the formation of the imperial universe, performing at the same time obvious socio-political functions. In this capacity, the language was considered during the extensive agricultural colonization of the North Caucasian territories, as a result of which the share of the Russian-speaking population who arrived in the Caucasus began to outnumber the other ethnic groups.

Language Dispersal, Diversification, and Contact

How did languages spread across the globe? Why do we sometimes find large language families, distributed over a wider area, and sometimes clusters of very small families or language isolates (i.e. languages without known relatives)? What was the role of agriculture in language spread? What do different language ideologies and patterns of ethnic identity formation contribute? What influence do geography and climate have?The availability of increasingly large databases and new analytical research techniques make it possible to provide new answers to these long standing questions. This book focuses on patterns of language dispersal, diversification, and contact in a global perspective by comparing the complex language and population histories of Island Southeast Asia/Oceania, Africa, and South America in terms of history and patterns of settlement, conceptions of ethnicity, and communication strategies. These three regions were selected because they show interesting contrasts in the distribution of languages and language families.

Patterns of diversification and contact

This chapter presents the main questions raised in this book, as well as introducing some key notions that play a role in their answering. How did languages spread across the globe, and what are the implications for our understanding of human prehistory? Sometimes we find large language families, and elsewhere clusters of very small families or language isolates. What was the role of agriculture in language spread, and what did different language ideologies and patterns of ethnic identity formation contribute? Do geography and climate help explain dispersal patterns? Notions discussed are diversity versus disparity and the role of different time depths, followed by a survey of different continents. The models of dispersal in the work of Nichols, Dixon, and Nettle are analysed and contrasted, and the Farming Dispersal Hypothesis critically reviewed. Then the concepts of language families, linguistic areas, and linguistic isolates are presented, followed by a discussion of diversification mechanisms.

From Chinglish to New Chinglish — A Critical Exploration of Chinese ELF

Predominant status of English in politics, science, technology and intercultural communications leads to fierce debate over the so-called “ownership” of the English language. Considering the major agent in the spread and development of English around the world, increasing arguments have favoured the position of English as a lingua franca (ELF) shaped more by English’s non-native speakers. This echoes growing advocacy in Chinese academia of legitimatising Chinese ELF and implementing it to the English education. This paper suggests the emergence of an imagined Chinese ELF community in response to the paradox under the Post-Multilingual context that individuals adopt and adapt English for intercultural communication while this may endanger local culture and identity. However, it argues that Chinese ELF is hard to be legitimatised officially and applied to teaching contexts due to its immanent self-contradiction and attitudes of the Chinese public — its aimed recipients — towards embracing and using it formally. Key point lies in the fact that under today’s context of Anglo-hegemony, it is still native speakers who remain arbiters of the form of the English language spread and taught over the globe, essentially preventing Chinese ELF from being recognised.

A Fuzzy Logic Based Synonym Resolution Approach for Automated Information Retrieval

Precise semantic similarity measurement between words is vital from the viewpoint of many automated applications in the areas of word sense disambiguation, machine translation, information retrieval and data clustering, etc. Rapid growth of the automated resources and their diversified novel applications has further reinforced this requirement. However, accurate measurement of semantic similarity is a daunting task due to inherent ambiguities of the natural language, spread of web documents across various domains, localities and dialects. All these issues render to the inadequacy of the manually maintained semantic similarity resources (i.e. dictionaries). This article uses context sets of the words under consideration in multiple corpora to compute semantic similarity and provides credible and verifiable semantic similarity results directly usable for automated applications in the intelligent manner using fuzzy inference mechanism. It can also be used to strengthen the existing lexical resources by augmenting the context set and properly defined extent of semantic similarity.