The Economics of "Why is it so hard to save a threatened Language?"

We study the language choice behavior of bilingual speakers in modern societies, such as the Basque Country, Ireland andWales. These countries have two o cial languages:A, spoken by all, and B, spoken by a minority. We think of the bilinguals in those societies as a population playing repeatedly a Bayesian game in which, they must choose strategically the language, A or B, that might be used in the interaction. The choice has to be made under imperfect information about the linguistic type of the interlocutors. We take the Nash equilibrium of the language use game as a model for real life language choice behavior. It is shown that the predictions made with this model t very well the data about the actual use, contained in the censuses, of Basque, Irish and Welsh languages. Then the question posed by Fishman (2001),which appears in the title, is answered as follows: it is hard, mainly, because bilingual speakers have reached an equilibrium which is evolutionary stable. This means that to solve fast and in a re ex manner their frequent language coordination problem, bilinguals have developed linguistic conventions based chie y on the strategy 'Use the same language as your interlocutor', which weakens the actual use of B.1

Bilingual Lexicography:Relevance of Corpora. The Example of German-Basque as Language Pair

Presentation for the 5th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC 2013), V Congreso Internacional de Lingüistica de Corpus.

The influence of diets and body manipulations on the growth of African prawn Macrobrachium vollenhovenii (Herklots)

Live African prawns Macrobrachium vollenhovenii were collected from Asejire reservoir (Nigeria) by trapping. After acclimatization, the prawns were differently amputated: some had their eye-stalks cut; some had their chelae cut; some had both eyestalks and chelae cut while some were intact which served as the control. Each set was placed under different levels of crude protein viz 15%; 20%; and 25%. Weekly weight changes were monitored. Results obtained were subjected to statistical analysis including analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results showed that prawns fed with 20% crude protein had the best growth rate. Specimens with the eyestalk and chelae removed also showed superior growth when compared with the others. Specimens that had their eyestalks removed were able to feed for 18 hours in the day while those with intact body fed for 6 hours during the same period. The amputation of the chelate appendages reduced considerably the cannibalistic urge in the prawns. This enabled a high number of prawns to be grown in the experimental tanks

Language distance and non-native syntactic processing: Evidence from event-related potentials

[EN] In this study, we explore native and non-native syntactic processing, paying special attention to the language distance factor. To this end, we compared how native speakers of Basque and highly proficient non-native speakers of Basque who are native speakers of Spanish process certain core aspects of Basque syntax. Our results suggest that differences in native versus non-native language processing strongly correlate with language distance: native/non-native processing differences obtain if a syntactic parameter of the non-native grammar diverges from the native grammar. Otherwise, non-native processing will approximate native processing as levels of proficiency increase. We focus on three syntactic parameters: (i) the head parameter, (ii) argument alignment (ergative/accusative), and (iii) verb agreement. The first two diverge in Basque and Spanish, but the third is the same in both languages. Our results reveal that native and non-native processing differs for the diverging syntactic parameters, but not for the convergent one. These findings indicate that language distance has a significant impact in non-native language processing.

More than one language in the brain

Boeckx C., M.C. Horno & J.L. Mendívil (Eds.)