Literacy in Contact and in Context

Abstract

According to UNESCO, at least 2500 languages are vulnerable. Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, French are “hegemons” - each having at least 100 million native speakers and accounting for over 51 percent of the global population. Half of the hegemons are written with an alphabet. For the non-alphabetic group, native speakers may read and write in logographic (e.g. Chinese) or syllabic writing systems (e.g. Devanagari) or both (e.g. Japanese). In languages that are spoken by less than one million people, Latin, Arabic and Chinese writing systems dominate but they do not always map to local dialects transparently. Multi-literacy is a growing global phenomenon particularly in Asia. In the 21st century, access to electronic literacy will include multi-literate speakers. However, multi-literacy brings questions. Multi-literacy is as old as civilization due to spoken language contact in commerce, ideology and religion. Literacy adapts to new technology via codification of symbols allowing multi-literacy to grow. Documentation of writing has a history but it is not prominent in global policy making. Programmes to develop literacy are reserved for monolingual ‘hegascripts’ (dominant languages) e.g. English. However, neglecting diversity in writing systems in developing countries risks more inequalities if indigenous language speakers are taught literacy in their non-native language only.

Intervention and Prevention of Dementia in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) of China

“… 1 , 29 Some of the factors in Table 3 could be interpreted as showing benefits from cognitive reserve such as computer use, reading, games and communication (conversation, social engagement). 30 This is consistent with the recommendations from the NIA Reserve and Resilience Collaboratory https://reserveandresilience.com . 10…”

Does Language Distance Modulate the Contribution of Bilingualism to Cognitive Reserve in Seniors? A Systematic Review

“…This research gap questions the cross-linguistic and crosscultural generalizability of data. 42,71,126 Our results therefore do not alter the conclusion from extant 134 studies that bilingualism does not delay the onset of dementia. 41,110,[134][135][136] However, this does not preclude the possibility that extant findings result from a modulatory influence of LD since this is rarely considered.…”

Scoping review of research practices in the investigation of bilingual effects on inhibition and attention in young people

“…Linguistic diversity has motivated the design of studies that focus on manipulating spoken languages according to their relative linguistic distance (Nerbonne & Hinrichs, 2006), including attempts to quantify this distance (Gamallo et al, 2017). There are calls to reconsider how bilingualism is conceptualized as bilinguals differ in complex and multidimensional ways that are meaningful in the context of research on bilingual effects (Weekes, 2020). The degree of similarity between a bilingual’s two languages is thought to influence cross-linguistic activation with higher similarity associated with higher levels of activation (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002).…”

“…These nontrivial differences are ignored when language status is considered as a categorical variable. Furthermore, a binary classification does not consider other factors such as the linguistic overlap between language pairs that may impact on the emergence of bilingual effects (Coderre & Van Heuven, 2014a; Kuzmina et al, 2019; Weekes, 2020).…”