Integrating Linguistic Diversity in Globalized Spanglish Communities

Communities of Practice: Reinscribing Globalized Labour in Workplace Learning

The concept of ‘communities of practice’ is widely used in workplace learning research. Whilst critiques have expanded its use in ways that claim more socially just approaches to workplace learning, a more critical analysis for change is needed. This paper draws on a case study of career guidance professionals’ work with young people, radically disturbed by new welfare-to-work policies. Their e...

Linguistic Diversity and Redistribution

This paper investigates the effect of linguistic diversity on redistribution in a broad crosssection of countries. We use the notion of “linguistic distances” and show that the commonly used fractionalization index, which ignores linguistic distances, yields insignificant results. However, once distances between languages are accounted for, linguistic diversity has both a statistically and econ...

Africa's Linguistic Diversity

African language classification in the latter half of the 20th century has been dominated by Joseph Greenberg’s work classifying African languages into four linguistic genetic groupings: Afroasiatic, Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan. Current research indicates that there are a minimum of 20 unrelated African language families or isolates. Africa’s linguistic diversity will remain po...

Linguistic diversity and universals

Representing and Integrating Linguistic Knowledge

This paper describes a theory of the representation and use of linguistic knowledge in a natural language understanding system. The representation system draws much of its insight from the linguistic theory of Fillmore el al. (1988). This models knowledge of language as a large collection of grammatical constructions, each a description of a linguistic regularity. I describe a representation la...