Rajend Mesthrie. 2003. Language in South Africa. Cambridge Africa Collection. Cambridge University Press
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CUP: 485ppThis is the latest volume in the Cambridge Africa Collection.It should also be seen in relation to four other volumes published by Cambridge, which focus on language in Britain, Canada, the USA and Australia, repectively.In the introduction, Mesthrie explains the format of the book and pithily describes some of the particular challenges faced in deciding where the focus would fall.In the end, the volume comes closest to its Australian counterpart.In that case the divisions were 'Aboriginal and Islander languages; Pidgins and Creoles; transplanted languages other than English; Varieties of Australian English; Public policy and social issues (p.3).In the the South African volume Part I covers (albeit not exhaustively) the main languages in the country.Part II deals with language contact.And Part III is concerned with language planning, policy and education.Mesthrie explains how, after considerable debate, the authors decided to use the potentially loaded terms black, coloured and white.African language names are used without prefixes (Xhosa rather than isiXhosa).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.048 | 0.019 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".