Transient Languages & Cultures

[from our woman in Kununurra, Eva Schultze-Berndt]

This email is a call for expressions of interest in a 5th European Australianist workshop, to be held at the University of Manchester in September 2008.

The suggestions for dates are either of the following:

a) Su/Mo, 14th/15th September. This is adjacent to the LAGB conference in Colchester/Essex from 10-13 Sept; train travel between Colchester and Manchester is about 5 hrs.

b) Fr/Sat, 19th-20th September.

c) Sat/Su, 20th-21st September.

Of course depending on the number of participants we might only need one day. But hopefully many of you will be able to come!

The suggestion for a workshop theme is "Discourse, prosody and information structure in Australian languages". As usual, participants would be free to present papers not related to this theme.

I will be able to apply for a very limited amount of funding towards accommodation and travel costs of students or other participants who are not in full-time employment (success not guaranteed of course). Please indicate if you are interested in participating and belong to this category.

[ from Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, Linguistics Department, SOAS]

One of the events which featured in Endangered Languages Week 2008 at SOAS was called What is your language footprint?. This concept of a Language Footprint and the ideas behind it were developed by David Nathan, and presented by his team that also included Chaithra Puttaswamy and Juliette Rutherford (Tom Castle created the dramatic poster).

It has since attracted the attention of several bloggers, including Bulanjdjan (Langguj Gel) and Hoyden about town.

The basic concept is simple. A language footprint is the influence of those speaking a dominant language on the behaviour of speakers of other languages. In any communication, if your choice of language makes another person shift from their language to yours, you have made a language footprint. The concept is intended as a metaphor similar to the"carbon footprint"notion and, like it, includes the potential that individuals can reduce or offset their language footprint. You can reduce your language footprint by:

[ from Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, Linguistics Department, SOAS]

The recently established Fondation Chirac in collaboration with the Musée du quai Branly and Unesco is organising a one-day public event to be held on Monday 9th June in Paris called "SOROSORO pour que vivent les langues du monde!" (SOROSORO long live the languages of the world! ). Sorosoro in the Araki language of Vanuatu means ‘breath, word, language’. The event will highlight the current situation of language diversity and endangered languages and includes presentations by linguists from France, Gabon, Guatemala, UK and Vanuatu.

The programme begins at 3pm in the Claude Levi-Strauss Theatre at the Museum and includes the following presentations (my translations of the French original):

The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) is a linguistics competition aimed at high school students from years 9 to 12. The state rounds will be held at University of Sydney, and University of Melbourne on the afternoon of June 25th 2008, with the national round to be held (in each location) on August 6th 2008. OzCLO will consist of teams of up to three students.

Target student population:
The program is designed for students from years 9 to 12. Any secondary school student who enjoys the sample problems on the web site is a potential contestant. High School students don't typically know what linguistics and computational linguistics are, so they probably won't know if they are interested until they try the problems. However, students who like languages, maths, computers, and the natural sciences are most likely to be interested in this competition.

Information sessions:
Information sessions for students and teachers who are interested in the competition will be held at each location. At these sessions we will explain the details of the competition, introduce the fields of linguistics, computational linguistics, and language technology, and give tips for solving sample problems.

Sydney: Wednesday 11th June 4:00 – 6:00pm at University of Sydney
Contact Elwin Cross (elwin AT ozclo.org.au)

Melbourne: Wednesday 4th June 4:00 – 6:00pm at University of Melbourne
Contact Saya Ike (saya AT ozclo.org.au)

Competition Format:
The State round on June 25th 2008 will be a two and a half hour session, and the successful competitors will go to the National Round, which will also be held in Sydney and Melbourne on August 6th 2008.
Although this is a team competition format, individual students are also encouraged to join. They will not be disadvantaged in any way.

Registration:
Registration in the competition is free. The registration form can be downloaded from the website ( HYPERLINK "" www.ozclo.org.au). The participating students will be contacted through a nominated teacher to protect their privacy.

The competition is being sponsored by HCSNet, the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, Macquarie University, the Australasian Language Technology Association, and the Australian Linguistics Society.

[ from our man in the heart of the spot, Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, Linguistics Department, SOAS]

Well, Endangered Languages Week 2008 has drawn to a close, and apart from feeling knackered after a week of full-on EL activities, we at SOAS reckon it all went pretty well. We had a lot of fun, especially during the kick-off debate about What is your language footprint? when the "for team" of David Nathan, Chaithra Puttaswamy and Juliette Rutherford were soundly defeated by the "against team" of Peter Austin, Julia Sallabank and Peter Sutton. Superior debating skills combined with some bad jokes won the day. Another highlight of the week was the UK Premiere of the film "The Linguists" which was attended by over 90 people, many of whom got to meet in person K. David Harrison, one of the dynamic duo who star in the film.

Our main goal for EL Week 2008 was showing what we are doing in EL research, teaching, and archiving at the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project and communicating with as wide an audience as possible. We feel we achieved that, both in the real and virtual interactions we had with visitors, most of whom have never come to Project activities before. Some students even travelled from Paris to attend the workshops and films. We also made contact with the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies which is a publicly funded service, providing UK-wide support and services for higher education in these three areas. They featured EL Week 2008 on their website and mailed out a special e-bulletin about our activities to their 3,000 subscribers – as a consequence, a number of teachers came to SOAS during the week, and we now have great opportunities for future collaboration.

So, here are some statistics about the week (all numbers are approximate):

Mirabile dictu... The 2020 summit background material on Indigenous Australia, ">Slide 10 of the 11 slides, notes the terrible state of Australia's languages, and the need to do something about them. Considerable urgency is required if we are to preserve Australia's Indigenous languages and traditions.

BUT, the urgency and importance have disappeared from the interim report arising from the summit. The Indigenous section doesn't mention Indigenous languages once. Education ranks highly, but it's the kind of education that focuses on the problems caused by the differences between children's home languages and school languages (send the kids to boarding schools, make parents send kids to school), rather than on helping children negotiate between the two languages, and learn to value them both.

Some of the ideas from Yuendumu that didn't make it into the summit appear in Wendy Baarda's piece in the Education News of the Age . I quote a bit, but go read the whole!

After 30 years living and teaching at Yuendumu - a remote community about 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs that speaks Warlpiri as its first language - I have watched literacy attainment levels slowly declining over the past decade. I believe there are two main reasons for this. One is the reduction and neglect of our bilingual or Two-Way program, a key to community involvement and pride in schools at Yuendumu and other bush schools.

The other factor has been the difficulty in attracting school principals of sufficient calibre and experience to be able to navigate complex relationships between two vastly different cultures and to develop innovative, community-based solutions.

There has been a steady loss of positions for Warlpiri staff since the early '90s. Fifteen years ago our Two-Way program was thriving. We had 10 Warlpiri and 10 mainstream staff members, including a mentor and a teacher linguist to support Warlpiri staff.

Now we have only one trained Warlpiri teacher and four Warlpiri assistant teachers with seven mainstream teachers. With fewer Warlpiri staff in the school there are fewer families represented and therefore a declining interest in the school and fewer children made to attend. Attendance has declined over the past decade, a symptom of a malaise within the community itself.

The Aboriginal schools whose Two-Way programs were discontinued have not since lifted literacy standards. Across all remote indigenous schools, whether English-only or Two-Way, the standard of spoken and written English is very low.
.....
Boarding schools may be the answer for some, but why should Aboriginal children need to be sent far away to boarding schools to become literate, when much more could be done to improve education and build strong communities at home?

In the 2020 interim report the only place that Indigenous languages do get mentioned is in the arts section:

• Creativity is central to Australian life and Indigenous culture is the core to this. To measure, document and leverage the strengths of this culture, to articulate our role and improve protection of indigenous culture, language and heritage through a National Indigenous Cultural Authority.

Ho hum, I thought that helping preserve Indigenous languages was part of the job of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Studies. They hold the major archive of language material, and they presently employ two research linguists on short-term contracts. They advise on maintaining and documenting Indigenous languages. It's a specialised field, and good advice could save Government departments and language centres heaps of time and money. And it could save Indigenous people much heart-ache.

There's a bit more on languages of the region in another section

• To reinvigorate and deepen our engagement with Asia and the Pacific.
• To ensure that the major languages and cultures of our region are no longer foreign to Australians but are familiar and mainstreamed into Australian society.

Again, amplification of this in an opinion piece by Matthew Davies in the Age. Again a BUT. Not sure about this word 'major'. Leaving aside the many small endangered languages of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia etc, is Tok Pisin major? Is Solomons Pidgin? Is Bislama? Not in number of speakers, perhaps, but in being important languages for use in the region, undoubtedly.

[From John Giacon]

As noted in the blog post on John Hobson's lecture, the Koori Centre has been one of a number of forces which have pioneered major developments in Indigenous Language education in NSW and other parts of Australia. I want to comment on two sentences in the review:
'Indigenous children need qualified teachers who are fluent speakers of the language' and 'Majors in Indigenous languages just aren't on offer [in Universities]'.

I will use my experience of Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay to reflect on these. I started working in the languages 12 years ago. Sadly, I have not met anyone who has or had elementary fluency from 'handed down' language. For instance I have met a number of people who know that yanay is 'go/walk', but none who knew the past-tense form 'yananhi' or the various continuous forms. Nor have I met anyone could productively use the locative suffix for meanings like 'in, on, at'. Just two examples of the many elements you would need to know for even moderate fluency. People who have done courses now know these elements of Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay, and much more. Fluency is growing, slowly.

So, the fluent teachers necessary for language teaching are not there, 'in the community'. However the rules for forming past tense and the forms and meaning of the locative suffix, and much more, are in Corinne Williams' Grammar of Yuwaalaraay (1980). And there is much more information that she did not have time to process in tapes and other Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay sources. So if those sources are used, then resources and courses can be developed: for instance the Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay Yuwaalayaay Dictionary, the 'Speaking Gamilaraay' course at the Koori Centre/University of Sydney and the TAFE Certificate 1 in Gamilaraay and Gumbaynggirr courses.

[ from our man on the spot, Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, Linguistics Department, SOAS]

Following on from our successful experiment in April 2007 the Endangered Languages Project at SOAS is running an even bigger and better Endangered Languages Week from 30th April to 8th May 2008.
Through films, displays, discussions and workshops we are presenting what is being done to document, archive and support endangered languages at SOAS and around the world. The theme of the week is “What can WE do?", exploring how researchers, students, language community members and members of the public can work together to address the challenges of global language and cultural loss.
Activities include:

[ from Peter K. Austin, Linguistics Department, SOAS]

Last Wednesday, Elizabeth Zeitoun’s recently published Grammar of Mantauran (Rukai) arrived in my mailbox at SOAS from Academic Sinica in Taipei. This is a beautifully produced description of a dialect of Rukai, one of the Endangered Languages of Taiwan and at 551 pages is a sizeable account of the language.

So I got to thinking: this is a pretty impressive comprehensive reference grammar of an endangered language. And then, well what counts as a “comprehensive (reference) grammar”? The term gets used quite a bit in relation to endangered and minority languages. For example the February 2007 newsletter [pdf] of La Trobe University’s Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, the most recent one available, contains over 25 uses of the term, and all 10 PhD students associated with the Centre are said to be writing a “comprehensive grammar” of a small language. A Google search for “comprehensive reference grammar” returns 1,130 hits, and for “comprehensive grammar” 128,000 hits, though that includes things like A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Randolph Quirk,Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik, which doesn’t really count for our purposes, nor does Matthews and Yip’s Cantonese: A Comprehensive Reference Grammar.

So I then adopted a tried and true sampling method of language typologists, namely have a look at the grammars of smaller languages that are on my book shelves at SOAS and pick the fattest ones (ok, ok, I know real typologists don’t do sampling like this any longer, but bear with me for the purposes of this exercise). What I came up with is summarised in the following table (astute readers will notice that I am not controlling for factors like margin width, page size, font type size and line spacing, but I’m only human):

So, the Oz Government wants to ensure that the Oz tax payer gets value for the taxes that pay for me and my colleagues to scuttle and scurry around universities, and our students to read & learn & think & write &..

To this praiseworthy end, each year the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Training ask us to produce copies of everything solid & worthy we've published over the previous year with all sorts of verification information, and of course the all important label MADE IN AN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY CONTAINING ALL AUSTRALIAN INGREDIENTS. And the "we" includes not only staff but also students - which is right & proper, except that the students get no direct benefit from the labor of copying and collating the information, whereas a small trickle of money comes back to departments on the basis of their research output.

Now, one of our students* has just published an interesting article on grammaticalisation of a Cantonese particle, in the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Yue dialects (Cheung, H-H; S-H Cheung and H-K Chan (eds) 2007. Dishijie GuoYuefangyan Yantaohui Lunwunji (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press. ISBN 978-7-5004-6582-9). She kindly copied the article, and the preface, the table of contents, and the ISBN publication details page, all of which are needed for verification.