Endangered Languages and Cultures

Books, HTML, audio, images – falling out from fieldwork

10 June 201128 May 2011 by Nick Thieberger

I’ll be going to Vanuatu next month courtesy of Catriona Hyslop’s DoBeS project, to help build an installation of three computer-based interactive dictionaries (Vurës, Tamambo and South Efate) for the Museum there. We will have hyperlinked dictionaries with sound and images where possible. All of this will be HTML-based for low maintenance and to allow new dictionaries to be added to the set over time. This post is aimed at outlining the method used to get these various files into deliverable formats and follows on from an earlier one where I talked about using ITunes to get media back to the village.

Searching in Endangered Languages Archives

27 May 2011 by admin

In a previous post I looked at who might be using materials deposited in endangered languages digital archives. In this post I will look at searching for information in several of the larger archives. The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) has a simple search interface which allows users to find materials … Read more

Happy snaps

23 May 2011 by admin

If you ask a linguist what they collect when they do fieldwork on a language they will probably tell you that they make audio and video recordings. They then go on to annotate these in various ways, such as by adding information about pronunciation (transcription), meaning (translation) or word structure (morpheme-by-morpheme glossing) and sentence structure … Read more

Transcribing and giving back

22 May 2011 by admin

There is an interesting post on the That munanga linguist blog about what he calls “slow fieldwork” where community members in the Northern Territory do their own transcriptions of recordings. He relates this to part of the process of “giving back” that has been talked about here and here and here.

A Warlpiri double launch

4 July 201118 May 2011 by David Nash

The annual meeting of Warlpiri-patu-kurlangu Jaru Inc. and its professional development workshop known as Warlpiri Triangle this year is being hosted by Yuendumu CEC, 16-19 May 2011.

This evening in the Yuendumu school library two resources were launched to a large gathering including senior Warlpiri women.

Have your say

16 May 2011 by admin

As regular readers of this blog may know, Clair Bowern has been compiling a massive database of lexical materials on Australian languages in her NSF-funded project on reconstruction and language classification. She now has over 600,000 items in her database from 1,000 sources (all individually referenced and attributed, unlike some other collections: see here and … Read more

Jandamarra’s War

13 May 2011 by Jane Simpson

Jandamarra’s War was on ABC tonight. It’s based on the book Jandamarra and the Bunuba resistance (Howard Pedersen and Banjo Woorunmurra, Magabala Books). In the jagged red and grey country of the Bunuba, a boy is enticed by new technology and new ways of behaving and relating to others, which gradually estrange him from his … Read more

London’s Language Landscape

6 May 2011 by admin

A group of SOAS students taking the MA in Language Documentation and Description this year organised a project to map the diversity of languages spoken by staff, students and visitors to SOAS, and to record language samples. They have identified scores of languages in use around SOAS and recorded 40 samples, including proverbs, poetry and … Read more

Interpreters for speakers of Indigenous languages

4 May 2011 by Jane Simpson

Thanks to Kazuko Obata, thanks to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald , thanks to a media release (19/4/2011) from the Commonwealth Ombudsman, I came across the report Talking in language: Indigenous language interpreters and government communication [.pdf].

The report contains an interesting table detailing how various government agencies are currently deploying (or not) interpreter services. As they indicate, having good policies is a good start. What’s important is whether the people charged with carrying them out know how to carry them out, can carry them out, and do carry them out.

Here are some of the good recommendations and observations that struck me:

Trumpeting revival at Lajamanu

2 March 20192 May 2011 by David Nash

My recent interest in some traditional Australian aerophones sprang from hearing about the Warlpiri kurlumpurrngu or ‘Warlpiri didjeridu’.

The instrument was shown in a event on Thursday 21 April at the National Library, when Steven Patrick Jangala and Yukihiro Doi presented ‘Milpirri: A Response to Cultural Loss’ to the National Australian Folklore Conference 2011. The pair also have a paper accepted for ICTM 2011 in Newfoundland this July, ‘Milpirri: An Aboriginal community event that joins the ancient with the contemporary.’

Milpirri is a biennial gathering at Lajamanu¹, with ‘extraordinary performance events’ (source). Milpirri has been a focus for maintenance of traditional Warlpiri performance which has also ‘toured to local and national festivals’.

Steve Jampijinpa is a Warlpiri man who has long worked at Lajamanu Community Education Centre (CEC), and who has led Milpirri. Yukihiro Doi (土井幸宏) is an ethnomusicology PhD student who has spent time at Lajamanu and also been involved in several Milpirri. Together they appear on a short video (with transcript) [update: now only on YouTube] (also on YouTube) in which we can glimpse a kurlumpurrngu and something of its revival at Lajamanu. As the NT Mojos mobile journalist (and Jerry Jangala’s granddaughter) Jasmine Patrick says on the commentary, the kurlumpurrngu ‘was used in the early days and it was lost in our days but Jerry is bringing the Kurlumpurrungu back to the community’.

There are a couple of linguistic angles on this revival.

Notes

Records of the last three Milpirri are available through Tracks Indigenous Projects