[Corpora-List] Re: 'Standard European English' ?

[TadPiotr]

One interesting question is: what is a minority language? I am a native
speaker of Polish and I was somewhat surprised to see Polish included as a
topic at a minority language conference. From the point of view of the size
of the population it is hard to consider Polish as a minority language, from
the point of view of the cultural impact it has, it certainly is a minority
language. But I would say that the same is true of Russian now. So, where to
draw the line?
Best regards,
Tadeusz Piotrowski

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no 
> [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On Behalf Of Briony Williams
> Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 7:09 PM
> To: FIDELHOLTZ_DOOCHIN_JAMES_LAWRENCE
> Cc: corpora at lists.uib.no
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Re: 'Standard European English' ?
> 
> FIDELHOLTZ_DOOCHIN_JAMES_LAWRENCE wrote:
> > Perhaps there is a desire to actually communicate with the largest 
> > possible group, which almost certainly has a higher 
> probability in the 
> > unmarked Internet case in English, given the political, globalized 
> > facts of life (as well as the obvious fact that English is the 
> > most-taught and most-used second language in the world, although 
> > Chinese begins to look like it may give us a run for our money).
> 
> There are two potentially competing demands here:
> a) To reach the maximum number of readers.
> b) To use one's native language.
> 
> This is a hot issue in the case of minority languages. If 
> someone were to send a message to this list in Welsh, for 
> instance, the expected number of responses would probably be 
> zero. Even sending the message bilingually (with an English 
> translation) would be a little pointless, unless there was at 
> least one other list member who would be able to respond in Welsh.
> 
> > In any case, I have never seen any actual resolution on this list 
> > about the language to use, and aside from us monolingual Americans, 
> > most English speakers with any academic pretensions at all 
> (ie most of 
> > those on this list, I assume) can at least read in a couple of 
> > non-English languages.  In short, as far as I am concerned, 
> at least, 
> > people are welcome to contribute here in Spanish, French or German.
> 
> At least in the case of Spanish, French, German, etc., there 
> is a high probability that many people will at least be able 
> to read that language, even if they then respond in English. 
> But where do we draw the line? What about Dutch, Finnish, or 
> Urdu? In practice, each person has to estimate the likely 
> audience size for any given language. Since the primary 
> criterion seems to be "maximum audience size", English will 
> win every time.
> 
> What this means for minority languages is that they will 
> continue to be squeezed out of the domain of academic 
> discourse. Even some state languages (Dutch, Finnish, etc) 
> tend to be squeezed out as well. Although my native language 
> is English, I am sorry to see this happen, and my 
> professional efforts for many years have been bent towards 
> helping to ensure that the Welsh language at least has a 
> stake in speech and language technology. This is the reason I 
> set up the ISCA Special Interest Group in "Speech And 
> Language Technology for Minority Languages" (SALTMIL) - see 
> http://isl.ntf.uni-lj.si/SALTMIL/
> 
> On the other hand, if anyone sends a message to this list in 
> French or German, I might attempt at least a simple reply in 
> that language - and then continue in English!  :-)
> 
> Best regards
> 
> Briony Williams
> 
> 
> 
>