Send a letter to a Minister – Ngapartji Ngapartji

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[From Alex Kelly, Ngapartji Ngapartji and BIGhART] Dear friends and supporters, After 5 years working on Ngapartji Ngapartji, building the language website [and see blogpost] and touring the show, we have the opportunity to engage with the people who can help move the issue of Indigenous languages forward in leaps and bounds. Currently, without any … Read more

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Endangered languages and finances

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The financial difficulties currently facing the world’s economies are having an impact on funding and support for research on endangered languages in various ways. (I heard the current situation referred to in Australia last month as The GFC (“Global Financial Crisis”), an acronym that I initially confused with The BFG (as a Roald Dahl fan) … Read more

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EuroBABEL projects announced

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As I reported back in October 2007, the European Science Foundation has been working on a project called EuroBABEL(standing for “Better Analyses Based on Endangered Languages”) as part of the EUROCORES collaborative research infrastructure. The main goal of the EuroBABEL is:

“to promote empirical research on underdescribed endangered languages, both spoken and signed, that aims at changing and refining our ideas about linguistic structure in general and about language in relation to cognition, social and cultural organization and related issues in a trans-/multi-disciplinary perspective”

After a complex selection process that involved review by an international expert panel and then negotiations with national funding agencies, ESF has just announced the successful EuroBABEL projects:

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Gayarragi, winangali, a new language resource – David Nathan

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from David Nathan,
HRELP, Endangered Languages Archive, SOAS
Gayarragi, winangali, a new Gamilaraay/Yuwaalaraay language resource, is now available. Click on the picture to download.Download Gayarragi, winangali

Gayarragi, winangali is an interactive multimedia resource for the Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay languages of northern New South Wales, Australia. It is aimed at language learners at all levels, and anyone interested in these languages. It contains extensive language material, including audio. The main features are:

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Fieldwork workshops

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It seems that linguistic fieldwork has become a topic that is attracting quite a lot of interest lately. As Sheena Van Der Mark from La Trobe University recently wrote, there will be a workshop on Non-linguistic aspects of fieldwork at the Australian Linguistic Society annual conference in July.
On the 22nd of this month, SOAS Linguistics Department will be hosting a workshop on Teaching field linguistics techniques, organised in conjunction with the LLAS, the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, the UK national body which supports teaching of languages, linguistics and area studies in higher education. We anticipate roughly 40 attendees, including students interested in learning more about fieldwork, and staff who are considering how fieldwork might fit into the linguistics curriculum. Presentations will be given by staff and post-graduate students from SOAS, Manchester University and Queen Mary, University of London, covering the following topics (in line with my remarks from two years ago here and here (see especially the comments section), we are aiming to cover a range of fieldwork types, including language documentation-type fieldwork and urban sociolinguistic-type fieldwork):

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Samson and Delilah

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A couple of weeks ago I watched “Samson and Delilah” at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station along with maybe 1700 other people, black and white, on the grass or swags and a few on camp chairs. It was a spectacular place for a premiere, the screen set up against red cliffs and white gums.
Several reviews have come out, by David Stratton, and by Julie Rigg on the ABC.
It’s a bleak fairytale that’s beautifully filmed and staged – the light at different times of day and in different places, the shadows when Samson is dancing, the strangeness of living under a bridge in the Todd River.

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Sacred Earth Network – Endangered Languages Program

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[passed on from the Foundation for Endangered Languages] Media release: Sacred Earth Network, a non-profit organization located in Petersham, Massachusetts, is continuing its Endangered Languages Program after its successful launch in 2008. Endangered Languages Program aims to support preservation and revival of those indigenous languages which are threatened with extinction and which are vital to … Read more

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ESL in Indigenous Australian contexts

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Way back when (actually 20-21 February), I went to the National Symposium on Assessing English as a Second/Additional Language or Dialect in the Australian Context. Jill Wigglesworth and I gave a talk on some of the problems we see with the NAPLAN testing of second language learners of English, in particular Indigenous children living in remote communities where they mostly only hear standard English at school or on the telly. There were plenty of bloggable moments and discussion, but life got in the way of actual blogging.
Now, thanks to Adriano Truscott, I’ve got the link to the handouts and powerpoints of the presentations. Here they are.
And here [.pdf] also are the recommendations that people concerned with Indigenous education made.

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Report – First International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation – Nick Thieberger

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[from Nick Thieberger] The 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) was held in Honolulu from March 12-14th this year. With a theme of “supporting small languages together” the emphasis was on collaborations, between linguists and speakers, and between linguistics and other disciplines. Over 300 people attended the conference with over 150 presentations … Read more

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Birds that tell people things: bird posters in four Central Australian Aboriginal languages

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[Thanks to Myf Turpin for passing this information on] In many cultures birds indicate ecological events and can be harbingers of bad news through their role in mythology. Birds can signal where water can be found, the presence of game or other food, seasonal events or danger. This series of posters features birds that are … Read more

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