Multilingualism in Finland: A Legal Perspective

Multilingualism is an increasingly frequent societal phenomenon. More and more societies and individuals are, or have become, multilingual. Legislation is an important tool for language policy and, ultimately, language environment. Yet, it seems that little research has been dedicated to multilingualism from a legal framework perspective. The law is, generally speaking, blind to language. This means that the legal framework rarely takes into account the co-existence of several languages in a society other than national languages. In addition, there are altogether relatively few provisions regarding what language shall be used in which contexts. The article focuses on multilingualism in Finland where the cornerstone for the Finnish language policy of the country is laid down in the Constitution. Multilingualism is particularly interesting in a bilingual country Finland that has a long and solid history of language legislation. The country has over a few decades undergone change and rapidly developed into a multilingual country. This article examines whether the Finnish current legislation enables and supports the societal multilingualism or poses restrictions on the parallel use of several languages. Another more fundamental question discussed in this article is if societal multilingualism sets new demands on the national legislation.

L’influence de l’aménagement linguistique sur l'orientation des travaux de terminologie à l’Office québécois de la langue française (1961-2004)

La terminologie, telle quelle se pratique au Québec depuis une cinquantaine d'années, s'inscrit dans un projet d'aménagement linguistique qui vise à faire du français la langue d'utilisation commune sur le territoire québécois. La mise en œuvre de ce projet a été confiée à l'Office québécois de la langue française. Dans le cadre de la présente thèse, nous évaluons l'influence de l'aménagement linguistique sur l'orientation des travaux de terminologie à l'Office québécois de la langue française de 1961 à 2004. Notre objectif principal est de montrer que le projet d'aménagement linguistique a engendré une intense activité terminologique à la suite de l'adoption de diverses lois linguistiques au cours des cinquante dernières années. Plus précisément, nous analysons l'impact de ces lois sur le développement de la pratique de la terminologie. Pour ce faire, nous avons proposé six périodes qui caractérisent les travaux de terminologie de l'Office québécois de la langue française de 1961 à 2004. À l'intérieur de ces six périodes, nous analysons les mandats que les lois linguistiques ont confiés à l'Office et leurs répercussions sur l'orientation de ses travaux terminologiques. À l'instar de la problématique que nous avons esquissée au début de cette thèse, les résultats de notre recherche révèlent que la pratique de la terminologie est liée au projet de société que le Québec s'est donné pour assurer la défense du français sur son territoire. En outre, l'adoption des lois linguistiques a favorisé le développement de la pratique de la terminologie. Cette pratique a évolué en fonction des différents mandats confiés à l'Office québécois de la langue française qui a mis au point une méthodologie de travail en terminologie. C'est dans le cadre de l'aménagement linguistique que la terminologie s'est développée au Québec et qu'elle est devenue l'instrument clé de la mise en œuvre du projet d'aménagement linguistique québécois.

L’influence de l’aménagement linguistique sur l'orientation des travaux de terminologie à l’Office québécois de la langue française (1961-2004)

La terminologie, telle quelle se pratique au Québec depuis une cinquantaine d'années, s'inscrit dans un projet d'aménagement linguistique qui vise à faire du français la langue d'utilisation commune sur le territoire québécois. La mise en œuvre de ce projet a été confiée à l'Office québécois de la langue française. Dans le cadre de la présente thèse, nous évaluons l'influence de l'aménagement linguistique sur l'orientation des travaux de terminologie à l'Office québécois de la langue française de 1961 à 2004. Notre objectif principal est de montrer que le projet d'aménagement linguistique a engendré une intense activité terminologique à la suite de l'adoption de diverses lois linguistiques au cours des cinquante dernières années. Plus précisément, nous analysons l'impact de ces lois sur le développement de la pratique de la terminologie. Pour ce faire, nous avons proposé six périodes qui caractérisent les travaux de terminologie de l'Office québécois de la langue française de 1961 à 2004. À l'intérieur de ces six périodes, nous analysons les mandats que les lois linguistiques ont confiés à l'Office et leurs répercussions sur l'orientation de ses travaux terminologiques. À l'instar de la problématique que nous avons esquissée au début de cette thèse, les résultats de notre recherche révèlent que la pratique de la terminologie est liée au projet de société que le Québec s'est donné pour assurer la défense du français sur son territoire. En outre, l'adoption des lois linguistiques a favorisé le développement de la pratique de la terminologie. Cette pratique a évolué en fonction des différents mandats confiés à l'Office québécois de la langue française qui a mis au point une méthodologie de travail en terminologie. C'est dans le cadre de l'aménagement linguistique que la terminologie s'est développée au Québec et qu'elle est devenue l'instrument clé de la mise en œuvre du projet d'aménagement linguistique québécois.

Le politiche linguistiche in un contesto multilingue: un'analisi comparativa tra Italia e Cina

Questa ricerca ha l’obiettivo di confrontare le politiche linguistiche in Italia e in Cina, due Paesi multilingue, con particolare attenzione alla legislazione riguardante le lingue comuni. Nella prima parte della tesi viene descritta e confrontata la situazione sociolinguista dei due Paesi, dal punto di vista sia diacronico sia sincronico, permettendo così di tracciare un quadro generale della panoramica sociolinguistica, la quale costituisce il fondamento per analizzare le politiche linguistiche adottate. La seconda parte della tesi descrive e analizza rispettivamente la legislazione linguistica sulla lingua comune dei due Paesi, mostrando la diversità e le caratteristiche delle pratiche legislative di Cina e Italia su questo tema. L’ultima parte della tesi presenta un confronto tra le legislazioni linguistiche sulle lingue comuni da diverse prospettive, individuando e discutendo differenze e punti in comune. La tesi si conclude con un’analisi delle motivazioni che spingono la Cina e l’Italia ad adottare scelte differenti, mettendo in luce la diversità delle politiche linguistiche e la complessità dei fattori che le determinano.

Manual of state employment security legislation. Supplement: Draft language with commentary for a state temporary disability insurance law coordinated with unemployment insurance.

Mode of access: Internet.

Practical legislation; or, The composition and language of acts of Parliament

Mode of access: Internet.

Language minority children at risk in America : concepts, definitions and estimates /

Cover title.

Offensive language, offensive behaviour and public nuisance: Empirical and theoretical analyses

Offensive behaviour and offensive language - new Queensland public nuisance offence - interpretation and enforcement by police and magistrates - impact of changes to legislation on the number and nature of prosecutions for legally unacceptable behaviour and language coming before the courts - results of empirical study indicate that public nuisance offence is not meeting its objectives - not being targeted only at behaviour which threatens the safety or security of people using public space as was its intention.

Seeing Turkish state formation processes: Mapping language and education census data

Language provides an interesting lens to look at state-building processes because of its cross-cutting nature. For example, in addition to its symbolic value and appeal, a national language has other roles in the process, including: (a) becoming the primary medium of communication which permits the nation to function efficiently in its political and economic life, (b) promoting social cohesion, allowing the nation to develop a common culture, and (c) forming a primordial basis for self-determination. Moreover, because of its cross-cutting nature, language interventions are rarely isolated activities. Languages are adopted by speakers, taking root in and spreading between communities because they are legitimated by legislation, and then reproduced through institutions like the education and military systems. Pádraig Ó’ Riagáin (1997) makes a case for this observing that “Language policy is formulated, implemented, and accomplishes its results within a complex interrelated set of economic, social, and political processes which include, inter alia, the operation of other non-language state policies” (p. 45). In the Turkish case, its foundational role in the formation of the Turkish nation-state but its linkages to human rights issues raises interesting issues about how socio-cultural practices become reproduced through institutional infrastructure formation. This dissertation is a country-level case study looking at Turkey’s nation-state building process through the lens of its language and education policy development processes with a focus on the early years of the Republic between 1927 and 1970. This project examines how different groups self-identified or were self-identified (as the case may be) in official Turkish statistical publications (e.g., the Turkish annual statistical yearbooks and the population censuses) during that time period when language and ethnicity data was made publicly available. The overarching questions this dissertation explores include: 1.What were the geo-political conditions surrounding the development and influencing the Turkish government’s language and education policies? 2.Are there any observable patterns in the geo-spatial distribution of language, literacy, and education participation rates over time? In what ways, are these traditionally linked variables (language, literacy, education participation) problematic? 3.What do changes in population identifiers, e.g., language and ethnicity, suggest about the government’s approach towards nation-state building through the construction of a civic Turkish identity and institution building? Archival secondary source data was digitized, aggregated by categories relevant to this project at national and provincial levels and over the course of time (primarily between 1927 and 2000). The data was then re-aggregated into values that could be longitudinally compared and then layered on aspatial administrative maps. This dissertation contributes to existing body of social policy literature by taking an interdisciplinary approach in looking at the larger socio-economic contexts in which language and education policies are produced.

Influence of English language in the number of citations of articles published in Brazilian journals of Ophthalmology

PURPOSE: To determine the association between language and number of citations of ophthalmology articles published in Brazilian journals. METHODS: This study was a systematic review. Original articles were identified by review of documents published at the two Brazilian ophthalmology journals indexed at Science Citation Index Expanded - SCIE [Arquivos Brasileiros de Oftalmologia (ABO) and Revista Brasileira de Oftalmologia (RBO)]. All document types (articles and reviews) listed at SCIE in English (English Group) or in Portuguese (Portuguese Group) from January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2009 were included, except: editorial materials; corrections; letters; and biographical items. The primary outcome was the number of citations through the end of second year after publication date. Subgroup analysis included likelihood of citation (cited at least once versus no citation), journal, and year of publication. RESULTS: The search at the web of science revealed 382 articles [107 (28%) in the English Group and 275 (72%) in the Portuguese Group]. Of those, 297 (77.7%) were published at the ABO and 85 (23.3%) at the RBO. The citation counts were statistically significantly higher (P<0.001) in the English Group (1.51 - SD 1.98 - range 0 to 11) compared with the Portuguese Group (0.57 - SD 1.06 - range 0 to 7). The likelihood citation was statistically significant higher (P<0.001) in the English Group (70/107 - 65.4%) compared with the Portuguese Group (89/275 - 32.7%). There were more articles published in English at the ABO (98/297 - 32.9%) than at the RBO (9/85 - 10.6%) [P<0.001]. There were no significant difference (P=0.967) at the proportion of articles published in English at the years 2008 (48/172 - 27.9%) and 2009 (59/210 - 28.1%). CONCLUSION: The number of citations of articles published in Portuguese at Brazilian ophthalmology journals is lower than the published in English. The results of this study suggest that the editorial boards should strongly encourage the authors to adopt English as the main language in their future articles.

Health Related Quality of Life Assessment questionnaire for children aged 5 to 11 years with HIV/AIDS: cross-cultural adaptation for the Portuguese language

The objective of this study is to describe preliminary results from the cross-cultural adaptation of the Quality of Life Assessment Questionnaire, used to measure health related quality of life (HRQL) in Brazilian children aged between 5 and 11 with HIV/AIDS. The cross-cultural model evaluated the Concept, Item, Semantic and Measurement Equivalences (internal consistency and intra-observer reliability). Evaluation of the conceptual, item, semantic equivalences showed that the Portuguese version is pertinent for the Brazilian context. Four of seven domains showed internal consistency above 0.70 (α: 0.76-0.90) and five of seven revealed intra-observer reliability (ricc: 0.41-0.70). This first Portuguese version of the HRQL questionnaire can be understood as a valuable tool for assessing children's HRQL, but further studies with large samples and more robust analyses are recommended before use in the Brazilian context.

Biologically Plausible Connectionist Prediction of Natural Language Thematic Relations

In Natural Language Processing (NLP) symbolic systems, several linguistic phenomena, for instance, the thematic role relationships between sentence constituents, such as AGENT, PATIENT, and LOCATION, can be accounted for by the employment of a rule-based grammar. Another approach to NLP concerns the use of the connectionist model, which has the benefits of learning, generalization and fault tolerance, among others. A third option merges the two previous approaches into a hybrid one: a symbolic thematic theory is used to supply the connectionist network with initial knowledge. Inspired on neuroscience, it is proposed a symbolic-connectionist hybrid system called BIO theta PRED (BIOlogically plausible thematic (theta) symbolic-connectionist PREDictor), designed to reveal the thematic grid assigned to a sentence. Its connectionist architecture comprises, as input, a featural representation of the words (based on the verb/noun WordNet classification and on the classical semantic microfeature representation), and, as output, the thematic grid assigned to the sentence. BIO theta PRED is designed to ""predict"" thematic (semantic) roles assigned to words in a sentence context, employing biologically inspired training algorithm and architecture, and adopting a psycholinguistic view of thematic theory.

The effect of Sao Paulo`s smoke-free legislation on carbon monoxide concentration in hospitality venues and their workers

Background Studies have shown that there is no safe level of secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure and there is a close link between SHS and the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke. Carbon monoxide (CO) is one of the most important components present in SHS. Objective To evaluate the impact of the smoking ban law in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, on the CO concentration in restaurants, bars, night clubs and similar venues and in their workers. Methods In the present study we measured CO concentration in 585 hospitality venues. CO concentration was measured in different environments (indoor, semi-open and open areas) from visited venues, as well as, in the exhaled air from approximately 627 workers of such venues. Measurements were performed twice, before and 12 weeks after the law implementation. In addition, the quality of the air in the city during the same period of our study was verified. Results The CO concentration pre-ban and pot-ban in hospitality venues was indoor area 4.57 (3.70) ppm vs 1.35 (1.66) ppm (p<0.0001); semi-open 3.79 (2.49) ppm vs 1.16 (1.14) ppm (p<0.0001); open area 3.31 (2.2) ppm vs 1.31 (1.39) ppm (p<0.0001); smoking employees 15.78 (9.76) ppm vs 11.50 (7.53) ppm (p<0.0001) and non-smoking employees 6.88 (5.32) ppm vs 3.50 (2.21) ppm (p<0.0001). The average CO concentration measured in the city was lower than 1 ppm during both pre-ban and post-ban periods. Conclusion Sao Paulos smoking-free legislation reduced significantly the CO concentration in hospitality venues and in their workers, whether they smoke or not.

Proposal of a High-Level Language for Writing Self Modifying Programs

This paper proposes a simple high-level programming language, endowed with resources that help encoding self-modifying programs. With this purpose, a conventional imperative language syntax (not explicitly stated in this paper) is incremented with special commands and statements forming an adaptive layer specially designed with focus on the dynamical changes to be applied to the code at run-time. The resulting language allows programmers to easily specify dynamic changes to their own program`s code. Such a language succeeds to allow programmers to effortless describe the dynamic logic of their adaptive applications. In this paper, we describe the most important aspects of the design and implementation of such a language. A small example is finally presented for illustration purposes.

Brazilian Agriculture and Environmental Legislation: Status and Future Challenges

Brazilian agriculture covers about one-third of the land area and is expected to expand further We assessed the compliance of present Brazilian agriculture with environmental legislation and identified challenges for agricultural development connected to this legislation We found (i) minor illegal land use in protected areas under public administration, (ii) a large deficit in legal reserves and protected riparian zones on private farmland, and large areas of unprotected natural vegetation in regions experiencing agriculture expansion Achieving full compliance with the environmental laws as they presently stand would require drastic changes in agricultural land use, where large agricultural areas are taken out of production and converted back to natural vegetation The outcome of a full compliance with environmental legislation might not be satisfactory due to leakage, where pristine unprotected areas become converted to compensate for lost production as current agricultural areas are reconverted to protected natural vegetation. Realizing the desired protection of biodiversity and natural vegetation, while expanding agriculture to meet food and biofuel demand, may require a new approach to environmental protection New legal and regulatory instruments and the establishment of alternative development models should be considered