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This chapter addresses the question of the specific epistemic role of language planning within language policy and planning (LPP) and in the larger field of applied linguistics. Drawing from the traditional distinction between internal and external linguistics, the core of language planning is found in the internal dimension of LPP. The empirical insights obtained by language planning permit avoiding the tragedy of inductivism on one side and the taxonomic fury on the other. In other words, when properly considering empirical data from language planning, the design of the corresponding language policies comes along solid lines so that no gross errors are found. The chapter illustrates the method of levels of abstraction, adapted from the Philosophy of Information, to guide the analysis of case studies, which is exemplified by the case study of Esperanto and Hebrew in comparison, focusing on the epistemological standpoints. The illustrated method shows the importance of inspecting the levels of abstraction, to be done independently from considerations of status, management, or policy.

This introductory chapter reviews the historical development of the field of Language Policy and Planning (LPP), outlines the structure of the book, and introduces conceptual concerns and challenges that circulate throughout the chapters. The authors review the foundations of the field in classic language planning theory and examine the evolution of disciplinarily and interdisciplinary approaches. Chapters in the book examine (socio)linguistic foundations, critical empirical research, the public policy approach, modern corpus planning, LPP and technology, and language revitalisation.

This chapter concludes the book by pointing out five issues that deserve more attention. The first issue is the necessity of researchers leveraging the epistemological and theoretical diversity within the field. The second issue is the study of the conditions under which LPP is effectively able to influence language change, and the context in which such change occurs. The authors argue that more attention should be paid to the effects of the increasing role of the public sector in contemporary societies. The third issue calls for researchers in the field of LPP to be clear in their epistemological and methodological standpoints. The fourth issue is the recent massive use of information technologies for language-based applications, whose current proportions we are just beginning to estimate. A final issue is the difference between scholarship in and about LPP and actual, real-world LPP writing and implementation. A general question remains open: the identification of the epistemological limits of the field of LPP.

Adpositional Argumentation (AdArg) is a new method for annotating argumentative discourse that represents linguistic and pragmatic information in argumentative adpositional trees. In this paper, we explain how the representation of claims and individual arguments provide the building blocks for more complex argumentation structures. We illustrate the abstract trees representing the systematic possibilities of a claim (one statement), minimal argument (one conclusion, one premise), convergent argumentation (one conclusion, multiple premises), as well as serial argumentation, when the same linguistic material plays the double role of the premise of a given argument and the conclusion of a subargument.

In the contemporary world, with more and more people and languages in contact, the goal of inclusive societies should pass through the appreciation and valorization of heritage languages, both spoken and signed. Many of them are often contested, i.e., not considered full-fledged languages, or less valuable, by the majority of society. This paper presents two case studies of contested language heritages: CODAs, i.e., hearing children of Deaf parent(s) and denaskuloj, i.e. Esperanto family speakers. We focus on CODAs who can sign fluently and denaskuloj who speak fluently. Regardless of different patterns in society and culture, the sociolinguistic situations of both cases show interesting similarities. We address the in-group attitudes of CODAs and denaskuloj based on preliminary qualitative data, in order to propose feasible strategies to increase the prestige of minority spoken and sign languages alike.

According to the UNESCO Atlas, Sardinian is an endangered language, and the debate about its promotion in Sardinia is lively and passionate (Moseley 2010). In fact, over the past two generations, the language vitality and vigour of the limba (in Sardinian: language) have been drastically reduced. Nowadays, youngsters tend to abandon the limba when the literacy process towards Italian starts in school. The OCSE-PISA 2012 reports that students in Sardinia are among the lowest in literacy within the Italian state: Bolognesi and Heeringa (2005) argue that youngsters are losing Sardinian without mastering the Italian language. In order to reverse this language shift, a common written standard, the Limba Sarda Comuna (LSC) was made official by the local government in 2006. However, the LSC is still contested: “plastic language”, “Frankenstein monster idiom” are some of the epithets cast against it by the local press. In this contribution, we show a successful pilot experiment of a concrete application of the limba at school, that in our opinion could be easily applied on a wider scale in other parts of Sardinia. In fact, in the academic year 2014–15, three classes in a middle school of Orosei (Nuoro) took part in a laboratory where the limba was used both orally (local variety) and in written form (LSC, for the didactic material) following the so-called CLIL approach. Students learned Sardinian history in a Mediterranean and European perspective, using the LSC in reading and writing. No participant – L2 speakers included – rejected the LSC for being “artificial”, even though the local variety is approximately 85% similar to the LSC, according to Bolognesi (2007). This pilot experiment shows that a concrete application of the LSC in schools is possible and desirable. A discussion on how to expand this pilot experiment in different settings will be provided.

The status of Esperanto, the language launched by Zamenhof in 1887, has been contested since its beginning. Esperanto became the most relevant of the International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) from a sociolinguistic perspective, as it successfully survived two World Wars in spite of being explicitly persecuted by Hitler and Stalin, among others (Lins 2017). The motivations of the pioneers of Esperanto were put under scrutiny according to the different political context, both across time and place (Forster 1982). Therefore, its language ideology was adapted in order to reduce the level of contestedness of the language, and this adaptation re-framed the self-perception of its speakers and their attitudes toward Esperanto itself. For instance, before the Great War in Europe there was a strong connection between the Esperanto movement and pacifism (Alcalde 2015), while in the 1930s in China and Japan Esperanto was linked to anarchism and communism (Lins 2008). In the aftermath of the Second World War, the language ideology deeply changed (Jordan 1987), and the link between Esperanto and linguistic rights became increasingly stronger (Pietiläinen 2010). Nowadays, the new generation of Esperantists is facing the new challenges of the Digital Era. In particular, there is an ideological convergence with other contested languages, in particular Regional and Minority Languages, also in the Esperanto speaker’s attitudes (Caligaris 2016; Gobbo and Miola 2016). This chapter aims to illustrate the evolution of the language ideology of Esperanto, in comparison with other contested languages.

This paper extends a high-precision method for representing ‘first-order’ arguments to the linguistically and pragmatically more complex ‘second-order’ arguments (such as the argument from authority). It thereby contributes to the further development of Adpositional Argumentation (AdArg), an approach to representing argumentative discourse with applications in corpus linguistics and computational argumentation that combines Gobbo and Benini’s linguistic representation framework of Constructive Adpositional Grammars (CxAdGrams) and Wagemans’ argument categorisation framework of the Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA).

This book is the result of the Lecture Notes produced for the class "Introduction to Interlinguistics" held at the University of Amsterdam during my first mandate as Special Chair holder there (2014-2019). This means that the intended readers are my students, who may come from the Humanities, such as English Studies or Philosophy, as well as from more formally oriented curricula, such as Logic or Artificial Intelligence. The structure of the volume follows the structure of the class: there are seven chapters that correspond to the seven weeks of contact hours. Thus, the expression "in this chapter" is equivalent to "in this week". The first three chapters form Part I, which gives the theoretical basis, while the second three chapters of Part II apply the theory to major case studies in Interlinguistics. Please note that there is more material than I succeed to cover in the classroom – I am very ambitious – and that I explain in class the content of this book. This means that some sections may be skipped, depending on the specific class. For details, please pay attention to the official communication sent to class members.In studying this book you will acquire the conceptual toolbox of the working interlinguist. Technical terms and important names are indicated in bold and referred to the index by the end of the book, to facilitate students. Readers who do not belong to my students’ cohorts may also appreciate, as – to the best of my knowledge – there is no such book published in English yet. Comparable published works in other languages are: first, the book by Barandovska [1995], written for advanced Esperanto speakers enrolled the programme in Interlinguistics Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan ́; second, my short textbook in Italian [Gobbo, 2009], used at the Universities of Milan and Turin, which is now out-of-date, as it does not include Hollywood linguistics at all, being written just before the publication of Na’vi and Dothraki; last, the brand new Astori [2020], also in Italian, in press while I am writing these few lines, that will be used at the University of Parma. However, it is important to keep in mind that I wrote this lecture notes for absolute beginners who study at the BA level; neither experts nor researchers are the ideal readers here.

In the literature of linguistic justice, there is still room for sociolinguistic discussion. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate by the mean of introducing into the analysis a number of sociolinguistic parameters that have been hitherto used for the interpretation of linguistic repertoires, mainly in minority contexts. In fact, the necessary holistic view – driven by the need of rendering justice to the speaker – should lead the researcher to consider the whole set of linguistic varieties present in the repertoire of the communities, at any level of use: international, super-national, national, local. The paper will show and justify the motivations of these parameters and the (social) rules that control their use arguing that their consideration can draw important hints for a better understanding and implementations of issues of linguistic justice.

This paper is a pilot study that investigates the attitudes towards the official recognition of Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) by Hong Kong citizens. We used video-chat software (mainly WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, but also FaceTime) to conduct long-distance semi-structured interviews with 30 participants grouped as deaf, hearing-related (hearing people that are closely involved in the Deaf community), and hearing unrelated (hearing people that have little contact with deaf people and the Deaf community). Results show that the majority of participants (N=22)holds a supportive attitude towards the recognition of HKSL; Five participants hold a neutral position, and three participants hold a negative attitude towards it. We discussed each type of attitude in detail. Results show that participants’ attitudes are positively related to their awareness of deaf people’s need, the understanding of ‘language recognition’, and personal world views. In other words, the more participants are aware,the more they foster official recognition, at least as a general trend.Results also indicate that hearing people who are not involved in the Deaf community know very little about deaf people and the Deaf community,in general. At the end of the paper, we also reflect on two issues: we argue that the standardization of HKSL plays an important role in deaf education and empowering citizenship awareness and participation.

This paper presents the application of the constructive adpositional grammars (CxAdGrams) to phraseological units, through the special case study of Esperanto. Constructive linguistics is an approach to human language analysis that considers constructions, themselves being paradigms of language-in-use, as the first units. Unlike other constructional approaches, constructive linguists apply formalisms in understanding linguistic phenomena. The adpositional paradigm is the most developed formalism in constructive linguistics, which is understandable by humans and machine-readable at the same time. The term ‘constructive’ should also be understood in formal terms, as the adpositional paradigm is based on constructive mathematics, and in particular on topos-theory. From a theoretical perspective, CxAdGrams describe human languages in terms of constructions, described adpositional trees (in short, adtrees).This paper aims to explain why such an interpretation of constructions in terms of adtrees can be useful for a deeper understanding of phraseology. Esperanto is the case study chosen so to give an empirical base to CxAdGrams. In particular, we illustrate the problematisation of its phraseology as well as the advantages of Esperanto in setting up workable prototypes in a short time.

This paper develops a new method for reconstructing arguments in natural language by combining the linguistic representation framework of Constructive Adpositional Grammars (CxAdGrams) with the argument classification framework of the Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA). The method centers around the notion of ‘argumentative adpositional adtree’ (‘arg-adtree’). After an explanation of the two frameworks involved, the method is illustrated by providing the arg-adtrees of two concrete examples of so-called ‘first-order arguments’. It is argued that the resulting ad-trees provide a theoretically informed and empirically reliable reconstruction of an argumentative text or discussion. As such, the method developed in this paper is especially suitable as a point of departure for developing instruments for computer-assisted argumentation analysis.

There is a need for a tool for reconstructing arguments that describes their linguistic elements with high precision and at the same time identifies their type. In this paper, we prepare the ground for developing such a tool by introducing the notion of ‘argumentative adpositional tree’. The notion is based on a combination of the linguistic representation framework of Constructive Adpositional Grammars (CxAdGrams) and the argument classification framework of the Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA).

This paper describes and illustrates the use of Adpositional Argumentation (AdArg), a new formal method that enables the analyst of argumentative discourse to represent linguistic and pragmatic information in a highly detailed and yet flexible way. It first explains the theoretical starting points of the method, which is a combination of the linguistic representation framework of Constructive Adpositional Grammars (CxAdGrams) and the argument classification framework of the Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA). It then lays out the basic steps of the method and illustrates them by explaining how to build a so-called 'argumentative adpositional tree' (arg-adtree) of a concrete example of an argument.

This chapter illustrates the main results of a language laboratory held in a Montessori primary school in Milan, Italy, during 7 years. Pupils (age: 9–11) are guided in the collective invention of a secret language, using all their linguistic repertoire present in class – including minority and home languages. The structure of the language is highly influenced by the language of instruction (in our case, Italian), but, at the same time, it differs from that because its aim is to be secret. In other words, the invented language is shared among the class members only, who know how to decipher its alphabet and grammar, unlike other schoolmates. Secrecy permits the inventor to insert elements from other languages, resulting in an a priori language contact. During the process of invention, participants increase their metalinguistic awareness and thus their understanding of the languages they are studying formally – in our case, Italian and English. The Montessori method fosters a “learning-by-doing” approach and an active interdisciplinary cross-fertilization (called Cosmic Education). In fact, pupils may use the secret language to create an imaginary country – usually an island – and conceive a utopian society, putting together notions of natural sciences (for instance, orography) and social sciences, in particular, to describe the ideal human society speaking their secret language. The chapter also includes reflection on how this language laboratory can be applied in other educational contexts, maintaining its original character of being a serious game for learning.

Social constructivism is grounded on the construction of information with a focus on collaborative learning through social interactions. However, it tends to ignore the human mental architecture, pillar of cognitivism. A characteristic of cognitivism is that instructional designs built upon it are generally explicit, contrarily to constructivism. This position paper proposes a novel learning task that is aimed at combining both the approaches through the use of trigger questions in a collaborative activity executed after a traditional delivery of instructions. To evaluate this new task, a metric of efficiency based upon a measure of mental workload and a measure of performance is proposed. The former measure is taken from Ergonomics, and two well know subjective self-reporting mental workload assessment techniques are envisioned. The latter measure is taken from an objective quantitative assessment of the performance of learners employing concept maps.

When the concept of linguistic justice was proposed by Pool (1991) in order to cope with the asymmetries quite often found in multilingual contexts, it immediately provoked a great deal of debate. To sum up the debate, there is broad agreement on the meaning of linguistic in-justice, but it is still not clear what linguistic justice really is. This doubt is reflected in the mechanics of the proposed methods for the evaluation of multilingual contexts. What are we measuring? In particular, justice for whom, for example, national citizens or migrants? At which level of analysis, that is to say, at local, national, or transnational? The answers to these types of questions will determine our choice of the right – or at least the appropriate – parameters to be taken into account in order to design an index of the proposed measurement method. In other words, measures are far from neutral, in spite of the fact that they are quantitative, especially in the field of analytical sociolinguistics (Iannàccaro & Dell’Aquila, 2011). After almost a decade of refinements, in particular by Van Parijs (2004, 2011, 2012), Grin (2011), and Grin and Gazzola (2007) observed that the intangible value of a language, being one of the main carriers of culture, is quite often left aside in the indexes that propose to measure linguistic justice as a whole. The only variable that seems to be generally accepted as being relevant is territory. In this chapter, I examine the Calvet Language Barometer (CLB) in its latest version, published on the web in 2012, under the perspective of linguistic justice. I will proceed backwards, as the CLB aims to measure the “linguistic altitude” of languages in isolation – i.e., their position on the scale – while linguistic justice refers to languages in contact and mainly to multilingual contexts. However, the worldwide gravitational model presented in Calvet (2006, 1999), is naturally compatible with the CLB and can be used for this purpose. The case study of South Tyrol will be presented in order to test the CLB in this perspective, showing to what extent the barometer works, where it does not work, and why. In the conclusion, some preliminary ideas about a genuine multilingual measure of linguistic justice will be presented, based upon an operative notion of multilingual equilibrium.

In recent years the focus in linguistics research has shifted from the investigation of syntax, phonology and logical semantics supported by intuitions and speculation, to a more hard-nosed analysis of words in text and speech, focusing on how words are actually used. As such, lexicography has moved from the periphery to the centre of language research. At the same time, lexicography itself is in transition from a highly traditional craft, to a new interdisciplinary science. This handbook contrasts traditional methods of lexicography with newly emerging electronic and corpus-driven approaches. The International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography is a fully international and comprehensive reference work. It deals with every aspect of lexicography in all major languages, together with area studies of lexicography in indigenous languages, as well as rare and endangered languages. Readers will benefit from the comparative study of best practice and future targets in lexicography in all the countries of the world. The Springer Handbook will be of interest to users ranging from general readers and undergraduates to specialists from the fields of lexicography, language teaching, computational linguistics, translation studies, and literary and cultural studies.

After the fall of the Ussr, the use of english between non-native speakers spread even more than it had before. this situation has no precedent in the history of mankind, hence there is no straightforward answer to the question of how to deal with it. On the one hand, english non-native speakers are now more numerous than english native speakers, challenging the relevance of the distinction. On the other hand, local identities aspire to be promoted to national identities in various parts of the world, even if speakers of languages of well-established nation-states are not comfortable with this. I argue that in the 21th century language policy and planning experts as well as language activists cannot deal with the global level (spread of English) without also considering the supranational and national levels, together with all the complexity of local situations. This new situation, often summarized by the motto ‘think globally, act locally’, can be described with the term ‘glocalization’.

Studies show that in emergency situations, like in the aftermath of natural disasters, people tend to self-organize into so-called ephemeral organizations and transitional communities based on common problems, common places, etc. Strict interactions among victims, fundamental to strengthen such small communities, may be efficiently supported by a new generation of mobile-empowered disaster management systems based on the social networking approach, with crowd-generated and geo-referenced data. In this paper we discuss how a shift of perspective in the interaction, conceptual, logical and physical models adopted for the social network can efficiently support the dynamic bonding/de-bonding/re-bonding of communities that emerge based on alliances around shared problems and/or objectives.

The history of machine translation and the history of Esperanto have long been connected, as they are two different ways to deal with the same problem: the problem of communication across language barriers. Language can be considered a Complex Adaptive System (CAS), and machine translation too. In fact, there are multiple agents (both natural and artificial) involved, interacting with one another and committed to achieve a common goal, i.e., the machine translation task. The main characteristics of language as a CAS are also shared in machine translation, especially if we consider the example-based, statistical approach, which is nowadays paradigmatic and unavoidable. In fact, control is distributed, there is no ideal representing agent (intrinsic diversity), there are perpetual dynamics in performance, adapted through amplification and competition of new examples from the crowd of users. On the other hand, Esperanto, being a living language, can be considered a CAS, but of a special kind, because its intrinsic regularity in structure simplifies the task of machine translation, at least up to a certain level. This paper reviews how Esperanto has enhanced the development of human-machine communication in general and within machine translation in particular, tracing some prospects for further development of machine translation, where Esperanto could play a key role.

Description of a rare outbreak of Viral encephalopathy and retinopathy in freshwater fish farmed in Italy.

As a collaboration between two research centers based at the University of Amsterdam, ACLC (Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication) and ARTES (Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies), we are pleased to announce the launch of a new series of working papers A’dam Multiling, in October 2014. Contributions are welcomed from across a number of disciplines, including linguistics and its related subfields, but also from economics, political science, international relations, philosophy, law, anthropology, geography and area studies. Although we encourage interdisciplinarity, multilingualism should be the central topic of any proposal. We especially encourage young researchers, including PhD students, to submit their ideas even if they are not yet ready for publication in peer-reviewed journals, and we encourage submissions from beyond the two research centers and indeed also from beyond the University of Amsterdam.