Endangered Languages and Cultures

3L Summer School 2010

5 February 201114 March 2010 by admin

The 3L Consortium (comprising Lyon, Leiden and London (SOAS) Universities) has been running an annual series of international summer schools on language documentation and description. The first was held in Lyon in 2008, and the second was in London in 2009. This year the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) will host the third 3L … Read more

Contact..

5 February 20114 March 2010 by Jane Simpson

.. is showing TONIGHT on ABC television 9.25 pm. It describes how in the 1960s Martu people of the Western Desert of Australia first encountered non-Indigenous Australians. It’s based on the book Cleared out by Sue Davenport, Peter Johnson and Yuwali, who appears in the film. Yuwali has lived through contact, missions, remote settlements, Native … Read more

“Let us love native language and make it lovely” – International Mother Language Day – 21 February

5 February 201121 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

Today is UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day (IMLD) which is intended to “promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism”. The UN have just launched UN Language Days, “a new initiative which seeks to celebrate multilingualism and cultural diversity as well as to promote equal use of all six of its official working languages throughout the … Read more

Fishing

5 February 201118 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

For a beautifully organised site run by a small group, check out Sarah Colley‘s new site: the Sydney fish project. What fish have been found in archaeological sites in Sydney? What do the bits look like, what does the whole fish look like (i.e. a reference skeleton)? What fish did Aborigines eat at what period? … Read more

Random locations of grammars and dictionaries

5 February 201117 February 2010 by Nick Thieberger

Further to the discussion of making online material discoverable (using standard metadata or via a more elaborate infrastructure proposed by ELIIP), other useful sources of free online grammars or dictionaries include ‘Online Books’ and the Project Gutenberg sites. These are ‘free’ as in unencumbered by intellectual property or copyright concerns, typically because the authors have been dead for over 50 years, not because they were placed in an open access archive. A sample of the files available follows, but wouldn’t it be great to have a way of announcing these items using standard metadata terms so they could all be searched via a dedicated language service? For example, the entry for Sgau Karen below is followed by Sgaw Karen, so google searching on Sgaw will only give you one of these three items.

Bypassing written documentation – oral annotation of recorded text

5 February 201115 February 2010 by Nick Thieberger

A large corpus of recorded oral tradition can be created using two recording machines, one playing back the spoken texts and the other used to capture an oral annotation. Recording speakers who are commenting on earlier recordings is a method for providing annotations that bypasses literacy.

Speaking Gamilaraay

5 February 201112 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

Sydney University students – your chance to study an Indigenous Australian language this semester! KOCR2605 – Speaking Gamilaraay 1 – University of Sydney Gamilaraay is an Indigenous Australian language from the mid-northwest of NSW that is currently undergoing revitalisation. This unit of study will provide students with a basic competence in speaking, understanding, reading and … Read more

Revisiting the bilingual education figures

5 February 201110 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

In Australia, there’s been a lot of downplaying recently of the fact that young kids understand what’s happening in the classroom better if they hear it in their first language – from the NAPLAN tests which don’t factor this in, to the MySchool comparisons which ignore it, to the English literacy push expressed recently by … Read more

Literacy isn’t just literacy in English

5 February 20119 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

On Ockham’s Razor (24/1/2010) a psychologist, Margot Prior, talks about the need to do something about Indigenous children’s literacy. There’s some good stuff in it – the need for more Indigenous teachers, for partnerships between schools and communities, for teachers to be sensitive to the differences between non-standard English and Standard English (note that this is NOT limited to Indigenous children – there are plenty of other children in Australia who don’t speak Standard English as a home language).
Prior’s overall solution?

If preschool education at a minimum of 15 hours per week was universally available, and every child had at least a year of programs which focused on enhancing language and pre-literacy skills, provided by committed preschool teachers, many more children would begin school well prepared for reading and writing.

I expect politicians will welcome this solution. Why should we treat it with caution?
First, for Prior “language” = “English”. But her talk shows some basic misunderstandings of languages and how children learn languages and reading and writing. The distinction between speaking a traditional language and speaking a non-standard variety of English are treated as if they presented the same difficulties for children attempting to learn standard English. They present rather different challenges – the methods of teaching English as a second language have to be different from those of teaching English as a second dialect.
As worrying are remarks such as the following:

Boa Sr

5 February 20115 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

Boa Sr was apparently the last speaker of the Great Andamanese language Bo (or Aka-Bo, described as extinct in the Ethnologue). According to Survival International there were around 5000 Great Andamanese in 1858 , when the British invaded the Andaman Islands. Now there are around 50 – killings, diseases and forcible resettlement having caused the … Read more