All Australian humanities scholars with an interest in digital scholarship should take this brief opportunity to read and comment on the federal government’s ‘2011 Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure’ discussion paper. Why? Because the two previous ‘Roadmaps’ funded hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ‘research infrastructure’, almost exclusively NOT in the Humanities, but … Read more
As I pointed out here and here, speakers of minority and endangered languages are using Web 2.0 social networking applications like Facebook as a means of interacting and communicating. Well , according to wakablogger, it seems Twitter, the short message site, is also being used by these communities as well. The problem is: how to … Read more
Here’s where I spent the morning: HASS On the Hill. One reason I went is because I’d like to know how to get policy-makers and implementers interested in the information that university researchers have on matters like – language education, mother tongue medium instruction… Before it started, I caught up with a Chinese colleague who … Read more
As in previous years (see here, here and here), we will be running a week of activities concerning endangered languages at SOAS this year. Endangered Languages Week 2011 (ELW2011) runs from 9th to 14th May, and includes a host of events: Meet an Endangered Language, each day throughout the week – a series of short … Read more
The ninth volume of Language Documentation and Description is now in production and can be pre-ordered for 20% off the regular price. LDD 9 is a collection of papers dealing with several topics in language documentation: language documentation and sustainability ontologies in language documentation negation, deixis and loan words in endangered languages book reviews The … Read more
As a result of on-going collaboration between the Foundation for Endangered Languages and the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, all thirteen FEL books (proceedings of their unique annual conferences) can now be purchased securely by credit card through the SOAS online bookstore at http://www.bitly.com/LDDstore. (Scroll down past the LDD volumes for the FEL books.) To … Read more
My colleague Stuart McGill and I have recently completed work on a new book Endangered Languages: Criticial Concepts in Linguistics that will be published by Routledge later this year. At 1,600 pages in 4 volumes it is one of the largest projects I have been involved with. The book consists of 75 key journal articles … Read more
As I mentioned in a previous post, recently anthropologists have pointed to the need to highlight issues of concern, especially in the public media. I suggested that linguists are ahead of the game here, and doing fairly well at “express[ing] their views in public forums, including the popular press”. The media sharing site YouTube is … Read more
“Welcome to this land and welcome to us all”. That’s how on 11th March Aunty Margaret Iselin opened the (tenth or eleventh) Australian Languages Workshop held this time at the University of Queensland’s Marine Biology Research Station on North Stradbroke Island. She grew up on Myora mission, and learned some language from two old grannies. … Read more
The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages edited by Julia Sallabank and myself will be available in the UK next week (and in Australia in June). The book is being launched by Mari Jones at the conference on Language Endangerment: Documentation, Pedagogy, and Revitalization at Cambridge on 25th March. The Handbook covers issues in linguistic diversity … Read more
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