Ngapartji Ngapartji has launched a policy paper regarding Australian Indigenous languages. You can download it [.pdf] from their website. The press release is below.
[ from Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, Linguistics Department, SOAS]
At the Australian Languages Workshop 2008 held in March at the ANU field station at Kioloa (recounted in Jane Simpson's blog post) there was an after-dinner quiz organised by Harold Koch. It consisted of a series of trivial pursuit style questions to identify scholars who had published on Australian Aboriginal languages (some recent, some not so recent). The questions went something like this (some of these are ones I remember from Harold's quiz, others I have made up):
Identify the following six people each of whom published on Australian Aboriginal languages and:
- also wrote a book on scurvy in sheep
- published on middle-Indo-Aryan under another name
- prepared a handbook for coroners
- was a jackaroo on a station in the north-west of Western Australia
- is an expert in Ergodic Theory and has published a book on Multidimensional Continued Fractions
- spent time in an Australian internment camp as a Nazi spy during the second world war
The answers to most of these questions are to be found in a new 526 page book published this month by Pacific Linguistics and edited by William B. McGregor entitled Encountering Aboriginal languages: Studies in the history of Australian linguistics. My copy just arrived in London and I am having trouble putting it down, the contents are so interesting.
[from our woman in Kununurra, Eva Schultze-Berndt]
This email is a call for expressions of interest in a 5th European Australianist workshop, to be held at the University of Manchester in September 2008.
The suggestions for dates are either of the following:
a) Su/Mo, 14th/15th September. This is adjacent to the LAGB conference in Colchester/Essex from 10-13 Sept; train travel between Colchester and Manchester is about 5 hrs.
b) Fr/Sat, 19th-20th September.
c) Sat/Su, 20th-21st September.
Of course depending on the number of participants we might only need one day. But hopefully many of you will be able to come!
The suggestion for a workshop theme is "Discourse, prosody and information structure in Australian languages". As usual, participants would be free to present papers not related to this theme.
I will be able to apply for a very limited amount of funding towards accommodation and travel costs of students or other participants who are not in full-time employment (success not guaranteed of course). Please indicate if you are interested in participating and belong to this category.
Mirabile dictu... The 2020 summit background material on Indigenous Australia, ">Slide 10 of the 11 slides, notes the terrible state of Australia's languages, and the need to do something about them. Considerable urgency is required if we are to preserve Australia's Indigenous languages and traditions.
BUT, the urgency and importance have disappeared from the interim report arising from the summit. The Indigenous section doesn't mention Indigenous languages once. Education ranks highly, but it's the kind of education that focuses on the problems caused by the differences between children's home languages and school languages (send the kids to boarding schools, make parents send kids to school), rather than on helping children negotiate between the two languages, and learn to value them both.
Some of the ideas from Yuendumu that didn't make it into the summit appear in Wendy Baarda's piece in the Education News of the Age . I quote a bit, but go read the whole!
After 30 years living and teaching at Yuendumu - a remote community about 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs that speaks Warlpiri as its first language - I have watched literacy attainment levels slowly declining over the past decade. I believe there are two main reasons for this. One is the reduction and neglect of our bilingual or Two-Way program, a key to community involvement and pride in schools at Yuendumu and other bush schools.The other factor has been the difficulty in attracting school principals of sufficient calibre and experience to be able to navigate complex relationships between two vastly different cultures and to develop innovative, community-based solutions.
There has been a steady loss of positions for Warlpiri staff since the early '90s. Fifteen years ago our Two-Way program was thriving. We had 10 Warlpiri and 10 mainstream staff members, including a mentor and a teacher linguist to support Warlpiri staff.
Now we have only one trained Warlpiri teacher and four Warlpiri assistant teachers with seven mainstream teachers. With fewer Warlpiri staff in the school there are fewer families represented and therefore a declining interest in the school and fewer children made to attend. Attendance has declined over the past decade, a symptom of a malaise within the community itself.
The Aboriginal schools whose Two-Way programs were discontinued have not since lifted literacy standards. Across all remote indigenous schools, whether English-only or Two-Way, the standard of spoken and written English is very low.
.....
Boarding schools may be the answer for some, but why should Aboriginal children need to be sent far away to boarding schools to become literate, when much more could be done to improve education and build strong communities at home?
In the 2020 interim report the only place that Indigenous languages do get mentioned is in the arts section:
• Creativity is central to Australian life and Indigenous culture is the core to this. To measure, document and leverage the strengths of this culture, to articulate our role and improve protection of indigenous culture, language and heritage through a National Indigenous Cultural Authority.
Ho hum, I thought that helping preserve Indigenous languages was part of the job of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Studies. They hold the major archive of language material, and they presently employ two research linguists on short-term contracts. They advise on maintaining and documenting Indigenous languages. It's a specialised field, and good advice could save Government departments and language centres heaps of time and money. And it could save Indigenous people much heart-ache.
There's a bit more on languages of the region in another section
• To reinvigorate and deepen our engagement with Asia and the Pacific.
• To ensure that the major languages and cultures of our region are no longer foreign to Australians but are familiar and mainstreamed into Australian society.
Again, amplification of this in an opinion piece by Matthew Davies in the Age. Again a BUT. Not sure about this word 'major'. Leaving aside the many small endangered languages of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia etc, is Tok Pisin major? Is Solomons Pidgin? Is Bislama? Not in number of speakers, perhaps, but in being important languages for use in the region, undoubtedly.
Dhanggati people (Dhanggati is the language of the Macleay Valley) and linguists are well served by a new 205 page reference book on the language.
Lissarrague, Amanda. 2007. Dhanggati grammar and dictionary. Nambucca Heads: Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Cooperative 14 Bellwood Road, Nambucca Heads NSW 2448.
It's another Muurrbay product (in 2006 they published a reference book on the Hunter River language by Lissarrague) which really justifies the funding from the Maintenance of Indigenous Languages and Records programme, now housed in the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.
Mari Rhydwen is working with people developing resources for teaching Indigenous languages of New South Wales. She asks if speakers of traditional languages in Australia have engineered terms for talking about age in years and, if so, how they did it. It's quite possible that they have invented terms for other things (reading, school, money), but haven't felt the need to talk about people's ages in terms of years, except in English.
I could only think of age grade and status terms (child, woman with children etc) in traditional languages to describe someone's age, and of the use of 'Christmas' to mean 'year', but I couldn't recall an instance where someone described someone's age in terms of Christmasses.
Over to blog-readers for their ideas. Here's a start from Robert Hoogenaad:
One of the "pleasures" that come with being known as a specialist in Australian Aboriginal languages is the string of requests one gets to translate various things into "Aboriginal", especially names for pets, houses, boats or even children (one of my favourites happened when I was at La Trobe University and someone called wanting a translation for "Happy Anzac Day"). Sometimes the reverse holds and the "meaning" of a word "in Aboriginal" is asked for. Nowadays there are websites devoted to this task, such as this one which promises: "Thousands of ABORIGINAL NAMES for your DOG, CAT, HORSE, PET AND CHILD! From Chinaroad Lowchens of Australia". This site at least mentions "these names/words are taken from several different Australian Aboriginal Languages", though none is mentioned by name.
Recently, David Nash pointed out to me that an Aboriginal word, which he identified as coming from the Diyari language, had made its way onto a koala at the Planckendael Zoo in Belgium (located near Antwerp). The zoo established an "Australia" section in May 1998 where various Australian animals are exhibited, including koalas, each of which has been given an "Aboriginal" name. Information about the koala names can be found in both Dutch and French, Belgium being officially bilingual. Here is my translation of what they say:
Murriny Patha is fun. Especially if you like "kintax" (Evans 2003), cause it's got it in spades. Murriny Patha keeps delivering weird phenomena that require unconventional nomenclature (see for instance Walsh 1996). "So what", I hear you asking, "is the 'elided progeny' construction?" In Murriny Patha it constitutes a subclass of what are clearly a group of "triangular" referring expressions, whereby a person-referent is referred to via "triangulation" - that is indirectly, via another person or persons. The most common of these are possessed kinterms: my father, your uncle, their cousin etc. The person that the kinterm is anchored to is frequently termed the propositus. Other classes of people may also take a propositus: e.g., John's bank manager. Arguably all kinterms are anchored to a propositus, regardless of whether the propositus is expressed overtly or not. Thus when an adult addresses a child, "Hey, where's daddy?", the altercentric kinterm Daddy has an implied 2nd person propositus. However the same adult, when talking to another adult, may use egocentric kinterms with an implied 1st person propositus i.e., "Mum is driving me mad."
The "elided progeny" construction is a kind of kin-based triangulation, but the kinterm corresponding to son or daughter is just missing. These things are very common in Murriny Patha conversation. In fact "triangulation" is generally a very common means of referring to people. I wouldn't say it's the default method of referring to persons, but it probably is the preferred choice for "upgrading" reference to persons. So how does this construction work? It's basically a special case of the Murriny Patha possessive construction.
(Guest post from David Nash)
Mark Liberman's post at Language Log 'On the origins of 'American Indian hyphens' (with updates) locates "the practice of writing American Indian words -- especially proper names -- with multiple internal hyphens" in the 19th century. The earliest usage Mark has found so far is in an 1823 publication about an 1819-20 expedition across the USA.
Here in Australia, by about 1791 hyphens between syllables were common when the Sydney Language was being written down by the English colonists (who had arrived in 1788).
A good example is David Collins' list near the end of his 1798 An account of the English colony in New South Wales (pp.407-413 in 1975 edition; at "What follows is offered only as a specimen, not as a perfect vocabulary of their language").
'Tis the season for workshops.
Deck the walls with electropalatograms and nasal airflow measurements
These blazed out of powerpoints in the David Myer Building at La Trobe University, where about 25 or so people interested in the sounds of Australian languages gathered for a workshop organised by Marija Tabain.
Many of the papers were collaborative, often between descriptive linguists and phoneticians or phonologists, named as authors or in acknowledgments. The success demonstrated a point that Gavan Breen made (Reflecting on retroflexion):
"grammars, especially of languages that have been worked on by only one researcher are likely to have systematic errors in them, and they need checking"
[ From our man, temporarily in the Netherlands, Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS]
On Saturday 27th October the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen hosted a European Australianists workshop, organised by Ruth Singer, post-doctoral fellow at the Radboud University. The workshop was attended by about 15 people and had a packed programme of nine talks from 9am to 6pm. Unfortunately, I had to leave in the early afternoon to catch a flight back to London and missed some of the later presentations.
A new wiki has been set up: Sharing Aboriginal language. Longterm it's for general discussion "for all Aboriginal language people to work together, share ideas, develop exchanges programmes, discuss language matters and be able to contact each other quickly".
But most immediately the current discussion is on recommendations for Australian government policy on Indigenous Languages (you can find information on the main Australian language policy resources up to late June at David Nash's site). The recommendations arise from the successful Indigenous Languages Conference held last month at the University of Adelaide (See Matjjin-nehen, Anggarrgoon and Langguj gel for discussion of ideas arising in the conference).
Noel Pearson sets up a deliberately provocative contrast between 'we' (Indigenous Australians and good guys) and 'they' ('middle-class culture producer's and bad guys) in The Australian (21/7/07).
* They say we should respect Aboriginal English as a real language.
* We say we should speak our traditional languages and the Queen's English fluently.
False contrast.
A nice reversal: Mount Nameless has got its name back. The Western Australian Government has adopted dual naming guidelines. (The good people of the Geographic Names Boards. Hurrah hurrah!) The Shire of Ashburton agreed to the mountain being called both Mount Nameless (apparently this name was bestowed by a Hamersley Iron survey team in the early 1960s), and Jarndunmunha, the name used by the Eastern Guruma people. (The people are also known as Kurrama*).
[Further update, you can see a picture of Jarndunmunha/Mount Nameless and more discussion at
Filipiniana & Cunning Linguistics.]
[ further to further update, Piers Kelly has sent a photo of the long long view from the top [.jpg]]
The Western Australian Lands Minister, Michelle Roberts, is quoted as saying:
"There are probably hundreds of traditional Aboriginal names, virtually unknown by the general community, for features such as mountains, lakes and rivers that currently have a well-known European name."
'Hundreds'? Wrong ball-park.
The only fluent speaker of the Thaynakwith people's language, Dr Thanakupi Gloria Fletcher, has just produced a dictionary "that includes the traditional stories, songs and art of the Thaynakwith people" of western Cape York, with the help of other community members, and Bruce Sommer and Geoff Wharton. It was praised by Peter Beattie - wonderful to see a major government figure interested in Indigenous languages.
LingFest 2008 will be held at the University of Sydney, Australia, 1 – 13 July 2008. LingFest is a series of linguistics conferences and the Winter Linguistics Institute.
In conjunction with LingFest 2008 , the Indigenous Languages Strand will run between 7 – 11 July 2008. It will be held at the Koori Centre of the University of Sydney. The Indigenous Languages Strand will be a useful forum for a wide range of people working in the area of the revival and maintenance of Australian Indigenous languages.
More details follow, or download the form for expressions of interest here - deadline Friday August 24.
Lewis O'Brien continues to be one of the mainstays of Kaurna Warra Pintyandi, the Kaurna language movement. There's a favourable review in the Sydney Morning Herald of a book about him And the clock struck thirteen - assembled by the linguist Mary-Anne Gale from conversations and archival research. Nothing on the language in the review - but read the book to find out more...
I posted a while back about the very interesting Ngapartji Ngapartji Pitjantjatjara course. Here's their call for some feedback.
Linguist, teacher, linguistics student or curriculum expert to review, critique and provide constructive feedback on structure, content and flow of Ngapartji Ngapartji online Pitjantjatjara language and culture site.
Please contact alex AT ngapartji.org for more information or to express your interest in being involved and supporting the future development of this innovative project.
--
Alex Kelly
Creative Producer
http://www.ngapartji.org
http://www.bighart.org
0422 777 590
Sign up: Ngapartji Ngapartji updates list:
http://lists.ngapartji.org/listinfo.cgi/updates-ngapartji.org
[Nick Thieberger, PARADISEC, Melbourne University branch, sent in this post after The Puliima National Indigenous Languages Information Communication Technology Forum.]
This forum was held in Newcastle, Australia, 24-26 April 2007, coordinated by the Awarbukarl Cultural Resource Association (ACRA). Subtitled 'Modern ways for ancient words', it was organised by Daryn McKenny and his team (including Dianna Newman and Faith Baisden) who put together two and a half days of presentations on the state of ICT in Indigenous language (IL) programs. The forum had a number of sponsors, testament to Daryn's ability to pull in support from various quarters, including DCITA, Telstra, Microsoft among others.
Representatives of language programs and language centres came from far and wide, including Townsville, Cairns, Port Hedland, Kalgoorlie, Bourke, Adelaide, Nambucca Heads, Sydney, Melbourne, Walgett, the Kimberley and New Zealand. We were given lots of information over the two days that I was there (I missed the last morning) and I'll try to summarise it here. Apologies to anyone I've left out.
Last week the Victorian government announced its first step towards a policy on Indigenous languages. So, Noel Pearson was onto something..
I wonder what's on their wishlist? Dual naming of places (that'll be slow after the Grampians fiasco)? More ceremonial language used on ceremonial occasions and in official publications? Some Indigenous languages to be taught in schools (that will require a big investment in preparing teaching materials and training teachers, to avoid alienating kids)?
It's been a week for Indigenous Australian languages here in the Sydney area - the annual Australian languages workshop at Pearl Beach brilliantly directed by Joe Blythe, a new film on teaching NSW languages in schools, and finally the launch of Jennifer Biddle's new book Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (UNSW Press).
Check out Noel Pearson's opinion piece in The Australian 10/3/07. He suggests that the two most important pieces of work in "saving" Indigenous languages so far have been the language documentation work undertaken by linguists (yes!) sponsored by AIATSIS, and the translations of the Bible done mostly by Summer Institute of Linguistics linguists. (And to this let's add the importance of gospel song writing mentioned by Bulanjdjan and Wamut). He gently makes the point that linguists' grammars are often inaccessible to speakers. We should listen; we can do better.
Several Indigenous Australian music stories.
Last year's Stanner Award went to Allan Marett for his ethnomusicological study, Songs, dreamings, and ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia: Wesleyan University Press (2005). This is an award for "the best published contribution to Australian Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Studies that is considered by Council to be a significant work of scholarship in Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Studies and which reflects the dynamic nature of Professor Stanner’s life and work."
And the award ceremony was moving. Yes there were speeches. And then Allan explained how the wangga songs link the living and the dead (and check out also the radio program Ghost songs). He showed three short clips of performances of wangga. Then Joe Gumbula, a Yolngu scholar and musician, and the first Indigenous Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, sat down on the floor with his didgeridoo. Allan sat down next to him with clap sticks, and they performed two songs, Allan singing. Many traditional Indigenous Australian songs are HARD, hard to learn the words of, and hard to sing, but he made it seem effortless. Two scholars and musicians, Yolngu and non-Indigenous-Australian, performing traditional songs together. A future for us all.
And then the other way around. Indigenous Australians have been writing and performing modern Anglo-Australian songs in traditional languages for a while now.
March is the month for Warlpiri in Sydney. Some people from Nyirrpi, a southwest Warlpiri community are putting on an exhibition of paintings, Emerging at Gallery Gondwana, 7 Danks Street, Waterloo, until March 13.
And then, just as they leave, some women from Lajamanu, the northernmost Warlpiri community, will be down as artists in residence for painting workshops at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales from the 13th to the 23rd. They'll finish their visit by performing a public yawulyu (women's ceremonial dance and song series) on 23rd March. This will take place during the launch of a book Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience by Jennifer Biddle (UNSW Press).
Indigenous languages conference; Linguist wanted for Australian Indigenous languages project
22 February, 2007
Two items for people who haven't read the Australian Linguistics Society February 2007 newsletter (subscribe! get all the goss AND the Australian Journal of Linguistics).
• LINGAD 2008 25 - 28 September, Adelaide comprises 3 meetings, including:
••the Australian Linguistics Society Conference 26 - 28 September, abstracts due 16 March; (reminder: same due date also for the associated workshop on the language of poetry and song - 300 words abstracts in word or PDF format to christina.eira AT adelaide.edu.au.)
•• Indigenous Languages Conference 2007, 25-27 September 2007,
•• AUSTRALEX
• CAAMA (the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) got squillions from DCITA for work on endangered languages and now want a linguist to help them do it. (In several procrastinatory moments I searched the DCITA website to find out how many squillions, but the site didn't yield the information in an obvious way. Can anyone tell us?)
• the Central Australian Linguistics Circle call for papers on language description, education, literacy and indigenous knowledge. Friday 20 - Saturday 21, April 2007, Charles Darwin University, Alice Springs Campus, Australia.
• the programme for the Pearl Beach Workshop on Australian Languages Friday 16 - Sunday 18, March 2007, Pearl Beach, Australia.
• a reminder that registration is open (and places are limited) for Puliima National Indigenous Languages and Information Communication Technology Forum, 24th - 26th April, 2007, Newcastle, Australia.
• a seminar on Maori tattooing (Tā Moko), 17 and 18 March 2007, at Wesley College, University of Sydney, Australia. (Information from curtis AT oceaniagroup.ac.nz)
In a previous posting “Modern Grammar from nineteenth century mission materials” Jane Simpson refers to the 2005 University of Adelaide doctoral dissertation, The language of the chosen view: the first phase of graphization of Dieri by Hermannsburg Missionaries, Lake Killalpaninna 1867-80 by Heidi Kneebone who, she says “takes linguists to task for NOT looking at early grammars of the languages they're working on”.
Now I don’t have a copy of this dissertation and only had a few hours in Canberra recently to skim through a copy lent to me by Luise Hercus. I was impressed by the historical work Kneebone had done with Lutheran sources (some written in an old German handwriting that is incredibly difficult to read, at least for me) and how she turned up materials written in Diyari by native speakers that I had not seen before. But since the thesis makes claims about my own research on Diyari, spoken in northern South Australia, and appears to suggest that the language I recorded thirty years ago from the last generation of fluent speakers was in part a missionary creation, I would like to take this opportunity to make a couple of points.
After weeks of hot weather and blame-firing over failed native title compensation land deals, rape, gangs, children taken into state care etc., it was like a fine lemon gelato to come across a couple of good news stories on Australian Indigenous languages. New flavour-of-the-year language and tourism, and long-term favourite language reclamation.
God and languages are in the air. The Australian Federal Government is cross with a radical Islamic sheik who preaches in Arabic (translator spooks required!). The sheik points out, correctly, that many churches advertise services in Korean, Tongan, etc., and this causes no offence (= no drain on the spook translator budget). The NSW State Opposition leader wants immigrants to Australia to learn a subject called "English as a first language", not "English as a second language". "Second", he thinks doesn't reflect the importance of English. Maybe he wants immigrants to talk to their gods in English. Clearly, what linguists think a first language is is not yet a mainstream thought.
And linguists have been debating our connections with missionary linguists, language work done by missionaries, and linguistic software built by the missionary linguist organisation SIL (Semantic compositions (11/1/07) on the panel at the LSA and Anggarrgoon). On one side there are people saying that missionaries roll Dalek-like through the societies of the speakers of the languages they study and do bad things, and so their work is irredeemably sinful. On the other side people say that linguists are also a Dalek species, and so, what the hell, if the SIL software's good and the linguistic descriptions are good, use them. (Setting aside Earthlings who say that both species of Dalek are only into extermination).
And there's the position taken by Heidi Kneebone in a 2005 University of Adelaide doctoral dissertation, The language of the chosen view: the first phase of graphization of Dieri by Hermannsburg Missionaries, Lake Killalpaninna 1867-80. PhD dissertation, Linguistics, University of Adelaide (noted at OzPapersOnline )[1]. Kneebone takes linguists to task for NOT looking at early grammars of the languages they're working on.
Today's Australia Day, the anniversary of the British invading Australia in 1788. Bang! Plants, animals, birds, land-forms got English common names, and the Indigenous language names were displaced. The exceptions were things which had no obvious look-alikes in England: unfamiliar animals (kangaroos, koalas), birds (currawong), plants (kurrajong, quandong), land-forms (billabong, yakka), fish (ponde), and some man-made things and ideas (boomerang, wurley, corroboree).
Two hundred years later, words from Indigenous languages are gradually coming back as parts of scientific names for species.
STOP PRESS
SBS news - Tuesday January 23, 2007 - is likely to have an item on NgaawaGaray.
NgaawaGaray was a summer school in Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay - two New South Wales languages. [Ngaawa and Garay are the words for ‘language’ in Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay]. It was sponsored and organised by Muurrbay and Many Rivers language centres from Nambucca and held at the Koori Centre at the University of Sydney on January 15 - 19. There were 16 students in the Gumbaynggirr course and 11 in Gamilaraay. The Gamilaraay course consisted of part of the ‘Gamilaraay 101’ - taught as ‘Guwaalmiya Gamilaraay’ - a first year subject at University of Sydney, and also taught in TAFE. The Gumbaynggirr course was adapted from the regular course run each year at Muurrbay.
16-18 March 2007 Workshop on Australian Indigenous languages at the Crommelin Field Station, Pearl Beach. This is organised by the Departments of Linguistics of the Universities of Sydney and Newcastle. There's a call for papers out.
24 -26 April 2007: Puliima National Indigenous Languages Information Communication Technology Forum
"Modern ways for ancient words" at Newcastle. Coordinated by the Arwarbukarl Cultural Resource Association, this is is an expo of technology which all has the potential to assist Indigenous Language programs. The content may range from the use of basic equipment such as audio and video recorders, to computer based programs that support the teaching of languages and the production of resources."
25-27 September 2007: Indigenous Languages Conference 2007 This is run as part of LINGAD 2007, along with the Australian Linguistics Society and AUSTRALEX's annual meetings. There's a call for offers to "present on any topic related to the use and strengthening of Australia’s Indigenous languages, run a workshop or panel, or be part of a panel. Indigenous Language workers and Indigenous teachers of Australian Languages are particularly encouraged to participate"
Australian Indigenous place names often suffer distortion in form and meaning when they are adopted into English. The distortion can have many different causes: English speakers might not be able to hear the sounds of the source language properly or they might not understand what place the name really refers to. In the case of Tayan Pic (32°58'4"S, 150°12'58"E — picture shown below), a mountain near Kandos in New South Wales, however, the name has suffered further distortion after its adoption into English because of a misreading of the English transcription of the name. We first have to investigate the evolution of the name in English before we can begin to look into its Australian origin.
Carmel O'Shannessy has just lodged her doctoral thesis Language contact and children's bilingual acquisition: learning a mixed language and Warlpiri in northern Australia in the Sydney eScholarship Repository (D-Space) at the University of Sydney. It's on the emergence of a new language, Light Warlpiri, in the multilingual community of Lajamanu in northern Australia, and on how children acquire this language as well as one of the source languages, classical Warlpiri. It's the first time anyone's looked carefully at mixed languages in Aboriginal Australia, let alone documented the acquisition and development of such a language. A major theme is how children differentiate between the input languages. She's got some very interesting results on how adults and children distribute ergative marking differently in the two languages, but show similar word order patterns in both. The correlation between ergative marking and word order patterns is stronger among children - and Carmel suggests the children are leading language change here.
Go click! It's a ripper!
Wendy Baarda's 2003 report The design and trial of an interactive computer program
Yesterday brought two good news stories: an Indigenous linguist has been honoured as the Northern Territory's Australian of the Year, and the first relic of the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt's last journey has been authenticated.
If you had $350 to teach kids one word of an Indigenous language, what would you do with it?
• pay a skywriter to write Janapurlalki "eagle" over an Eagles grand final footy match in Tennant Creek?
• pay a cheersquad of 5 people to chant Ja na pu rlal ki at the Eagles footy game?
• buy 35 t-shirts printed with wawarta "clothes" and give them to the kids?
• pay someone to reprogram a Barbie doll to say "Ooooh wawarta!"?
• provide two big loaves of damper bread with, spelled out in raisins, kantirri "bread" or marnukuju jangu "with raisins", once a week for a year?
or
• pay a language speaker to work with the children once a week for 4 weeks. And record the classes.
• pay a PhD student a scholarship for three years plus preparation, evaluation and testing expenses to work with speakers on devising a curriculum, lesson plans and teaching materials ( oops - only a very cheap PhD student in a very poor country - thanks Ilan!)
Now you've got $80,000 to get the kids using 230 words. Would you spend it on 230 reprogrammed Barbie dolls? Or on weekly school language classes for fifteen years? Or on a multi-media CD?
The present Australian government's approach to coordinating and delivering (funding for) general services to Indigenous people has failed on its first trial. That's the conclusion drawn in an article on a leaked report by Bill Gray (Chris Graham and Brian Johnstone in the National Indigenous Times). So, what happens about coordinating and delivering money for maintaining and documenting Indigenous languages in Australia? How much is spent? Does more go on documenting than on maintaining and supporting education? I got asked these questions the other day, and had to admit surprised ignorance. (Hey, I SHOULD know. I'm a tax-payer). Here's a start on answering - based on web-trawling.. and maybe some readers can add to it - help, is there an econo-statistician handy?
The making of contemporary Aboriginal learning and literacy: Ngaanyatjarra engagement with changing western practices was a seminar given by Inge Kral today at the Centre for Aboriginal Policy Research. The seminar raised questions about reading and writing practices in Indigenous communities, and about the survival of small Indigenous communities faced with increasing demands from governments for paper work.
Blog catcher: Africa, America, Australia, art, language, literacy, software, travel
27 October, 2006
Sociolingo's Africa is a general blog which includes posts about languages (the writer's based in Mali but draws together material from across Africa). There are some interesting posts on linguistics, literacy - including mother tongue language education. So much seems so familiar. Thanks to this blog I've learned about Litcam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning Launch “The Literacy Project” and of practical handbo