Chapters authored
Natural Disaster and International Development
Recovery from natural disaster has for many years been seen in objective terms as simply the time taken to replace damaged infrastructure. Increasingly, however, social scientists are describing the large part that human capital plays in the recovery from natural disaster in the form of ‘resilience’. The purpose of the chapter is to delineate, from a social scientific perspective, the main factors involved in disaster rehabilitation from a necessarily superficial but nevertheless accurate and useful viewpoint. The main areas to be considered are infrastructural impacts, psychological impacts and communication factors. The chapter concludes by defining various perspectives that contribute to the quality of resilience that underscores the investment in human capital in post‐disaster zones.
Part of the book: International Development
Language Evolution, Acquisition, Adaptation and Change
In the twenty‐first century, there are between 6000 and 8000 different languages spoken in the world, all of which are in a continuous state of evolving, by inter‐mixing or stagnating, growing or contracting. This occurs through changes in the population size of the people who use them, the frequency and form of their use in different media, through migration and through inter‐mixing with other languages. As Stadler et al. argue, human languages are a ‘culturally evolving trait’ and when it occurs language change is both sporadic and robust (faithfully replicated) and the main established variants are replaced by new variants. Only about 200 of these disparate languages are in written as well as spoken form, and most, except the popular ones like Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, and Russian, are in decline of use. But how did language itself evolve and come to be the most important innate tool possessed by people? The complex issue of language evolution continues to perplex because of its associations with culture, social behaviour and the development of the human mind.
Part of the book: Sociolinguistics