[ from Peter K. Austin, Linguistics Department, SOAS]
Today I have a story to share that involves intellectual property violations, taking materials without attribution from a copyrighted dictionary of an Australian indigenous language, and publication of a book that contains such bad scholarship, ridiculous claims, nonsense, and stupid howlers that it is actually funny.
Over the past couple of years I have presented sessions at various workshops and training courses (most recently at a grantee training workshop held at SOAS 11-17th June) on the topics of "ethics, intellectual property rights and copyright". I have learnt a bit about copyright and moral rights in the process - my Powerpoint slides for the most recent presentation can be found here.
One of the issues that is often raised by fieldworkers and researchers during these presentations can be summarised as: "I don't want to make my data publicly available because someone will steal it and publish it under their own name". I usually reply in terms of the low likelihood of such an event happening (as Andrew Garrett said at an archiving workshop at the January 2008 Linguistic Society of America annual meeting (and I paraphrase): "Sorry to tell you this, but actually no-one wants to steal your data") and the protection afforded by copyright and moral rights (mentioning the World Intellectual Property Organisation and various other lobby groups).
Well, unfortunately, I have to change my tune, folks, because it has happened to me. A subset of materials which I have published in book form (and deposited as Word .doc files with the ASEDA archive) and co-published with David Nathan on the web as the Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay Web Dictionary that are all clearly marked as copyright have been reproduced without attribution or recognition of our authorship both on a website and in a recent book publication. Fortunately, they have been done in such as way as to reveal the ignorance of the violator that is truly laughable. Sadly, this individual is attempting to profit financially from both our intellectual property and that of an Australian Aboriginal group, along with potentially damaging the trust we have built up by years of work with the community.
The story goes like this.
So you haven't had enough conferences on languages of the Pacific - or you missed AFLA and the Papuan languages workshop??
Head to Ourimbah, 9-11 December 2008 for for the Directions in Oceanic Research (DOR) conference.
Here's the info:
[ from our man in Lyon, Peter K. Austin, Linguistics Department, SOAS]
As it approaches the halfway point, the 3L (Leiden-London-Lyon) Summer School on Language Documentation and Description is humming along. It started on Monday 23rd June and ends on Friday 4th July.
So far we have had five days of plenary lectures (in English) and discussions (in English, and French) on a range of topics, practical classes (on phonology, tonology, audio recording, Toolbox, multimedia, applying for research grants -- most available in both English and French), and areal classes (on Cushitic, and Mayan languages). There is a full list [.pdf] of course descriptions on the 3L website. There are around 65 students and researchers attending from a wide range of countries as varied as Togo, Gabon, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Guatemala, USA, Netherlands, Germany, France, Russia, UK, Taiwan and Australia. Teachers are from the University of Lyon-2, SOAS and Leiden. The local organisational team is made up of students and staff from Lyon-2 together with student volunteers.
On Wednesday evening there was a very interesting soirée which brought researchers and students attending the 3L Summer School together with researchers and students attending a summer school on Interactional Linguistics being run by the CNRS ICAR laboratory headed by Professor Lorenza Mondada at the recently opened École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (with brand new architecturally outstanding buildings and facilities). There were many interesting issues of common interest that surfaced in the short presentations given by researchers from the two groups, including problems of fieldwork (entering, being in and leaving the field, the role of gatekeepers and brokers), research methods and tools, and giving back to those participating in the research. There are sure to be more useful interactions between the ICAR and DDL research groups in Lyon in the future.
Today there is a student conference, or rather two conferences since there will be presentations of around 20 papers in two parallel sessions, one in French and one in English. The students are so keen to discuss their work that the programme starts at 9:30am and goes to 7pm (on a Saturday, mind you!). This level of enthusiasm and willingness to share ideas and experiences has been a feature of the past week both in class and outside.
Some other features of the summer school so far that I have noticed include:
In the flurry of exam marking and LingFest preparation, the top floor of the Transient is still coming down from the ascent of 64 high school students today. They came from as far away as Camden (Macarthur Anglican), and James Ruse, to as close as Fort Street and St Marys in Sydney proper. Year 9, 10 and 11 students bounded up our stairs, and along our (thankfully refurbished) corridors, to the State Round of OzCLO, the First Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad.
Fueled by tim-tams and orange juice, teams of three worked away at problems in Luiseno, Chinantec, Japanese compounds, the horror [1] of getting computers to parse English morphology, and a wonderful problem on Anglicised Irish place-names - how do you get Clashgortmore from the forms in An Chlais Bhán (The White Pit), Bun an Ghoirt Bháin (Base of the White Field), An Currach Mór (The Big Marsh) - and what does it mean?
They seemed excited, charming, enthusiastic problem-solvers, and, with luck they'll be the next generation of linguists (doctor, lawyer, Indian chief?)
The general consensus seems to be that:
- yes, we must have it next year,
- yes if we advertise in further in advance we will get more students (64 was FAR more than we'd expected),
- and
YES, we must find sponsors [2] to send the national winners overseas to the International Computational and Linguistic Olympiads.
Suggestions anyone?
And now, to mark the results…
Watch this space for the three winners who will go on to the National round on 6th August.
[1] and the horror of marking - one of our Melbourne collaborators spent today whipping off "a quick and dirty Perl script to evaluate the effectiveness of the regular expressions that the students come up with" in answer to the problem.
[2] Above and beyond our current kind & generous sponsors, HCSNet, the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney, Macquarie University, CSIRO, the Australasian Language Technology Association, and the Australian Linguistics Society.
Alexandre Duchêne & Monica Heller. 2007. Discourses of Endangerment: Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages. London: Continuum.
Reviewed by Nick Thieberger, University of Melbourne / University of Hawai'i
This collection of thirteen papers addresses language ideology, in particular the use of 'language endangerment' as a rallying cry with broader 'ideological struggles on the terrain of language'. If I could have done a concordance of the text, I'm sure that tokens including 'discourse' and 'essentialize' would have come out near the top of the frequency list. The use of the former is apparently necessary at least once a page (and preferably more often) and the second is a 'Bad Thing', although I have to say that most authors in this book essentialize linguists and the linguistic project as unproblematic, and not internally fraught in the way that everything else is (although the naivete of this postmodern critique would have one think that only they could consider such a thing to be possible).
Deconstruction is the trope of choice throughout this volume – unfortunately constructive critique is not. A certain amount of critical evaluation of linguists' engagement with endangered languages is necessary, but I find it in general to be dealt with in a heavy-handed and unhelpful way by many of the contributions to this volume.
In this review I will give a brief sketch of the contents of the book which I approached eagerly, keen to read a critical account of the endangered languages (EL) movement in which I have had some interest over almost three decades now. My interest in ELs has focussed on small languages, typically spoken by marginalised groups in what used to be called the fourth world, pre-industrial people living largely traditional lives and, in general these language were not provided with much in the way of resources or existing documentation. This book, on the whole, deals with languages ranging from Corsican to French as endangered in some way and it takes some changing gear in my mind to sympathise with their plight. One chapter deals with indigenous languages (of Canada) but otherwise the volume has a strong European focus (the other exceptions being a chapter on the 'Official English' movement in the USA and another on Acadian French in Nova Scotia).
[from Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, Linguistics Department, SOAS]
As I pointed out in a previous post, there have been a lot of new developments in the field of endangered languages research in the past five years. One of those has been the publication series Language Documentation and Description which we produce annually at SOAS. We started the series in 2003 with the launch of HRELP, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (in fact, the first volume contains papers from our launch event and the workshop that followed). Hot off the presses this week is the fifth volume of papers, containing six papers on three topics: data and language documentation, digital video and archiving in language documentation, and training and activism in documentary linguistics. Here is the table of contents (for more details including a downloadable PDF of my Editor's Preface and an order form go here):
[from Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, Linguistics Department, SOAS]
The May Newsletter of the Australian Linguistic Society has just come out and can be viewed here. As usual it includes information about conferences, workshops, research grants awarded to members, recent publications, and the odd flashback to ALS doings of the last century. Then there is the "News from ..." section where stories submitted by Linguistics Departments around Australia are presented; the May edition includes Macquarie University, University of New England, Australian National University, and the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University.
[ a review from Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, Linguistics Department, SOAS]
Things move fast in the endangered languages world. Five years is a long time, especially the past five years when so much has happened. Last speakers of languages have passed away, such as the late Marie Smith Jones who was the last speaker of Eyak and who died on 21st January 2008 (her death garnered much publicity as signalling the first native Alaskan language to become extinct -- a Google search of "last speaker of Eyak", for example, returns 537 hits, led by such big names as the BBC, the Economist and so on). Other less publicised losses have occurred, such as Jawoyn from the Northern Territory, whose last fluent speaker died in July 2007.
But really good stuff has happened in the last five years too: millions of dollars of research funds have been made available for work with endangered languages through the Volkswagen Foundation's DoBeS project, the NSF-NEH DEL scheme, and the ELDP grants administered by SOAS. There have been lots of grass roots activities to document, archive and support endangered languages, and a whole new group of committed students have entered the field via training programmes at ELAP at SOAS and University of Hawaii, among others. There have been summer schools, like the 2004 DoBeS summer school in Frankfurt, with more on the way including the 3L summer school and InField summer institute starting in June this year. If you add in the conferences, workshops, training courses, books, articles, media coverage, blogs and so on it is pretty clear that endangered languages has become a really hot issue, especially since 2003 or so.
Courtesy of the KITLV Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies I have just received a copy of Encyclopedia of the world's endangered languages edited by Christopher Moseley and started dipping into it. I am writing a proper review of the book for the BKI Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, but thought I would share some initial impressions here.
[ 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):
[ 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.
Among the people invited to share ideas at the 2020 Summit on visions for Australia's future are several speakers of traditional Indigenous Languages, Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan, Raymattja Marika and Thomas Jangala Rice. Apart from them, as far as I can see, linguists haven't got a look in. Our ideas aren't part of the vision for Australia. Sigh, so what's new?
Australia's language capacity has declined. This includes the capacity to speak the languages of our neighbours, the loss of Australia's Indigenous language heritage, and the fact that Indigenous children in remote communities are not learning Standard English. Changes in policy are needed to rebuild our ability as a country to learn and use languages. It'd be great if the summit considered this as something to push for.
[ from Peter K. Austin, Linguistics Department, SOAS]
A series of five documentaries on languages is scheduled to air on OBE (Original Black Entertainment) TV in the UK starting on 13th April 2008. OBE TV is a freeview 24 hour Channel on Sky Digital Channel 204 with a primary target audience from the African, Caribbean and other ethnic communities in the UK and Ireland, Europe, North Africa and beyond. OBE TV reaches over 7.8 million satellite subscribers in the UK and Ireland alone.
The documentary series is called World – Speaking in Tongues and the episodes are.....
[ from Linguistic Export Peter K. Austin, Linguistics Department, SOAS]
Since 1963 the Australian National University has annually awarded the University Medal as its most prestigious undergraduate academic prize. At each conferring of degrees ceremony the University’s most outstanding first class honours students are recognised with the award. An Honour Board displaying the names of all University Medal winning students was launched in February 2008 and is now on display in the Great Hall, University House, Canberra. There is a Virtual Honour Board on the ANU website.
Between 1974 and the present 17 Linguistics students have been awarded the medal, and quite a few names that will be familiar to readers of this blog are among them. They include a number of students who went on to do PhDs and further research describing and/or documenting endangered languages:
This year's Australian languages workshop, the seventh, was very well organised by Kazuko Obata, Jutta Besold, Jo Caffery and the rest of their committee. It was held at Kioloa [kai'oʊlə], ANU's field station on the NSW south coast. Spongy green grass and tall green trees make it a far cry from drought-ridden Canberra, and the extent of the wilderness is restful. Walking along a white beach to the Murramarang Aboriginal area (very good signs with information on local words for sea creatures and traditional practices). Generations of rainbow lorikeets trained by generations of students to perch on arms, shoulders, knees. Boobook owls calling in the night as we looked at the Milky Way during Earth Hour.
The weather was perfect, warm, and the papers were cool..
The Australian Linguistics Institute is now open for online registration [finally - oh the pain of making a rego page that's secure AND university-compliant, tax-compliant, human-compliant...]. Short, intensive courses will be presented by some excellent linguists from 7th - 11th July 2008, at the University of Sydney. It is a great opportunity for linguists, language professionals, graduate students and advanced undergraduates to learn more about a wide range of topics in language. Plus there's to be a three day Indigenous Languages Institute sponsored by the Koori Centre which will bring heaps of Indigenous people working on languages together to work on problems of language maintenance and language revitalisation.
Participants may register for up to four courses during the week-long ALI. Each course is offered for 1.5 hours each day for five days. Topics include psycholinguistics (Anne Cutler), first language acquisition (Rosalind Thornton and Stephen Crain), morpho-syntax (Brett Baker, Greville Corbett, Mark Harvey, Rachel Nordlinger, Gert Webelhuth and Regine Eckhardt), computational linguistics (Robert Dale, Mary Dalrymple, Mark Dras), Japanese grammar (Nerida Jarkey and Harumi Minagawa), sociolinguistics (Jennifer Hay, Michael Clyne, Diana Eades), semantics (Bert Peeters, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka), discourse and conversational analysis (Celia Kitzinger, Jim Martin, Sigrid Norris), sign language linguistics and grammaticalisation (Louise de Beuzeville and Trevor Johnston), contact language typology (Ian Smith), quantitative methods (Carsten Roever) and educational linguistics (William Armour, Ryuko Kubota, Ahmar Mahboob, Aek Phakiti).
Do book your accommodation early, as the combination of World Youth Day and the Pope's visit the following week mean that accommodation may be taken up.
[From Tamworth export Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS]
There is an article in Tuesday’s Education supplement of the The Guardian newspaper with the byline “Bowling Google a googly" about Tara Brabazon, Professor of Media Studies at Brighton University, who recently gave her inaugural lecture there. Professor Brabazon hails from Perth and the interview article makes much of her Australian connections (including her 2002 book Ladies Who Lunge that includes a discussion of another Australian academic export to the UK, Germaine Greer).
At the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Chicago two weeks ago, among the assembled linguists were seven Australians now established overseas:
[From our man back from the Netherlands, Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS]
We had an interesting discussion about documentation corpora in the course I taught last week for the LOT winter school at the Universiteit van Tilburg.
In the course I took the somewhat strong view that a documentary corpus minimally consists of: (a) media or text recordings (inscriptions), with (b) time-aligned transcription, and (c) time-aligned translation, and (d) relevant metadata about the documentation and communicative context. Thus, on this view, the 150 hours of untranscribed video collected by a project that one of the students is involved in is not part of any corpus (though it might be what Himmelmann (2006:10) calls 'primary data' ("recordings of observable linguistic behaviour and metalinguistic knowledge"), or what OLAC calls 'a resource', and it might become part of the corpus when it is worked on in the future). Neither is the audio recording of a 6-person conversation that another student made in Sri Lanka that neither he nor his consultants are able to transcribe. Media recordings without transcription or translation thus do not constitute data by themselves and don't document anything. This view of what a corpus is also appears in the DoBeS guidelines as presented in Brugman 2003, available here, and on the HRELP website. A corpus can be enriched by annotation (see Bird and Liberman 2001) with the addition of linguistic information like morphemic analysis, morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, part of speech tags etc (see Schultze-Berndt 2006), or non-linguistic information like kinship relations or cultural practices etc (see Franchetto 2006).
[From our man back from Chicago, Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS]
At the recent Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Chicago, Sandra Chung from University of California Santa Cruz gave an invited plenary address on the topic “How much can understudied languages really tell us about how language works?” She argued, among other things, that data from understudied languages should play a crucial role in the development of linguistic theory since only by including them can we get a full picture of the array of phenomena found in human languages that need to be taken account of. She illustrated her talk with examples from her work on Chamorro, an endangered Austronesian language spoken on Guam.
During the question time following Sandy’s talk, one person commented something along the following lines (I paraphrase, since I was rather stunned to hear the opinion being openly expressed before a linguistics audience, and don’t recall the exact formulation):
“Linguistic research needs to concentrate on working with corpora and for the sort of languages you were talking about, like Chamorro, you will never be able to put together a corpus of sufficient size to be able to do anything meaningful. We should give up on the small (and disappearing) languages and concentrate on ones where we are likely to be able to get a decent sized corpus.”
Dying to be counted: commodification of endangered languages in documentary linguistics - Peter K. Austin
13 January, 2008
[Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS, reporting on a joint poster presentation with Lise Dobrin (University of Virginia) and David Nathan (SOAS) at the 2008 LSA annual meeting]
They came. They saw. They chuckled. Some snickered, and a few laughed out loud. A couple even went “what the … ?”
Such was the range of reactions to the poster which Lise Dobrin (University of Virginia), David Nathan (SOAS) and I presented at last week’s Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Chicago dealing with the topic of commodification of endangered languages, ie. their reduction to things to be counted and standardised, and their treatment as if they were a tradeable commodity.
At David’s suggestion we decided to adopt a satirical approach using the metaphor of a newspaper front page to deal with what is, of course, a very serious topic. It was the only (deliberately) funny poster at the LSA this year, and probably ever. Ten points to avid readers who get all the allusions and jokes. View thumbnail of image or full size poster here.
This week saw a conference on placenames held in Ballarat Trends in Toponymy: Indigenous identity and theoretical developments in placename research, (organised by Ian Clark and Laura Kostanski). I got to the first two days of talks, which sparkled with maps and pictures of the places whose names were under discussion. Here are some ideas that struck me.
When Australians talk about 'Indigenous writing', 'Indigenous writers' and 'Indigenous literature' in Australia, they usually don't mean 'writing in Indigenous languages'. They mean English. You'd never guess that Indigenous Australians wrote in their own languages from reading Lisa Slater's review [1] of Penny van Toorn's recent book (2006) Writing never arrives naked: Early Aboriginal cultures of writing in Australia. (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press). Go instead to Mary-Anne Gale's (1997) book Dhaŋum Djorra'wuy Dhäwu: a history of writing in Aboriginal languages. Adelaide: Aboriginal Research Institute, University of South Australia. (and go to the end of this post to see how to get a copy!).
In fact, Van Toorn does have a little about early writings in Indigenous languages, but not much, because she mostly focuses on the east coast of Australia and Tasmania. The English monolingual mindset has always been very strong on the east coast since the early settlers spoke mostly English, or Gaelic, which was not highly valued as a language of learning. The monolingual mindset was less strong in South Australia (which, with the Northern Territory, is the focus of Gale's study), since the early settlers included a relatively large group of speakers of German. German was one of the major languages of science in the nineteenth century, English speakers studied it, and the SA German settlers published in German and ran German language schools until World War 1.
That's perhaps why bilingual education in Indigenous languages, and the production of literature in Indigenous languages has been strongest in South Australia and the Northern Territory, (which was part of SA during its first effective settlement from 1863 - 1911, and which, after 1911, retained close links with SA in relevant institutions such as churches and the law). Van Toorn suggests (p.14) that the German missionaries used the local languages because they knew very little English. Much more relevant are the language policies of the London Mission Society and the Lutheran mission societies, as well as the early SA missionaries' discussions with the Governors of South Australia, about what languages to use in schools [2].
World Language Centre conference on cultural and linguistic diversity - Peter Austin
18 November, 2007
[From our man in Ísland, Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS]
The Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Institute of Foreign Languages at the University of Iceland organised a conference on cultural and linguistic diversity on 2nd and 3rd November. The conference was associated with a proposal to set up a World Language Centre in Reykjavík and two main topics were discussed:
1. future visions for the World Language Centre to be established at the University of Iceland; and
2. comparative research in linguistic, literary and cultural studies
The conference was opened by Geir H. Haarde, the Prime Minister of Iceland (John Howard please note) who stressed the importance of multilingualism in the modern world and the need for people to learn several languages, not only for their economic advantages, but also to appreciate the richness and beauty of their own native language and culture. The Prime Minister is himself a fluent speaker of Icelandic, English, Danish, Swedish, German and Italian (beat that Alexander Downer). The PM was followed by Vigdís herself, the former President of Iceland (1980-1996) and UNESCO goodwill ambassador for languages, who stressed the need for academics and the general public to appreciate cultural and linguistic diversity. We non-Icelanders in the audience were wishing that we had even a fraction of this top-level political support for linguistics and languages back in our home countries.
Michael Clyne has a good article in today's Australian Higher Education Supplement where he attacks the monolingual mindset of the Federal Government, as shown by Alexander Downer's extraordinary remarks in an interview, a transcript of which appears on his website. Here are the low points.
MR DOWNER: (speaks French) But I mean I don’t think in diplomacy the fact that you can speak foreign languages is anything special and obviously he runs the risk of being seen by a lot of Australians as a show-off.
PRESENTER: So you think that’s how it went down with foreign visitors as well?
MR DOWNER: No because foreign visitors are here trying to deal with English – although of course the bulk of them do speak English but not all of them do – but they are dealing with interpreters and people who speak different languages every day of the week. So…
PRESENTER: Looking at the reaction on television…
MR DOWNER: …there’s nothing that unusual about people speaking foreign languages.
PRESENTER: Well speaking Mandarin is unusual and for someone who could potentially be the next Prime Minister. It is a bit like when Tony Blair went to France and spoke fluent French to the French.
MR DOWNER: Well I mean I don’t think it makes any difference to people’s lives, personal lives, their living standards, their jobs or anything.
PRESENTER: Alright, so he is a bit of a show-off,.
7 September 2007, Interview – ABC with Jon Faine
[ From Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS]
Over the past two years a group of European researchers including myself, Michael Fortescue (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Nikolaus Himmelmann (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany), François Jacquesson (LACITO, CNRS, France), Maarten Mous (Leiden University, Netherlands), and Mauro Tosco (L’Orientale, Naples, Italy) have been working on a European Science Foundation EUROCORES proposal called "BABEL: Better Analyses Based on Endangered Languages".
Update: (thanks Peter!) Barista has a long post discussing Harrison's work in the light of Anggarrgoon's post.
Huge media attention has been garnered by K. David Harrison's National Geographic funded fly-in-fly-out trips to document endangered languages in settings mostly remote and picturesque. See for example the Independent, and the Australian (the article also features Brownie Doolan, perhaps the last speaker of Lower Arrernte, and Gavan Breen, a linguist who has been working with him for years on a dictionary).
I was rung up in a supermarket by Jenny Green who was rung up on the road by a journalist who.. wanted to know more about endangered languages. So much for all our online information.. This started me thinking about two questions:
•How can we build on this media interest to do good things for endangered languages and their speakers?
•How could fly-in-fly-out trips be made useful for endangered languages and their speakers? (For some problems with Harrison's recent FiFo trip to Australia, see Anggarrgoon today).
Suggestions welcome, my present suggestions below..
[Our London correspondent does some sniffing out: Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS]
I blogged earlier this year about some differences I have been running into between my native Australian English and that of the locals here in the UK. Well it’s happened again.
I was taking part in a conference abstract selection panel recently with two English and one other Australian academic when one of our English colleagues offered the opinion that a particular abstract was "on the nose".
"But I thought you liked it when we did a quick run through earlier" said the other Australian.
"I do" responded the Brit, "that’s what I just said, it’s on the nose, exactly on the topic of the conference!"
My interpretation, and that of the other Australian, was that "on the nose" means "it stinks, it’s bad" and should be rejected.
The Australian newspaper has been running a teacher-bashing campaign for years - asserting that kids don't learn to read and write because their teachers are crap or because they use a crap teaching method. Front page news today was an article by the Education Writer, Justine Ferrari, Teacher failures spell student trouble. Ferrari quotes one Denyse Ritchie, "executive director and co-author of THRASS (Teaching Handwriting Reading And Spelling Skills)," as saying:
"You can learn to read without knowing phenomics (the sounds that make up words), but when you spell, you have to have a good phenomic understanding to help spell words like said. "Unless you're taught that 'ai' as well as 'e' can make an 'eh' sound in words like said and again, you will spell said as 'sed'."But many teachers don't have that inherent knowledge,"
The teachers' phenomic knowledge was also tested. When asked to break words into the constituent sounds or phenomes - such as how many sounds in 'cat' (c-a-t) - the average score was 4.1 out of a possible 10 correct answers.
Yesterday was an important day in determining the directions of university work on endangered languages in the Asia-Pacific area - the decision on the appointment of a replacement for Andrew Pawley as the research-only Chair of Linguistics at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. This department fosters much work on endangered languages, through staff research, doctoral student training and its publishing arm, Pacific Linguistics.
There were public talks by the three shortlisted candidates - back to back and neck and neck were Nick (Laos and Vietnam), Nick (Australian and a toe-hold in Papuan) and Nik (Western Austronesian).
Public job talks are a curious ritual - a discreet competition watched by an audience, most of whom are not on the selection panel, but who have a serious interest in the outcome, and only a few, like me, just along to hear an interesting paper. The etiquette is a puzzle for the organisers - should the candidates see each other? should they attend each other's talks? The puzzle for the paper-givers is what type of paper to give. Go for breadth? Go for depth? Show 'the vision thing'? Show how you fit in? Show what you'd add to the department? And in the end the quality of the paper may have little to do with the selection committee's decision. They may just want to know that you don't habitually spit in the corner.
Excellent news! The Economic and Social Science Research Council of the UK has just awarded a £1 million grant to Adam Schembri for what sounds like important work, The British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus Project: Sociolinguistic variation, language change, language contact and lexical frequency in BSL (2007-2010), which builds on the work he and Trevor Johnston and Louise de Beuzeville and others have been doing on the sign language of the deaf community of Australia, Auslan (e.g. the Auslan corpus project and Adam and Trevor's recent book. Adam got his PhD in 2002 from the University of Sydney, for a thesis Issues in the analysis of polycomponential verbs in Australian Sign Language (Auslan)).
Adam's the Principal Investigator - based at University College, London, and other investigators include Bencie Woll, Kearsy Cormier, Frances Elton, Rachel Sutton-Spence (University of Bristol), Graham Turner (Heriot Watt University), Margaret Deuchar (University of Wales Bangor) and Donall O'Baoill (Queens University Belfast). Here's the project summary.
In 2001 and 2002 St John Skilton carried out a survey of Scottish Gaelic in Australia and New Zealand using different means- participating in Scottish Gaelic community activities, carrying out interviews, forming focus groups, and sending out a questionnaire to which he received 178 responses. His description of the situation and his analysis were part of his doctoral work at the University of Sydney, which he finished at the University of Fribourg: The Survey of Scottish Gaelic in Australia and New Zealand PhD 2004.
Skilton examines from many angles the position in Australia of Scottish Gaelic, a language spoken by few, but the heritage language of many. He discusses the demography of the speakers and learners; he shows how opportunities to use and learn the language are shaped by the language practices in Australia - such as the language policies and the teaching of language at schools. He also discusses how the speakers and learners felt about the language. The situation of Scottish Gaelic as a minority language in Australia is both interestingly similar to, and interestingly different from, the situation of minority Indigenous languages in Australia. I quote here one of his concluding summaries.
[From Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS]
Last month (on 14th June) I gave a talk at the Tokyo University Linguistics Colloquium entitled “Current Trends in Language Documentation”; some of the ideas I discussed there can be found in a paper under the same name that I co-authored with Lenore Grenoble in the recently published Language Documentation and Description, Volume 4. In my talk I referred to and quoted a recent blog post that is an excellent discussion of what some language communities judge linguists to be useful for. The bottom line is: “Linguists are good for trust and love” – establishing and maintaining good human relationships over an extended period of time. Other things, like linguistic research, follow from that.
The inaugural issue (Volume 1, Number 1) of Language Documentation & Conservation (LD&C) is now available at http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/.
LD&C is a free, fully refereed, open-access, online journal that is published twice a year, in June and December. Please visit the LD&C webpage and subscribe (free), because that will help the journal editors show to their paymistresses/masters that we need and value the journal.
The Table of Contents lists 6 articles, 3 technology reviews and 2 book reviews. Among the articles is one for addicts of Tom Honeyman's posts on Solar power (parts 1, 2 and 3 - a paper "Solar Power for the Digital Fieldworker" by Tom together with Laura Robinson. The technology reviews include one by Felicity Meakins, who works on the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition project that I'm involved in, on the transcription program CLAN that we've been using. The book reviews include a detailed review by Robert Early of PARADISEC's manager Nick Thieberger's recent grammar of South Efate (Vanuatu). Early highlights the important documentation innovation in Nick's book.