Endangered Languages and Cultures

To celebrate Endangered Languages Week at SOAS we have cut the price of all issues of Language Documentation and Description by 20% until the end of May (copies now GBP 10, including postage). You can place orders through our online store.

Also, all Foundation for Endangered Languages books are now 25% off. Orders may be placed here.

With the upgrade to a new catalogue system just around the corner, PARADISEC staff are busily fine-tuning metadata within existing collections whilst attending to business as usual and  accessioning recordings and documents representing a wide range of languages. Take a glimpse of our latest additions and the regions they originate from below to get a feel for the linguistic diversity that is developing within our archives:

As part of Endangered Languages Week at SOAS some of our postgraduate students have prepared a series of podcasts about a range of topics that are now available from SOAS online radio.

They include Facts for newbies, an introduction to endangered languages and their study.

Launch of the Language Landscape website that describes a project to map unexpected languages in unexpected places.

Sand drawings of Vanuatu about a unique form of communicational art which represent physical objects as well as stories of the local population, and is listed by UNESCO as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Palatography describes how linguists study the articulation of sounds and the inner workings of the mouth when speaking.

Have a listen to the various topics our students talk about.

Ruth Singer recaps some of the interesting points of the last week’s Linguistics in the Pub, an informal gathering of linguists and language activists that is held monthly in Melbourne

The announcement for this month’s Linguistics in the Pub outlined the topic as follows:
The aim of language documentation, broadly speaking is to document linguistic diversity. At one level the diversity refers to the range of languages and dialects that are used. But zooming in a bit closer diversity can be understood to refer to the variation in how language is used across different speakers and contexts, i.e. social variation. Despite the close link between linguistic diversity and social variation, variation is often viewed mainly as a problem in initial stages of documenting and describing a language. It is more challenging to describe a system of phonology, grammar or morphology when it varies widely, than to describe a system with little variation. For this reason, it is often only after documenting one variety that linguists usually try to document broader socialvariation and patterns of language use. In this session, we will look at some good examples of documentation of linguistic variation and discuss how we might include some aspects of social variation in language documentation projects right from the start.
Continue reading ‘Discussion about Social Variation and Language Documentation: LIP Discussion’ »

This year’s Endangered Languages Week will be held at SOAS from 3rd to 11th May 2012. The focus this year is on Language, Performance and Culture. There will be presentations of films, talks, and performances about endangered languages and cultures over the week.

Bob Holman, poet, film maker and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance in New York City will present aspects of his work. Diaspora communities in London (including Sherpa, Kurdish and Maori singing groups) will also perform.

Open Day, with twelve exhibitors, will be held on 9th May 11am to 5pm in The Rausing Room (R201).

For more details of all the events check out the full programme of activities.

All events are free, so if you are in London over the next two weeks do come along.

Note: The poster photograph by PhD student Michael Franjieh comes from his extensive documentation of the sand drawing and narrative performance tradition of Ambrym Island, Vanuatu — Mike’s work, along with that of other students and researchers, will feature in the Exhibition that will run throughout Endangered Languages Week.

At the Aboriginal Languages Workshop at North Stradbroke Island last month, as usual there were things to celebrate. I had the honour of helping launch the Kaytetye Dictionary*. Book launches are a lovely way of thinking about and celebrating people’s work and ideas. Here’s what I said, more or less.

Things I love about this dictionary

1. it’s alkenhe (big) and contains elperterre (hard language).

2. It has lots of audiences: community members, linguists, scientists, teachers, people who want to learn the language. And the compilers, Myfany Turpin and the Kaytetye linguist, Alison Ross, have done their best to help all of these audiences. This is a dictionary that we will all learn from, not just for the encyclopaedic knowledge of Kaytetye it embodies, but also for how to present dictionary information.

3. I was trying to think of a metaphor to describe the Kaytetye Dictionary project. And I came up with the quandong tree (not a tree from Kaytetye country but not far off…).

Quandong tree: fruit
The bright red fruit looks pretty and it’s delicious. So I dip into the Kaytetye dictionary anywhere and I find things I love, I just keep on eating. Here are some:

Pronunciation: Arandic languages have a spelling system which takes a lot of getting used to – but the introduction to the dictionary is a real winner. It explains the system, demonstrates how sounds are made, gives respellings that will help English speakers, and even fuzzy spelling search clues. One thing I really like is the cross reference to words that sound similar arerre ‘collarbone’ and ararre ‘white bread’ are cross-referenced to help you distinguish between them.

Words: The dictionary includes not just traditional words but words for new things, words which show Kaytetye as a living language, one that a speech community uses to talk about things like batik wax, atnkere, and not-so-everyday things like guardian angels, arremparrenge. It also includes placenames, and a map with around 100 place names including country names. Yes!

It includes words for things which are very hard to elicit without the wholehearted deep involvement of native speakers. The clitic =akwele is glossed as:
“Of course, certainly; shows you are sure that what you are saying is true because you are speaking from your own knowledge, experience of authority” and then as a second sense:
When someone is repeatedly telling you something, akwele shows that you have heard what the person is saying and suggests that they don’t need to keep on about it.”

ayntengarrenke is glossed as “Crawl back to someone after rubbishing them”. Not the kind of word that comes up in elicitation sessions..

And the gloss leads to another thing I like: Myf and Alison have used a lot of everyday language from Central Australia which will make it more useful to Kaytetye people. So, – you’ll find mpwarle arlwar-atnenke glossed as ‘busting for the toilet’.

Quandong tree: roots and branches
Like a quandong tree,the roots and branches are what produce the dictionary – and that is the fieldwork, and the resulting collection of tapes, transcriptions and linkages between example sentences and speakers that underlies the dictionary. This dictionary is just a fraction of what’s contained in that collection, which has already produced the Kaytetye Picture Dictionary. If you find something missing, it’s almost certainly in the massive underlying collection – e.g. following the practice of the other Arandic dictionaries, examples are not sourced, but that information is in the underlying files.

Quandong tree: root sustaining
A special thing about quandong trees is that, to start growing in the first place, they have to have initial sustenance from the roots of trees growing around. And for dictionaries, that sustenance is generosity. This generosity has manifested in many forms.

First are the more than 70 Kaytetye speakers who gave their time and enthusiasm to work with Myf and Alison on the dictionary. Many have since died, and the dictionary honours their work.

Second are the earlier researchers on Kaytetye and on Arandic: Ken Hale, Harold Koch, Grace Koch, and Gavan Breen, who freely added the material they’d collected to form the basis of the Kaytetye dictionary.

Third is the community of Alice Springs, an amazingly collaborative place, where Myf was able to collaborate with natural scientists who have worked to identify plants, animals, reptiles. (but she did say in her speech that some insects had proved hard to label, and the best they could suggest for witchetty grubs was that she let them hatch to see what they turned into..)

Fourth is the wonderful Alice Springs collaboration on picture dictionaries, learners guides and reference dictionaries published by IAD Press. A whole grove of them has grown up since the early 1980s. Through the efforts of Gavan Breen, Veronica Dobson, Cliff Goddard, Jenny Green, John Henderson, Robert Hoogenraad, Jim Wafer, David Wilkins and many others, there are materials such as picture dictionaries, learners guides and reference dictionaries for Mparntwe Arrernte, Alyawarr, Anmatyerr, Pitjantjatjara, Warlpiri…. and each dictionary compiler has built on the dictionaries of the past, so that the Kaytetye Dictionary draws on the information and good ideas of the previous dictionaries.

Finally there is the generosity of the compilers. Myf talked about Alison Ross and how she had worked with her grandmother and had produced several hundred written definitions in Kaytetye. I talked about Myf. She has over many years published an enormous amount of analysis and documentation of Kaytetye that is of great benefit to the Kaytetye community as well as to linguists. In 2000 she produced A Learner’s Guide to Kaytetye. IAD Press, Alice Springs, NT. In 2003 came the text collection Growing Up Kaytetye. Stories by Tommy Kngwarraye Thompson. (It’s one of his paintings that provides the beautiful cover of the dictionary). In 2004 she and Alison Ross produced the Kaytetye Picture Dictionary, and a CD Awelye Akwelye: Kaytetye women’s songs from Arnerre, Central Australia. (This was distributed by Papulu Apparr-kari language and culture centre, Tennant Creek. Recordings by Grace, Koch, Linda Barwick and Myfany Turpin, commentary by Myfany Turpin and Alison Ross. Somewhere along the line she produced a Kaytetye version of Sesame Street. Oh and by the by she fitted in her PhD thesis, Form and meaning of Akwelye: a Kaytetye women’s song series from Central Australia: University of Sydney PhD, 2005.
And now, this enormous dictionary. In today’s academic climate this has been an extraordinarily generous act. And it’s been a family act – one of the three proof-readers was Myf’s mum.

Alkapertawe! (finished, completed, done)

In the past month (since my previous update post) the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS has been moving ahead with leaps and bounds. We now have 66 deposits available on our website, with six more having been added on Monday this week. There are now 41,690 files available online, amounting to 2 terabytes (2,000 gigabytes) of audio, video, image, text and metadata materials.

Our user group has also jumped and now stands at 545; it has been increasing at the rate of 1 per day for the past month! It is exciting to see the rising numbers of people interested in using the endangered languages materials in ELAR.

This will probably be my last update about ELAR here — that’s right, you won’t have to read about “ELAR update update update” :-). We have just launched on Twitter (@ELARarchive) and Facebook (ELAR archive) so if you want to keep in touch with our activities in future you can follow us on Twitter or become our Facebook friend. And if you are not already a user do sign up here.

Update on Laurie Baymarrwangga, Senior Australian of the Year, 2012 and patron of the Crocodile Islands Rangers.

Her life story ‘Big Boss: Race against Time’ will screen on Sunday the 13th of May at 1.30pm on the ABC’s Message Stick Program. And here’s a bit about it from Bentley James, Crocodile Islands Rangers.

95 years young ‘Big Boss’ Laurie Baymarrwangga has launched a new project amid renewed calls to save Australia’s threatened indigenous languages. The Senior Australian of the year is working hard on a trilingual Yan-nhangu Dictionary Publishing Project that she hopes will be distributed to every primary school in Australia. A unique and profoundly important project. Working from her homeland on remote Murrungga Island she believes this three language learning resource will protect her rare language Yan-nhangu, and help promote the living language Dhuwal/a, (7000 speakers). It will also encourage English-bilingual teaching and indigenous language education across Australia. Filled with colour pictures, ecological knowledge, art, songs and stories of country that are the real jewels of our distinctive national cultural heritage it is part of her struggle to save her world for the children of the future.

Please pass this information along your networks.
Details can be found at

https://crocodileislandsrangers.wordpress.com/

Back in the old days when some of us were younger and starting out on our language documentation and description careers (for me in 1972, as described in this blog post) the world was pretty much analogue and we didn’t have digital hardware or software to think about.

Back then recordings were made with reel-to-reel tape recorders, like the Uher Report, or if you had really fancy kit a Nagra. For those of us working in Australia on Aboriginal languages you could archive your tapes at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS), as it then was, later the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). They would copy your tapes onto their archive masters and return the originals to you and all you, as a depositor, had to do was fill in tape deposit sheets. You were supplied with a book of these, alternately white and green, with a sheet of carbon paper to be placed between them. For each tape you had to complete a white sheet listing basic metadata and a summary of the contents of the tape, tear off the white copies (keeping the green carbon copy) and submit them to the AIAS archive. In addition, the Institute encouraged the preparation of tape audition sheets where the content of the tapes was summarised alongside time codes (in minutes and seconds) starting from the beginning of the tape. Sometimes these were created by the depositor and sometimes by the resident linguist (at that time Peter Sutton).

So, if you wanted to find out where in your stack of tapes you could find Story X by Speaker Y you simply had to look at the deposit sheets and/or the audition sheets.

Alas, those days are gone and we are in the digital world, where our experience is mediated via software interfaces that can fool us into seeing the world the way the interface presents it. For language documenters Toolbox is often the software tool of analytical choice (along with ELAN)¹ for the processing and value adding analysis and annotation of recordings. As I claimed in a previous post, the existence of Toolbox means that for many documenters annotational value adding only means interlinear glossing, and alternatives such as overview or summary annotation (like the old tape audition sheets) are not part of their tool set. I have two pieces of evidence for this:

1. the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS has so far received around 100 deposits comprising roughly 800,000 files. Among these deposits there are many that are made up entirely of media files (plus basic cataloguing metadata) with no textual representation of the content of the files beyond a short description in the cataloguing metadata. When asked about annotations, depositors typically respond that they “are working on transcription and glossing” but because of the time needed they cannot provide anything now. They do not seem to consider an alternative, namely time-coded overview annotation which can (and probably should) be done for all the media files, only some of which would then be selected and given priority for interlinear glossing. Why? One reason might be because there is no dedicated software tool designed and set up to do this in an easy and simple manner (interestingly a tool that can be so used, and that produces nice time-coded XML output is Transcriber, though it is generally thought of as a tool for transcription annotation only — it also does not have a “reader mode” that would allow for easy viewing and searching across a set of overview annotations created with it);
2. during training courses and public presentations over the past couple of years I have been warning that current approaches to language documentation risk the creation of “data dumps” (which I have also called “data middens”) because researchers are not well trained in corpus and workflow management and additionally suffer from ILGB or “interlinear gloss blindness” which drives them to see textual value adding annotation in terms of the interlinear glossing paradigm² The most recent example of such a presentation was during last months grantee training course at SOAS (the Powerpoint slides from my presentation are available on Slideshare). All but one of the grantees attending the training had never heard of, or considered creating, overview summary annotation before launching (selectively) into transcription and interlinear glossing of their recordings.

I may be wrong about the source of the current ILGB and perhaps Toolbox is not (solely) to blame, but I do believe that it plays a part in a narrowing of conceptual thinking about annotation in language documentation, and hence the behaviour of language documenters.

NB: Thanks to Andrew Garrett for his comments on my previous post that caused me to think more deeply about these issues and attempt to explicate and exemplify them more clearly here.

Notes

1. ELAN is a tool designed for time-aligned transcription and annotation of media files, and is also widely used by language docunenters, bringing with it its own kind of window on the world that I do not discuss here
2. There may be a separate further dimension to be concerned about that results from the shift from analogue to digital hardware, rather than being a software issue. In the old days tapes were expensive and junior researchers in particular only had access to a rationed supply and therefore had to think seriously about what and how much to record. Today, with digital storage being so cheap and easy to use (especially for copying and file transfer), there is a temptation to “record everything” on multiple machines (one or more video cameras plus one or more audio recorders) and not write much down because “you can always listen to it later”. This can easily and quickly give rise to megabytes of files to be managed and processed. I saw this temptation among the students taking my Fieldmethods course this year — they learned after a few sessions of working with the consultant this way about the pain that then comes from the need to search through hours of digital recordings for which they had few fieldnotes or metadata annotations.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of my first venture into linguistic fieldwork and my first data collection on an Australian Aboriginal language. Looking back it was a kind of crazy way to start my career, but nonetheless one that got me set on a path that has given me the chance to work on 12 Australian languages and meet and learn from some amazing people.

Like the story of how I started Linguistics at ANU that I told last year, this one has an accidental component, but one affecting someone else, not me. This will become clear later.

Our story begins in March 1972 when I was in my second year BA (Asian Studies) course at ANU and enrolled in Bob Dixon’s Australian Languages course that he was teaching for the first time. We had just started off, getting an overview of the national linguistic scene in the 18th century and starting to study Dyirbal from north Queensland using the draft of Bob’s book that was published by Cambridge University Press later in the year. We raced through phonology (bypassing phonetics — have a look at the structure of Bob’s Dyirbal grammar to get an idea of how he dealt with these topics at the time) and on into nominal cases and verb conjugations. All very exciting stuff, especially as I gained the impression (perhaps wrongly) that so much of this was new and we were learning about exciting stuff that the old codgers like Capell and Wurm got wrong.

The time came for the end of Term 1 and the Easter holidays (Easter Sunday was 2nd April 1972) after which we had our first assignment due. I mentioned to Bob that I was going home to visit my family in Nemingha for the holidays and he said something like “great — you can do your assignment on the Kamilaroi language from that area”. He pointed me to the work of William Ridley and R.H. Mathews (see Austin 2008 for references) and told me that he had spent a few days in the town of Moree in 1971 as a result of his car breaking down on his way back to Canberra from fieldwork in Cairns (the incident is mentioned in Dixon 1984). During his enforced stay Bob had tracked down and interviewed six people and, as Austin 2008 says:

According to his fieldnotes, Dixon found that ‘no one remembers more than a few words’. … Together these people were able to recollect about 150 vocabulary items but no morphology or syntax. Dixon lodged recordings of the first two consultants at AIATSIS Canberra (AIATSIS Archive tape 2615).

Bob gave me access to his notes and the list of interviewees and suggested I go out to Moree (a mere 288 kilometers north-west from where my parents lived) and Toomelah Aboriginal settlement near Boggabilla, a further 125km north of Moree, to see if I could check his materials and collect more data for my assignment. As it happened, my mother knew some social services personnel in Tamworth who put me in touch with a medical team that made regular visits from Tamworth to Aboriginal patients in Moree and who kindly offered to let me go along with them on their April visit. They also organised for me to be accommodated by a local Moree nursing sister and her husband, and to accompany her on a day trip to Toomelah. So I set off, 19 years old and really unprepared, never having (knowingly) met an Aboriginal person before, let alone interviewed anyone or tried to write down what they might say to me. My only phonetics training was a few classes in first year and Bob’s quick overview, and I had zero training in fieldmethods (that came the next year when John Haiman had us working with a speaker of Hua from Papua New Guinea). Bob’s only advice that I recall was to buy some packets of cigarettes (“they like Marlboro”) and offer them to people as an inducement to talk to me — I remember this led to a couple of weird conversations: me “Wanna smoke?”, interviewee “Thanks. Aren’t you going to have one?”, me “No, I don’t smoke”, interviewee “Huh?”.

Anyway, I ended up spending three days in Moree and Toomelah, interviewed five people (only two of whom, Leila Orcher and Ron McIntosh, had been interviewed by Bob) and created my first ever fieldnotes. I left Moree and hitchhiked the long way back to Tamworth (via Narrabri and Gunnedah), somehow managing to catch rides that got me back to Tamworth before dark on the same day. I probably covered 1,000km in the five days but I had had my first fieldwork experience and have never looked back for 40 years.

Postscript
I managed to complete the assignment for Bob and got an A for it. I went back to Moree and Toomelah in December 1973 for my second field trip, with a car and a tape recorder this time, and re-interviewed and recorded my 1972 consultants plus six other people (for details see Austin 2008). The result was 212 cross-checked vocabulary items and half a dozen sentence-length fixed expressions in Gamilaraay (as it later came to be known) that people remembered their parents or grandparents using (and unanalysable by the interviewees), like yuulngin ngaya ginyi, dhalaa dhuwarr “I’m hungry, where’s my bread?”. My next trip to an Aboriginal community was in 1974 when I accompanied Luise Hercus to South Australia to meet Diyari (Dieri) speakers and be introduced to her style of fieldwork as an apprentice. But that’s another story.

References
Austin, Peter K. 2008. The Gamilaraay (Kamilaroi) Language, northern New South Wales — A Brief History of Research. In William McGregor (ed.) Encountering Aboriginal languages: studies in the history of Australian linguistics, 37-58. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
[ prepublication version available at http://www.hrelp.org/aboutus/staff/peter_austin/AustinGamil.pdf]

Dixon, R.M.W. 1972. The Dyirbal language of north Queensland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dixon, R.M.W. 1984. Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.