MEITS Blog


The Northern Ireland election and the Irish language

by Deirdre Dunlevy

Irish was a principal background factor in the breakdown of the Northern Ireland executive in January, resulting in a snap election on Thursday, 2 March. The position of the Irish language in Northern Ireland became a key issue in the election campaign among politicians and constituents alike. Parties clashed over the need to introduce an Irish Language Act, with some major parties vehemently opposed to any concessions towards the language.

Continue Reading

Is acquiring a second language like acquiring the first?

by Yanyu Guo

Human language has posed great challenges for learning sciences. It has long been noted that children acquire language with relative ease and rapidity and without effort or formal teaching while adult second language (L2) learners cannot. In particular, children show creativity in the course of first language (L1) acquisition, which goes far beyond the input that they are exposed to. This was dubbed as the poverty of the stimulus by Chomsky (1980), with an assertion that human’s knowledge about natural language grammar is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity. Chomsky (1965) put forth a hypothetical module called the language acquisition device (LAD), which enables human to acquire and produce language.

Continue Reading

“We killed him for being chichipato”: Fernando Vallejo’s politics of linguistic standardization

by Aleksandra (Ola) Gocławska

Probably the most ill-famed Colombian writer, Fernando Vallejo, has laid the foundations for a genre often referred to as la sicaresca antioqueña [the ‘sicaresque’ novel from Antioquia] after the publication of his first novel, La virgen de los sicarios, in 1994. The term, used for the first time by Héctor Abad Faciolince, playfully subverts the meaning of the term picaresca –the Spanish picaresque novel– by substituting the word pícaro [rogue] by sicario [assassin]. While constituting a genre of its own, la sicaresca combines different genres: chronicles, novels or films that revolve around the figures of assasins at service of the drug mafia.

Continue Reading

Find By Author




Our Partners