Prior's overall solution?

If preschool education at a minimum of 15 hours per week was universally available, and every child had at least a year of programs which focused on enhancing language and pre-literacy skills, provided by committed preschool teachers, many more children would begin school well prepared for reading and writing.

I expect politicians will welcome this solution. Why should we treat it with caution?
First, for Prior "language" = "English". But her talk shows some basic misunderstandings of languages and how children learn languages and reading and writing. The distinction between speaking a traditional language and speaking a non-standard variety of English are treated as if they presented the same difficulties for children attempting to learn standard English. They present rather different challenges - the methods of teaching English as a second language have to be different from those of teaching English as a second dialect.

As worrying are remarks such as the following:

Learning is a struggle for many children since they are inadequately equipped when they begin school, to tackle reading. Without a strong scaffolding of knowledge of sounds, letters, words, and meanings in language, children struggle to cope with this new and strange task; they fall behind, see themselves as failing, and become discouraged and often resistant to the whole literacy enterprise.

There's a persistent confusion in the talk between readiness to learn to read and readiness to learn to read in English. The Indigenous children may be quite adequately equipped to learn to read IN THEIR HOME LANGUAGE. The problem is that their teachers are not adequately equipped to teach children who don't speak Standard English.

And then there's a misunderstanding about what constitutes normal language behaviour

Indigenous children often have a very mixed bag of 'home' languages to contend with. It may be partly traditional, and is often alongside or mixed with, a form of Creole English, 'Koori English' is one example, but there are many variations. 'Code switching', that is, using a mix of both traditional and English words in the same conversation, plus use of several languages or dialects is likely, especially in regional and remote areas. When parents mix languages this makes it difficult for some children to learn and to differentiate two codes, and can be a persisting disadvantage for reading. This is not a problem specific to Australian indigenous people and languages, think of Spanglish in the United States.

What's the evidence that code-switching harms children? It's a normal part of language behaviour in multilingual societies. In fact the flexibility and metalinguistic awareness that comes from using more than one language/dialect/register is probably something to be valued. Code-switching between French, Latin, German... has at some periods been valued in English literature and scientific writing. Once it was a sign of an educated person. But code-switching among the under-classes.... hey.. In fact the language acquisition evidence suggest that children learn to differentiate codes very early - before school. Certainly, our work in the ACLA project shows pre-school Indigenous children shifting register to an approximation of standard English as they imitate white doctors and rent-collectors. What's needed is a better understanding of the sociolinguistic situation - why do children choose not to speak Standard English?

And then Prior says:

It's unpopular and politically sensitive to talk about indigenous language skills, and the place of English alongside traditional language. But it is fundamental in learning to read and write. No-one would argue against efforts to maintain the languages of traditional peoples. But if we want to help children to succeed in reading we must equip them with sufficient standard English language skills which are essential for all children to master reading.

This view is unpopular among linguists because it is just plain WRONG. Yes, Indigenous children need to learn standard English if they want to enjoy the rights, physical health and material comforts of the average Australian. But that doesn't need to come at the cost of devaluing their traditional languages. Children CAN learn to read and write in a language other than English, and they CAN transfer those skills to learning to read and write in another language. Just what many Australians do when they learn a foreign language at school. And just what kids in bilingual biliteracy schools do - Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

The devaluing of home languages (and therefore of home ways of living) that Prior's remark implies [she does try to compensate for this elsewhere in the talk] is, I guess, one partial answer to the question of why children don't choose to put effort in learning Standard English.

And thinking of other misusable data, the My School Site was launched recently, showing how students across Australia performed on the NAPLAN tests of English literacy and numeracy.

I'm all for numbers, but I do share Bruce Petty's concern about how these are being used. The numbers we've been given are seriously flawed for understanding what's happening in Indigenous schools in the NT.

These are ENGLISH literacy tests administered in ENGLISH. So if the kids start monolingual in a language other than English it's kinda obvious that they're going to do badly in reading and writing English in their first years at school. And they'll continue to do badly if they don't get good ESL teaching and if they get so bored at school that they stop attending.

Lots of the remote NT schools (bilingual and non-bilingual) do really badly. What is unforgiveable is the comparison with so-called "statistically similar" schools. They do not seem to have factored in first language. So, among the schools compared to Yuendumu (majority of children speak Warlpiri as a first language) are schools where most children's first language is English, Aboriginal English or an English-based creole. Here are some (there are probably more but I don't know all the communities).

Borroloola School, Borroloola NT 0854
Camooweal State School, Camooweal QLD 4828
Goodooga Central School, Goodooga NSW 2831
Moree East Public School, Moree NSW 2400
Wilcannia Central School, Wilcannia NSW 2836

Even if you speak an English-based creole rather than standard English, you'll still do better than a child who only speaks a traditional language - just as English-speaking children find it easier to learn French than Chinese. There are so many similar words.

Who could be surprised that these children do better on English tests?

And, the information one really wants isn't there on the site. You can get mission statement blah. So the Feds have said they'll give more information - what parents think about schools.... Brilliant, what blame-avoiding PR person thought that up?

I bet parents would be MORE interested in the following sets of numbers, which the State and Federal Departments could provide MUCH more cheaply than by conducting an expensive survey of parents:

• How much do the State and Federal governments spend per child in the school?
  
• how many students per teacher?(see a nice opinion piece (1/2/2010) in the Sydney Morning Herald)
  
• how many first year out teachers are there in the school?
  
• what's the teacher churn in the school?
  
• in schools with high numbers of children who don't speak English, how many properly trained ESL teachers are there? (and I don't mean ESL training via a day's workshop with a department trainer)
  
• how long has the principal been there>

Throw those into the statistical blender and see how that changes the "statistically similar schools" clumping.

Apparently the Federal Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, wants us to use the My School website to 'hold schools and teachers to account'. Give us the numbers ON THAT SITE so we can hold Governments to account.

On the other hand, take the much maligned bilingual education programs. Last year the NT government demoralised communities with bilingual education programs by unilaterally abolishing those programs, against the communities' wishes. All in the name of improving NAPLAN scores.

On the MySchool figures, both schools score above, equal to, or only slightly below "statistically similar schools". So kids going to these schools get both languages, and do by and large as well or better on English literacy and numeracy than kids going to so-called statistically similar monolingual schools.

Therefore, when bilingual education is properly resourced and taught, parents are motivated to take part in their children's education, their kids can do as well or better than in monolingual schools, AND they get the other language developed as well. Therefore bilingual education in and of itself is NOT the reason for the poor performance by students in NT bilingual schools on NAPLAN.

So, State and Federal Governments, give us more numbers. Tell us about teacher churn. Tell us about how experienced the teachers are. Tell us how much is spent per child at different schools. AND make sure you are really comparing like with like - stop claiming that children who don't speak English should do as well as first language English speakers in the early years on tests in English.

There's news of the very young (Kurdu Kurdu Kurlangu childcare centre), of old (Mampu Maninja-kurlangu Jarlu Patu-ku old people's program), of people generally - the winners of the Alice Pest Control Tidy House competition (Serena Shannon, newsletter editor Donovan Rice and their family), and the Little Sisters of Jesus. Of work - more Warlpiri are working at the Tanami Gold Mine, news of the Warlukurlangu Artists and of the Yuendumu Mining Company (including the current prices for native plant seeds - $680 for a full drum of Wardarrka (Acacia ligulata)). Lots of news of school-age children and young adults, from what Jaru Pirrjirdi (Strong voices/words/language..) and Mount Theo are up to - ranging from swimming carnivals, homework centre, life guard training, night club and youth programs - to what's happening at the school - classes, culture nights and country visits.

There's news from the Warlpiri branch of PAW Media - the Yapa Beats compilation CD, a radio program Yapa patu wangkami, (oral history docco in Warlpiri and English about life at Yuendumu before settlement, during the settling and during the NT Emergency Response aka the Intervention). And finally ...football! Flying South when the Yuendumu Magpies AFL team travelled to Melbourne to play at the MCG against the Anangu All Stars from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands and Maralinga Tjarutja Lands. [I can't resist mention here of a favourite recent successful ARC grant -- Mark Dras, Myfany Turpin et al.s' project Natural Language Generation for Aboriginal Languages - they hope to "generate a simplified version of reports on AFL matches" - in Indigenous languages....]

Junga yimi gives a lively picture of life at Yuendumu (check out also Yasmine Musharbash's equally lively ethnography Yuendumu everyday). Good things are happening, people are doing good things.

But, very sadly, this issue starts with an obituary (by Lizzie Ross Napurrurla) for J. Nungarrayi Egan, a passionate advocate and worker for Warlpiri people and Warlpiri language. Nungarrayi was there at the start of the bilingual education program, and worked there most of her life before retiring to help set up Jaru Pirrjirdi for young adults. She fought for the continuation of bilingual education, up until the end when she wrote a letter [quoted here] to Marion Scrymgour, protesting the "First four hours of English" decision. She could foresee what the decision would mean for Warlpiri children, Warlpiri communities and Warlpiri language. It dooms much of her life's work.

You can get a year's subscription to Junga Yimi for $16.50 (2 copies) incl. GST, post and handling. Check or money order to:
Bilingual Resources Development Unit,
c/- Yuendumu School
L.P.O. Yuendumu,, via Alice Springs, NT 0872
Australia
Phone: 61+8-8956-4045

Average time from receipt to having it "translated, categorized and back on the ground with coordinates, message and return #"? 10 minutes.

Brilliant. Read the report on it by a linguist, Rob Munro, who's been coordinating the volunteer efforts. Praise be to the good, clever and imaginative people who make this possible.

Calma came to the position with experience in many aspects of Indigenous life, from education to housing to public administration, as well as overseas. He has held office in a turbulent time for Indigenous people- turbulence caused on the one hand the recognition that many Indigenous people and communities are still suffering appallingly, and on the other by attempts to place the blame for this suffering on Indigenous people, traditions and languages, and on non-Indigenous do-gooders and their focus on human rights. Despite this, he has held firmly to the responsibility of his office of "keeping government accountable to national and international human rights standards". The Apology to the Stolen Generation he sees as the great symbolic triumph of the period, but he sees also continuing injustice.

Yesterday he delivered his final Social Justice Report 2009 and Native Title Report 2009, in the Redfern Community Centre, in Sydney, along with a community report, and a stirring speech. His speech and community report summarise in plain languages his three main concerns in 2009, while the major report provides supporting references and case studies.

He sees his three main concerns as interlinked.

• getting at the causes for why so many Indigenous people are in gaol by investing in communities rather than gaols,
  
• supporting Indigenous languages
  
• supporting the rights of Indigenous people to live in outstations and homeland centres by showing the benefits of living in well-run communities compared with the well documented problems of fringe camps and housing estates in urban centres

His plea for Indigenous languages is plangent, and grounded in his long experience in Indigenous education. Here's a quotation from his speech.

The Australian Government has made some effort to support our languages by introducing Australia’s first national policy exclusively focused on protecting and promoting Indigenous languages – Indigenous Languages – A National Approach 2009. While this policy provides a starting point to preserving and revitalising our invaluable languages, it will not be enough on its own. State and Territory governments have to come on board.

They have responsibility for school education and they need to make sure that their policies support our languages. If they don’t take action soon, Indigenous languages will be extinct within the next few generations. I urge you – if you are able – to do whatever you can to bring this injustice out into the open. The parents of the school children who are losing bilingual education are very distressed – many of them have contacted my office. They are doing everything they can to preserve the bilingual programs but their pleas are falling on deaf ears.

Good on you, Mr Calma , good on the HREOC staff who have worked on this report. Thank you.

The Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity's web site has had a makeover! Visit the site to check out the changes, and the new information. If you've been using the site, you may need to refresh it in your browser to view the updated site. We'll continue to add information to the site, and please contribute any relevant links and information you may come across.

RNLD now has a Facebook group which we will use to update members about events.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to introduce you to RNLD's Advisory Panel members for 2010:

Australian representatives:
Jeanie Bell (Batchelor Institute for Indigenous Tertiary Education, NT, Australia)
Kevin Lowe (Aboriginal Curriculum Unit, Office of the NSW Board of Studies, Australia)
Patrick McConvell (Australian National University, ACT, Australia)
Paul Paton (Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Australia)
Anne Poelina (Madjulla Inc. Western Australia)
Jane Simpson (University of Sydney, NSW, Australia)

International representatives:
Alec Coupe (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Toshihide Nakayama (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan)
Yusuf Sawaki (Center for Endangered Languages Documentation in Papua, State University of Papua, Indonesia)
Mark Turin (University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, UK)
Hannah Vari-Bogiri (University of the South Pacific, Vanuatu)

So here's roughly what I'm saying to them:

The big gap in the draft policy document is the absence of clear recognition of the differing needs of Indigenous children from different language backgrounds, and consequent focus on just one type of student . At least four different types of language background need to be distinguished.

1. schools where the children come to school monolingual in a traditional Indigenous language.

2. schools where the children come to school monolingual in an English-based creole language.

3. schools where the children come to school bilingual in an English-based creole language and a traditional Indigenous language.

4. schools where the children come to school monolingual in English or a non-standard variety of English.

As it stands, the document is mostly addressed to the needs of students in category 4.

Children in categories 1. 2. and 3. require special support in the early years of school.
a. These children may be cognitively and academically advanced, but unless teachers speak the children's first language they will be unable to assess the children's skills. This requires the employment of people who speak the children's first language, usually local Indigenous teachers.

b. These children will be severely handicapped at school if they are unable to understand the language of the classroom. Therefore all states with children in categories 1, 2 and 3 (primarily the NT, WA, SA and Qld) need to have in place sound English-as-a-second-language curricula, teaching methods and trained teachers to work with these children. You cannot teach children to read effectively if they don't understand the language of the reading materials. [Finer distinctions should be made between how one should teach children who speak a English-based creole, and those who only speak a traditional language.]

c. It is really important that these children should be engaged at school. That means that interesting stuff needs to be shown to them early. Take dinosaurs for instance. A lot of kids get enthralled by them, and they realise that school is worth doing because it helps you find out interesting things. SO you can't spend most of the day on phonics and numbers - you'll bore the shit out of kids. BUT, if these kids are to learn about dinosaurs, and if they are not to lag behind in other subjects such as numeracy, they have to understand what the teacher is saying. That is, they need to have teachers and teaching assistants who speak the children's home language well enough to explain to them in a consistent manner the important concepts of these other subjects. Consistency is crucial. Pulling in one interpreter one day and another the next will not result in the children receiving the consistent input needed for them to grasping difficult concepts. [I remember being confused at school about "four minus two, "subtract two from four", "take two away from four" - if interpreters who are not trained teachers are used, that kind of confusion will be magnified. ]

d. Since language is fundamental to culture, a 'culturally inclusive curriculum' for these children must include their home language. If schools show that they do not value the children' home languages, by relegating it to an optional extra which has to be done out of school, then this will lead to alienation of Indigenous teachers and communities from schools. (It is noteworthy that in the NT the majority of Indigenous teachers worked in the former bilingual schools where they felt valued).

The document also substitutes 'culture' where 'language' might be more suitable, or 'language and culture'. Trying to create a currciulum in which culture is studied apart from language will almost certainly result in dumbed-down material, unless substantial resources are invested in translation and work with older speakers, which does not seem likely. Similarly, focussing on teacher's 'cultural competence' rather than linguistic competence is also likely to result in continued poor communication, as these courses are almost always far too general. If you want to talk with people, attending a cultural competence course is no substitute for being able to speak their language.

Finally, the document contains an implication that there's no place for Indigenous languages in schools. This is quite extraordinary, given that no one sees any problem with teaching non-Indigenous languages at schools. The suggestion is that this can be handled by out-of-school language programs. Yeah. Like all those resentful children of German immigrants who, 40+ years ago, I went to German Saturday School classes with. Bet they don't speak German now.

Out-of-school language programs will be extremely difficult to operationalise. There's a radical difference in curricula and materials needed for monolingual children who speak traditional Indigenous languages [language maintenance] from those who are learning them as a second language [language revival and revitalisation]. But what work there has been in Australia has been done for language revival and revitalisation. We just don't know how curricula and materials should be developed for out-of-school programs for enriching the language development of first language learners. Who will pay for the on-going development of these materials? Who will train the teachers? Who will pay for the on-going employment of out-of-school teachers? In poor communities this is not sustainable.

My great fear is that removing Indigenous languages altogether from schools, (as the thrust of this document appears to be), and relegating them to out-of-school programmes will have the following effects:
1. children monolingual in another language will not learn standard English effectively
2. children monolingual in another language will have a slower start on learning other subjects
3. children, Indigenous teachers and communities will be alienated from schools
4. when out-of school programs for Indigenous languages fail, as they almost inevitably will, this will be blamed on the apathy of the children and the parents.
5. children will see their traditional languages as having no value, and will switch to speaking a creole, thus hastening the decline of traditional languages.

• Jeremy Hammond's Honours thesis The Grammar of Nouns and Verbs in Whitesands, an Oceanic Language of Southern Vanuatu. A ripper read for Oceanists thinking about arguments for there being distinct categories of nouns and verbs.
  
• Aidan Wilson's Honours thesis Negative Evidence in Linguistics: The case of Wagiman Complex Predicates. What's a possible complex predicate? Good to read in conjunction with Stephen Wilson's University of Sydney Honours thesis also on Wagiman which was published by CSLI as Coverbs and Complex Predicates in Wagiman. NOTE: Aidan is not Stephen.
  
• My 1985 paperlet "How Warumungu people express new concepts" published in the long dead, still lamented journal Language in Central Australia (issue 4, the last issue before it morphed into Language in Aboriginal Australia and died a couple of issues later). It was inspired by Geoffrey O'Grady's 1960 paper, "New concepts in Nyangumarda: some data on linguistic acculturation" [1], and was followed by Rob Amery's 1993 paper "Encoding new concepts in old languages: a case study of Kaurna, the language of the Adelaide Plains" [2]. I think the topic is due for further exploration. Psycholinguists are getting into it experimentally, but it's important to understand what actually has happened when people have had to find new ways of talking about things.

[1] Anthropological Linguistics 2: 1 (January), 1-6.

[2] Australian Aboriginal Studies 1. 33-47

To paraphrase John Lennon: "and so this is New Year's Day and what have we done ..."

Well 2009 has been a pretty hectic year for the Endangered Languages Project based at SOAS in London - lots of changes and some exciting new developments. Here are the highlights (you can download our 2009 Annual Report [.pdf] for all the details):

• the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP) entered its sixth year of operation and enrolled 17 MA and 4 PhD students in September, the largest intake since we began in 2003. Five PhD and 14 MA students completed their degrees in 2009. ELAP has now graduated 62 MAs in Language Documentation and Description
• the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) moved into the Linguistics Department at SOAS in February 2009 under the leadership of Head of Department (and Interim ELDP Director) Peter Sells. ELDP's sponsor, Arcadia Fund, agreed to extend its support until 2016 and to create a new post of Director of ELDP, to be filled by an appointment in 2010. ELDP had a busy granting year in 2009, with two grant cycles attracting 136 applications; 35 grants were awarded totaling GBP 1.4 million. ELDP has now funded around 250 projects on endangered languages
• the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) purchased a 48 terabyte NAS storage unit, and designed a new data curation workflow that takes advantage of the storage hardware with fast, transparent access to the archived data. The second stage of the ELAR catalogue, based on a Drupal content management system with a customised and innovative "Web 2.0" approach to access management, went live in February 2009. This provides user accounts to depositors, including facilities to edit and update catalogue entries; development to enable safe access to data, observing depositors' access conditions, will be operational in early 2010

We also held the 3L Summer School and the LDLT2 Conference, both of which attracted 100 participants, oh and Endangered Languages Week that brought in 500 visitors.

Early indications are that 2010 is going to be a busy and productive year both for us at SOAS and for language documentation and endangered languages more generally. For example, the Linguistic Society of America 2010 Annual Meeting in Baltimore 7-10 January features a range of sessions, talks, tutorials and meetings on relevant topics. Friday evening's Invited Plenary Symposium Documentary Linguistics: Retrospective and Prospective followed by Saturday morning's Invited Symposium on the same topic are likely to attract a lot of interest. Add to that Friday morning's Tutorial on Archiving ethically: Mediating the demands of communities and institutional sponsors when producing language documentation, and Saturday morning's Symposium on Findings from Targeted Work on Endangered Languages: 13 Years of the Endangered Language Fund's Projects and you have an LSA meeting unlike any other in the past in terms of the attention being paid to documentation and endangered languages.

In another development that is likely to have important ramifications in 2010 and beyond, the LSA Executive Committee in November 2009 approved and endorsed the following policy statement, which was a revision of an earlier statement approved in 1994 (both statements were drafted by the Committee on Endangered Languages and Their Preservation):

If the central concern of linguistics is essentially anthropological or psychological, i.e. to provide insight into the nature of "humanness" through the investigation of the structure of human language, then linguistics will without question benefit by supporting research on the documentation and conservation of endangered languages. Because each language is a repository of human knowledge and an instantiation of human culture, linguistic diversity significantly embodies the intellectual heritage of humankind. Each language also provides a unique array of linguistic structures which form the basis for the development of linguistic theory. Thus the rapid rate of language loss, from pure extinction to more attenuated patterns involving shift, makes large-scale language documentation and the support of endangered-language speech communities imperative at this time, both for the field of linguistics and for humankind. By "language documentation" we primarily mean providing a lasting record of a language as it is naturally used in a wide array of cultural environments, and elicitation of grammatical, lexical, and broader contextual information from a variety of speakers.

Recognizing that the practice of linguistic fieldwork is shifting to a more collaborative model firmly based on ethical responsibilities to speech communities and a commitment to broadening the impact of scholarship, and further recognizing that this shift in practice has broadened the formats of scholarly products to include not only grammars, dictionaries, and text collections, but also archives of raw and primary data, electronic databases, corpora, critical editions of legacy materials, pedagogical works designed for the use of speech communities, software, websites, or other digital media, the Linguistic Society of America supports the recognition of these materials as scholarly contributions to be given weight in the awarding of advanced degrees and in decisions on hiring, tenure, and promotion of faculty. It supports the development of appropriate means of review of such contributions so that the functionality, import, and scope of such materials can be assessed relative to other language resources and to theoretical works. Departments are encouraged to recognize that the preparation of grammars and dictionaries is an intellectual achievement which requires considerable depth of skill, deep theoretical knowledge, and linguistic expertise, and that the informed collection and analysis of linguistic data is a fundamental and permanent contribution to the foundation of linguistics. In addition, contributions to speech communities in the form of training and/or the development of materials that support language conservation are of significant importance in the preservation of linguistic diversity and should likewise be appropriately evaluated and weighed in the academic personnel process."

The really significant bit is:

"the Linguistic Society of America supports the recognition of [archives of raw and primary data, electronic databases, corpora, critical editions of legacy materials, pedagogical works designed for the use of speech communities, software, websites, or other digital media] as scholarly contributions to be given weight in the awarding of advanced degrees and in decisions on hiring, tenure, and promotion of faculty"

If this gets endorsed at the LSA general meeting, then an important precedent will have been set that has the potential to reshape the value of whole swathes of documentation outputs that have been sidelined up to now. The big challenge, of course is going to be "the development of appropriate means of review ... so that the functionality, import, and scope of such materials can be assessed relative to other language resources and to theoretical works". Some of us will be meeting at the LSA to discuss setting up a Special Interest Group on Language Documentation that will address these and other issues in our field.

Roll on 2010!

The Endangered Languages Academic Programme at SOAS is holding a workshop on Endangered Languages, Endangered Knowledge and Sustainability on Saturday 27th February 2010, from 9.30am to 6.00pm. The goal of the workshop is to explore sustainable approaches in our field: sustainability of endangered languages, and sustainability of research (in both theory and practice).

Issues to be discussed include:

• how communities can sustain languages and linguistic ecologies
  
• links between language maintenance and sustainable human development
  
• preservation of traditional knowledge and indigenous paradigms of teaching, learning, and research
  
• making the outcomes of our research sustainable
  
• whether sustaining languages and knowledge is something that researchers can contribute to, or is solely the responsibility of communities and speakers

The keynote speaker at the workshop will be Professor Lenore Grenoble, Carl Darling Buck Professor at the University of Chicago. Prof Grenoble is a world leader in research on endangered languages, with several influential publications and extensive fieldwork experience. She is an ELDP panel member, Vice-president of the Endangered Language Fund, and is involved in several other major international projects, with a focus on the impact of climate change on languages and cultures of the Arctic.

Proposals are invited for papers which present cutting-edge research on any of the topics outlined above. Each speaker will have 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion, followed by further plenary discussion. Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words (not including any references) and should be sent to: elap -AT- soas.ac.uk.

The deadline for abstract submission is Friday 15th January 2010. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 30th January. We plan to publish the proceedings of the workshop in our journal Language Documentation and Description.

The workshop is one of the events planned for Endangered Languages Week 2010.

To attend the workshop, you need to submit a booking form [.doc] by Friday 19th February 2010. The cost is GBP17.50 for full registration and GBP12.50 for student/ELAP alumni/staff registration. Registration will include a reading pack, tea and coffee and lunch.

On the topic of trying to locate material in a small language, I was reading Kaisa Maliniemi's 2009 article on the discovery of new linguistic material in Kven and Sámi in Norway's public records archives. She discusses the fact that the records have been publicly available for some time and that a number of researchers must have worked with them in the past, but there was no trace in that activity of the fact that the records included considerable amounts of information in these two minority languages. She argues that archives can make available to 'the other' those voices and knowledge marginalized by the western-dominated global mainstream. But the point that the article made strongly for me is that we should be able to provide a means for tagging such collections so that they can be located by others interested in those languages (this was also a topic at the ELIIP conference reported on by Jane Simpson here and here ).

The suggestion that we can use Wikipedia [in Peter Austin's reply to Jane's blog] is only part of a solution. I have put links to South Efate material into a Wikipedia entry here as a way to make the information available. We can, however, do better than an unstructured language page that is made by hand, as in the Wikipedia approach, rather than being automatically populated by web-based information in Web2 style. Using Web2 technologies, the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) harvests information from participating collections and then establishes a page for every language represented in those collections, like this one, where the three-letter language code (ISO-639-3) designates the language, in this case 'erk' = South Efate (Vanuatu). Of course there are languages without ISO standard codes and they need to be brought into the system too.

A focus of our archive, PARADISEC, is to make previously unlocatable material available, and we have done this in several ways. The first, and most straightforward, is to provide an online catalog of material in our own collection. The catalog, using standard terms like country names, language names and the metadata given by the Open Language Archives Community, allows depositors to enter their own metadata. For many, this is the first time they have actually systematised their collection. Because the catalog is part of the OLAC federation, it is accessible via their search mechanisms, and is also locatable via Google.

Second we have made material available by taking scans of around 14,000 pages of notes and placing them online, with enough contextual information to allow them to be located [see Arthur Capell's notes here, or Stephen Wurm's notes here, or Calvin Roesler's notes here]. If you look at the OLAC page with South Efate material listed you will also find a number of references and links to Arthur Capell's notes which we put online.

Third, we can enter a record in our catalog to make an existing resource more widely available, and, as our catalog is harvested by the Open Language Archives Community, it will then be more generally locatable. For example, George Grace is a linguist who has worked in various parts of the western Pacific, and his fieldnotes have been scanned and put online at the University of Hawai'i (UH) library. If you know that it is there and you search for his name, then you can find it in Google. However, there is no provision made by UH for standardising language names by use of the three-letter code (or ISO-639-3) that reduces ambiguity in searching. The UH library catalog currently does not list these items, nor does their 'Online resources' catalog. By entering a record into the PARADISEC catalog (here) the information is then propagated through to OLAC:

.

A Google search for one of the languages mentioned in this collection, 'Waropen', locates our record (hit number 3) in OLAC:

The item at UH comes in at hit number 57:

OLAC's language pages are an excellent source of information, and if we can add to each page by providing a fairly minimal pointer in an OLAC-compliant record then that may also solve the problem for the Kven and Sámi material that Maliniemi discovered.

You can set up equipment so that people are sitting near a microphone and within the field of view, but there are no guarantees that people will stay there. What can you do to make sure that people stay where they are? Nothing really. But sometimes the environment might be of some assistance. If you are in the bush and it’s really hot, a good tree with plenty of shade can provide natural “walls” that will ultimately constrain where people end up sitting, even if they wander off for a while. Unlike walls in a building, these shade walls do not create an echo.

This trip I was lucky enough get hold of a Rycote windshield. Inside I put a Rode NT4. No chance of having the recording destroyed by wind noise with that windshield. It’s awesome but it’s not exactly unobtrusive. So I mounted it on a tall overhead stand and put it next to the tree, over people’s heads like a boom mike. Certainly the tree goes a long way towards making the mike less obtrusive. You can just see the small black video camera in the bottom right of this photo, partly hidden by some leaves. You should also notice where the shadows fall on the ground.

The solid-state camera can record very large files for up to about nine hours, so there is no need to change video tapes. This means once you’ve got the sound levels adjusted and the people within the viewfinder (allowing for the fact that they may well reposition themselves) you can just walk away from the camera. Once we had lunch, I went and caught up on some reading.

You can see that the results were rather good. Here are a few screen shots. There’s no mike in view here.

The sound was pretty good. Being the build up to the wet season there were a few cicadas which can be pretty noisy. Their noise is reasonably high frequency so I’ve been able to suppress them with a graphic equalizer, without losing too much of the speech. You can’t do that so easily with engine noise.

Having a decent recording makes the job of transcription sooooo much easier. You can see who is speaking and what they are doing, where they are pointing and who they are looking at. When it comes to transcription, all this cuts down the workload massively and makes the job easier for all concerned. So finally, I’m very glad to have something decent to report. A happy camper.

The Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) has established a fieldwork scholarship to sponsor one MA student in the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP) at SOAS. The scholarship, funded by income from FEL book sales through the SOAS Endangered Languages Project website, will support one student to undertake fieldwork during 2010 in Guernsey on the endangered language Guernesiais.

SOAS is very grateful to FEL for this support.