Last January I wrote a blog post about how Facebook is being used in various ways to present and document endangered languages.

My former student and colleague Domenyk Eades of Sultan Qaboos University, Oman, has just written to tell me about another use of Facebook, this time by speakers of Gayo, an endangered language spoken in Aceh, Indonesia. Domenyk did his PhD research on Gayo and published a grammar of it. He writes:

I recently found that there is a large group of Gayo people who are communicating on Facebook in their language, many of them have a rudimentary command of the language. Some university students from Takengon have a project called "Kamus Gayo Bergambar" (illustrated Gayo dictionary). Every day they send out a photograph and a list of about 5-8 Gayo words and their Indonesian equivalents. The Gayo Facebook friends of the dictionary, who live in Gayo and elsewhere in Indonesia, read and comment on the words. There have been some good discussions on the different words. At the moment the spelling of the words is a problem, and I have been trying to get them to use the orthography I developed in my PhD study. It is very interesting to see the enthusiasm. I can't remember anything like it when I was doing my study of the language.

The Gayo dictionary Facebook Group is here (requires membership of Facebook to view). There is a map of Takengon and the Gayo area here and English language blogs developed by Gayo speakers here and here.

On Tuesday 6th October at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the Sorosoro Project of Fondation Chirac held a press conference and launch of their new website (currently only available in French but with English and Spanish versions in the works). The launch was hosted by Rozenn Milin, Director of the Sorosoro project, and attended by ex-president Jacques Chirac, who gave a thoughtful speech about the need to preserve and support linguistic and cultural diversity.

The Sorosoro website also features a Planisphère des langues that includes searchable Googlemaps that provide the locations of over 5,000 languages, with basic information about their names and genetic affiliations. I understand that in future the database underlying the maps will be extended to include other relevant data where reliable information is available. The website also includes a quiz, links to other projects, and a calendar of events.

The website launch concluded with a speech by a representative of the major sponsor Orange, Jean-Yves Larrouturou, who is manager in charge of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Mr Larrouturou spoke of his own personal experiences of linguistic diversity growing up as a French Basque, and his speech included some remarks in Basque. (Rozenn Milin, the Project Director, is a native speaker of Breton, so minority languages of France were well represented.)

On the Friday before this event the newspaper Le Monde ran a three page feature on "a fragile linguistic diversity" that highlighted some of the projects to be discussed at the launch on the following Tuesday, giving the Sorosoro Project excellent press coverage.

As a member of the Sorosoro Project Advisory Board I felt privileged to have been invited to Paris to see the progress that the Project has been making.

The Department of Linguistics at SOAS and the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies are jointly organising a workshop on teaching linguistic fieldwork and sustainability on Friday 4th December 2009. The workshop is intended for both experienced and novice lecturers and students of Field Linguistics, and will introduce them to knowledge and skills from a wide range of areas in linguistic theory and practice, with a focus on learning about "real world" language problems and solutions.

The workshop is aimed at students interested in learning more about fieldwork, and staff who are considering how fieldwork might fit into the linguistics curriculum. There will be two strands – one for beginners who are interested but have no experience of fieldwork, and one for advanced who have some fieldwork experience or have participated in a field methods course. For beginners, we will cover a range of fieldwork types, including language documentation and urban sociolinguistic fieldwork. For the advanced group topics will include language and culture documentation, sustainable documentation methods and phonetic fieldwork.

Presentations will be given by staff and post-graduate students from SOAS, Queen Mary University, Manchester University and Edinburgh University.

9:30-10:00 Registration/coffee – SOAS main entrance

Beginners
10:00-11:00 Why and how linguists do and teach fieldwork – Peter Austin, SOAS

Advanced
10:00-11:00 Documenting culture in the field – Friederike Luepke, SOAS and Serge Sagna, Manchester

11:00-11:30 Tea/coffee

Beginners
11:30-12:30 Remote location fieldwork – Oliver Bond, SOAS

Advanced
Fieldwork and sustainable data – David Nathan, SOAS

12:30-14:00 Lunch and equipment demonstration

Beginners
14:00-15.00 Sociolinguistic fieldwork – Sue Fox, QMU
15:00-16:00 Revitalisation and language sustainability – Julia Sallabank and Jennifer Marshall, SOAS

Advanced
14:00-16.00 Phonetic fieldwork – Bert Remijsen, Edinburgh
16:00-16:15 Tea/coffee

16:15-16:45 Final wrap-up and discussion

There is no charge to attend this event for employees and postgraduate students of publicly funded UK higher educational institutions and other institutions with a subscription to the Higher Education Academy. There is a charge of GBP 40 for employees and postgraduate students of private institutions/organisations and non-UK institutions to attend this event.

For more information and to register go to the Subject Centre website.

This year's conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages will take place in the High Pamirs, at Khorog in Tajikistan, on 24-26 September 2009.

The conference will discuss the contribution of Endangered Languages to History and how the study of history can encourage the preservation and promote the revitalisation of endangered languages.

Tajikistan itself, although a small and remote country with a population of 7 million, is home to nine languages, most of them in the mountainous south, the Pamirs. Unlike its surrounding Central Asian countries, where the national languages are Turkic, its primary language is Tajik, a form of Persian. It also shares a long border with Afghanistan, where Dari Persian is also widely spoken.

Conquered by Tsarist Russia in the 1870s as part of the Tournament of Shadows, the "Great Game" played between the British and Russian Empires, Central Asia had its languages re-organized and re-alphabetized in the 1920s and 1930s, all its scripts changing from Arabic to Roman to Russian in the course of 15 years. Nevertheless, this was the basis on which Tajik literacy has leapt from a tiny minority to almost 100 percent. The relative roles of languages, Tajik, Russian, Uzbek, and Yaghnobi and the many languages of the Pamirs, remain a highly charged issue in Tajikistan's policy.

Tajikistan is heir to many peoples who played key roles in ancient struggles between East and West: the Sogdians, great traders of 'heavenly' horses for silk at the courts of China; the Tajiks, who transmitted the fresh news of Muhammad's revelation within Central Asia at the forefront of an invading army, and brought the Persian language with them; the Samanids, who created the first civilization that used New Persian, the poetic culture made familiar in the west by the Rubai'yat of Omar Khayyam, and the Golden Road to Samarkand. As well as being a stage on the Silk Road, it was home to Tamburlaine the Great, whose bloody conquests straddled Asia from Ankara to Delhi, and to Babur, who founded the Mughal dynasty in India. Truly Tajikistan can be called the home of History. And the peoples who speak its surviving languages have seen more than most.

The conference will be held in collaboration with:

• The Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan,
  
• The Institute of Humanities, Khorog, Tajikistan
  
• The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London.

Conference delegates will also visit the Ishkashimi language community in the Badakhshan region of the country. Badakhshan was long famous as a source of rubies, emeralds and lapis lazuli.

Further details of the conference can be found at the FEL website. Or contact Nicholas Ostler,
Chairman, Foundation for Endangered Languages
Registered Charity: England & Wales 1070616 nostler AT chibcha.demon.co.uk

We sold out of the first printing quick as a flash with just local orders, so now we have re-printed and we have plenty to meet international demand (ha!) if the need should arise.

The book is simple and aimed mainly at parents or schools who wish to teach young people how to count to 20 in Anindilyakwa, however it is a vibrant and charming book that will open up to newcomers some of the delightful features of the language. For instance, the range of noun classes, and the mathematical precision of language structures.

Besides provoking the reader to deep thoughts about counting, the reader will enjoy being put in touch with the bush foods of the Groote Eylandt area through the many photos.

The book gained instant notoriety when the first printing arrived, coming almost to the day at the same time as the southern newspapers were heralding some research done with children on Groote Eylandt,
research which "demonstrated" that in languages where there were no words for counting more than one, two, and many, children still had a concept of counting in greater quantities.

Pity they picked on Groote Eylandt, where people do have words for numbers up to twenty. Children would have watched as women traditionally divided out collected turtle eggs into groups. True, a five year old may not have been taught to count yet, but on the days royalty money comes around they watch as the adults divide out their share, and numbers have an important function in daily life.

There are 54 pages, card cover, full colour, lots of photos, some word glossaries in the back, and even a few puzzles to test out what you can learn from your reading.
Cost: $25.00 each plus freight.

Available from Groote Eylandt Linguistics, Angurugu Community Mail
Agency, Angurugu via Darwin, Northern Territory, 0822
Email: linguistics AT activ8.net.au
Phone: 08 8987 6614 or 08 8927 1842
Mobile: 0439 827 073

Four Corners did a program on the decision to abolish bilingual education in the NT, focussing on Lajamanu, but with some footage at Yirrkala. They’ve also come up with a good set of links and resources, and extended interviews with Djuwalpi Marika (Chairman Yirrkala School Council), Wendy Baarda (former teacher-linguist, Yuendumu) and Gary Barnes, CEO NT Education Department. Barnes' most quotable quote:

GARY BARNES: We absolutely want our young indigenous people to become proficient in the use of English language... It's the language of learning, it's the language of living, and it's the language of the main culture in Australia.

And a quotable one-worder from the Chief Minister and Minister for Education:

DEBBIE WHITMONT (to Paul Henderson): Is it fair to expect that children who are trying to learn in a second language should meet the same benchmarks at the same time as children in other parts of the country who are learning in their first language?

PAUL HENDERSON: Absolutely.

If the Intervention were serious the commonwealth might think about taking over education again. The NT government is clearly unable to provide adequate schooling irrespective of the language question. The high turnover of teachers, poor quality of many principals, pitiful curriculum with all sorts of deficits (no music or decent sport programs, rarely any science, teachers who don't know how to make language lessons work, one could go on).

Last night I saw a fascinating documentary about a group of Mardu people’s first contact with Europeans. As Australia entered the space race the group of about twenty women and children found themselves literally in the firing line. In 1964 a rocket, the Blue Streak, was about to be launched from Woomera in South Australia. The “dump zone” for the rocket was the area of the Percival Lakes in the Great Sandy Desert, Western Australia. A pair of patrol officers was dispatched to the area to make sure that the region was uninhabited. Of course it wasn’t. Pretty soon they found recent fires and human tracks.

The film comprises amazing archival footage of both the first encounter in the desert, archival footage from Woomera and from Jigalong, as well as interviews with Yuwali and Thelma; as well as with Terry Long, one of the surviving patrol officers. It was fascinating to see hear the same events recounted from two rather different perspectives. Most of the story of the encounter was recounted in Martu Wangka, and was filmed in the very place from where the group was taken. The cinematography is very beautiful, especially the timelapse photography of the starts over the desert – truly stunning. However, the real star of the film is Yuwali – both as an old woman, and as a 17 year old girl.

Yuwali was taken out of the desert with a hairstyle that fashion gurus would copy for generations to come, only to have her bangs chopped off by a bunch of squares with short backs and sides. It might have been the sixties elsewhere but it was obviously still the fifties in the Pilbara. On a less light-hearted note, one of the women with Hansen’s Disease was carted off in a plane and promptly died.

The film however is far from a tragedy. These are proud people with a great story to tell. And it’s an important piece of Australian history. The film is based on the book Cleared Out, by Sue Davenport, Peter Johnson and Yuwali.
Contact is showing at the Chauvel cinema in Paddington, Sydney, for two weeks, or if enough people go and see it, possibly for longer. It will screen in Melbourne for a couple of weeks at Cinema Nova in Melbourne from September 17th.

Steven Bird's promoting for there to be more Comp Ling research to be aimed at assisting field linguists in maintaining and organising their data. He's redefining what should be included as part of core Comp Ling research. Studies that would assist in language documentation should be valued as much, well actually more than the current studies in Comp Ling, which is too often aimed at squeezing out an extra percent on whichever evaluation metric they are using based on somebody else's Machine Learning algorithm to form a small part of a solution to an NLP problem.

Ryuko Kubota, Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, writes:

In March 2009, three professors of educational linguistics--who want to remain anonymous for fear of media harassment--were fired by their former employer Hokkaido University of Education on a charge of “academic harassment.”

Academic harassment is perhaps an unfamiliar term to many. While sexual harassment has been in public discourse in Japan since the 1980s, academic harassment is a relatively new concept. It can happen between a senior professor and a junior faculty member or between a professor and a student. It refers to the abuse of power in forcing or preventing someone to do certain activities in and outside of the classroom/lab or barring someone from career advancement.

According to the university officials and media coverage, the three professors allegedly forced their students in the teacher preparation program to learn about Korean and Ainu languages and caused psychological pressure to the extent that at least two students became unable to attend classes. Ainu is an indigenous people in Northern Japan where the university is located. Like many indigenous languages throughout the world, the Ainu language is on the verge of extinction and language instruction is crucial for its survival.

One of the professors has recently spoken at an international conference in Melbourne, Australia about the pedagogical needs for establishing a grammar system of the language of Ainu. In an informal conversation after the presentation, this professor stated that the academic harassment charge is a total fabrication. In reality, the students took initiative and enjoyed learning these languages through a contrastive approach and broadening their view of linguistic diversity beyond English and Japanese. Some students became fluent enough in the Ainu language to engage in casual conversations, while others independently created dictionaries of Ainu regional dialects. The university has not provided the professors with concrete and convincing evidence of alleged harassment. According to the professor, academic harassment might be a pretext for punishing faculty members engaged in teaching minority languages.

In another context, the professor developed an instructional unit about Ainu language and taught quite successfully at local elementary schools as a guest lecturer. But after a while, the schools suddenly stopped inviting him. He suspects that these acts of obstructing diversity education might be politically motivated.

In 2008, the Japanese government for the first time recognized Ainu as indigenous people. The government has also established a special committee to discuss policies for Ainu people. The committee released a draft report a few days ago. The final report, which was submitted on July 29, includes recommendations such as advancing revitalization of Ainu culture, raising awareness of general public, and promoting employment. These recent developments have likely created fear among conservative groups that they would open a door to land claims, affirmative action, and other rights-based movements. Firing professors who taught about Ainu language might be politically motivated as a preemptive strategy to undermine the indigenous movement.

The three professors have filed a lawsuit against the university. However, they are up against the cunning tactics that officials have employed in framing the issue as academic harassment. It would be difficult to prove the absence of harassment, especially when the students involved are applying for teaching jobs; they would naturally fear retribution for supporting their former professors.

Equally disturbing is the implications for academic freedom. The instructional content in question is not even controversial; rather it is an exemplary effort to enhance intercultural and interethnic understanding among younger generations in the civil society. From the perspective of the professors who were fired and the students who lost their learning opportunity, it is a serious violation of academic freedom caused by the abuse of administrative power. If this type of disciplinary measures were widely used, many professors would be put in a precarious position and under constant pressure to avoid issues that might stand against the administrator’s political view.

The case of the three professors is worth watching closely. We must not allow progressive measures designed to open discussion and protect personal freedoms to be exploited as tools for suppressing academic freedom.

Ryuko Kubota
Professor
University of British Columbia