Good on you LTU!

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I have a soft spot for La Trobe University (LTU) in Australia. LTU is where I got my first tenured job 30 years ago (just over two years after finishing my PhD — ah, those were the days) and still the place I have worked the longest in a somewhat peripatetic academic career (summarised here. … Read more

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SOAS publication plans

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This month the eighth volume of Language Documentation and Description (LDD8) hit the streets (you can order it at a 25% discount, and also get 25% off any of our other volumes ordered before 31 December 2010). It’s a special issue on documentation of endangered oral literatures and is guest edited by Imogen Gunn and … Read more

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Consortium on Training in Language Documentation and Conservation (CTLDC)

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I recently attended a symposium titled Models for capacity development in language documentation and conservation hosted by ILCAA at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The symposium brought together a group of people involved in supporting language work in the Asia-Pacific region in various ways (see the website for a full list): academic (Institute of Linguistics, Minhsiung, Taiwan, Beijing, China, Goroka, PNG, Batchelor, Australia, Bangkok, Thailand) and community-based (Manokwari, West-Papua; Tshanglalo, Bhutan; Bhasha Research Centre and Adivasi Academy, Gudjarat, India; Miromaa, Australia), using film (Sorosoro, France), or archiving language records (PARADISEC). The aim of the meeting was to build a network that would continue to link between training activities to support language work, the Consortium on Training in Language Documentation and Conservation (CTLDC), whose planning group members are listed here.

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New book ‘Re-awakening languages’

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[ Forwarded by John Hobson] Re-awakening languages: theory and practice in the revitalisation of Australia’s Indigenous languages Edited by John Hobson, Kevin Lowe, Susan Poetsch and Michael Walsh Sydney University Press ISBN: 9781920899554 The Indigenous languages of Australia have been undergoing a renaissance over recent decades. Many languages that had long ceased to be heard … Read more

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Honours theses

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Around Australia, honours degrees are under threat from academic administrators who see them as resource-intensive and fee-sparse. Often terrific work is done in honours theses. But this work often doesn’t get publicised, and we need that kind of publicity to show just why honours degrees are worth doing, and worth fighting for. So it’s great … Read more

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No more Ngarla

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Friday this week (5th November 2010) marks a sad day for Aboriginal languages of the Pilbara region of Western Australia with the funeral of Alexander (“Sandy”) Brown, the last fluent speaker of Ngarla. Sandy was born in 1930 near the De Grey River in the traditional country of the Ngarla which stretched eastwards for about … Read more

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Alive & Digital event in New York

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The Trace Foundation is a New York based non-profit non-government organisation that has been working with Tibetan communities in China since 1993, mainly on education, health, rural development, and culture. The Foundation offers grants in these areas, and hosts the Latse Library of Tibetan materials at its home base in Greenwich Village in New York City.
Over the past two years Trace Foundation has organised various events, both exhibitions and lecture series on a range of topics, including minority and endangered languages, especially Tibetan. The series has included the following language-related symposia:

  • Minority Language in Today’s Global Society — 22 November 2008
  • Perspectives in Mother Tongue Education — 21-22 February 2009
  • Vitality and Viability of Minority Languages — 23-24 October 2009
  • Perspectives on Language Standardization — 27 March 2010
  • The Relationship between Language, Culture, and Ecology — 24-25 September 2010

On 20-21 November 2010 the sixth and final symposium called Alive & Digital will be held, bringing together scholars and experts who have worked extensively on minority language preservation and new technologies. The main topics to be discussed are what technological breakthroughs lie ahead and how technology today is impacting linguistic minorities worldwide. The first day will involve a diverse group of speakers discussing past and present trends in the relationship between technology and language, and the second day will explore technological issues specific to the Tibetan language including the Tibetan font converter, Unicode, and iPhone applications.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.

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Vaarwel, adieu, farvel, addio, farewell Michael

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It was very sad to learn* of the death of the linguist Michael Clyne. He will be remembered for his original work on the immigrant languages of Australia, on sociolinguistics (pragmatics, language contact and quantitative work on census data), and on bilingualism.
But most of all, many of us will miss his great generosity and his passion for helping speakers of all languages use the languages of their choice. Two strongly-held beliefs which he fought hard to get his colleagues, Governments and people to share were:
1. the importance of language rights: the right to learn a language and the right to learn through a language
2. the dangers of the monolingual mindset which, through ignorance, both discriminates against speakers of other languages, and destroys the social, cultural and economic resources that multilingualism affords a country.
Letters, speeches, opinion pieces and articles flowed from him in support of these causes (e.g. 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010). Good that his efforts were recognised – he was made a Member of the Order of Australia.
Another cause was the need to bridge the divide between applied linguistics and general linguistics, a divide that he strongly believed was unnecessary and counter-productive. Bridging it in himself, he was a member of both the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Until illness slowed him down, he faithfully attended annual meetings of both the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia and the Australian Linguistics Society. And he devised a delightful way of bringing them together – by establishing a prize administered by both societies – for the best postgraduate research thesis on some aspect of immigrant bilingualism and language contact.
What a man. Vaarwel, adieu, farvel, addio, farewell.

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The play’s the thing

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Back in 2003 David Crystal published a paper entitled “Endangered Languages: what should we do now”, in the first volume of Language Documentation and Description in which he suggested that it was time that the Arts got interested in endangered languages and he wondered when we would be seeing TV programmes, novels, plays, paintings, symphonies, … Read more

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