Today’s Honours list [.pdf] gives Indigenous Australians something to celebrate – Mick Dodson as Australian of the Year and the award of a Companion of the Order of Australia to Faith Bandler.
And for Indigenous languages, there are two awards of Members in the General Division of the Order of Australia to celebrate:
1. the late Dr R. Marika, “For service to Indigenous communities in rural and remote areas as an educator, linguist and scholar, through the preservation of Indigenous languages and the promotion of reconciliation and cross-cultural understanding”
2. the Reverend Dr Bill Edwards, who has worked for over 50 years with Pitjantjatjara people, learning the language, helping with documentation, with schooling, who pioneered the teaching of Indigenous languages at university, and who still helps out as an interpreter in hospitals and gaols.
Both awards come in the shadow of a government decision which goes against what both Bill and Dr Marika have fought for. Bill has protested about the NT Government’s decision to close bilingual education in a letter to the Australian.
Dr Marika died before the decision was made. But in her 1998 Wentworth Lecture [.rtf], we can see what she would have said about the destruction of her hopes for two-way education.
FollowHow soon we get used to things
40 years ago in Adelaide I didn’t even know the name of the people whose country was officially invaded on 28 December 1836. Last Christmas walking in the city, I saw:
The ‘wombat’ trail
How English acquired the word wombat is another story which began in early Sydney, after dingo (1788) and before boomerang (1820s). The way that the form and denotation of wombat came together for the colonists is notable for its convolutions, and for the record we have of some of the twists along the way.
The intriguing story of the European discovery of the common wombat Vombatus ursinus was assembled recently by museum specialists Pigott and Jessop, focussing on how “the Governor’s wombat” comes to be in Newcastle upon Tyne. There was a string of coincidences, with one sequence leading to general adoption of the word wombat for this marsupial. It spread also through the genus Vombatus (É. Geoffroy 1803) (with the synonym Wombatus (Desmarest 1804)) which was an early incorporation of an Australian word into a biological genus name — and through Family Vombatidae (Burnett 1829), up to Suborder Vombatiformes (Burnett 1830) and superfamily Vombatoidea (Archer 1984).
Facebook and Endangered Languages
About a year and a half ago I joined Facebook (see my blog post from July 2007 about it and other Web 2.0 applications). At first, it was just a bit of fun, but over the last few months, especially during the end of year holidays, some aspects of Facebook (FB) have attracted my attention in terms of what it can be used for in relation to endangered languages.
It seems I am not alone in becoming a bit of a “FB junkie” recently. Blogger Tom Leverett, who teaches English as a Second Language as his day job, has recently posted that:
“Like many people, I have found myself drawn more and more often to Facebook over [the term] break. Have free time? Check in and see what any of my extended friends are saying, doing, posting, etc. Late at night, I might troll through lists of friends’ friends, finding people I grew up with or went to college with; next thing I know, I’m finding out what they’re doing every day, or chatting with them. I keep up with my children, in various cities: what they do, what they say, what they say about me …”
and:
“I know enough about it to know that millions of people are doing this just like me, though my tech colleagues are less likely to be doing it, than just my everyday friends, other teachers, social people attracted to FB like moths to light.”
The Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS: developing and sharing language materials through archiving
The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) was established at SOAS in January 2004, with the first deposits accepted in late 2005. Our initial priority was on preservation but recently the ELAR public catalogue was released and it will soon extend to providing access to materials (where permissions allow). To date, ELAR has received over 50 deposits and stores about 4 terabytes of data. Audio recordings make up about 60% of this (both in terms of the total number of files and the total volume of data).
ELAR was established primarily to preserve and disseminate data collected by grantees from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) and by staff and students from the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP). Because language documentation is an emerging area that relies a lot on new techniques and technologies, ELAR also provides training, advice and support to ELDP grantees, ELAP staff and students, and others through international training workshops (see, for example, the various Rausing Room, the Linguistics Resources Room, and the pool of fieldwork equipment available to ELAP staff and students.
ELAR now has four staff, with David Nathan and Ed Garrett being card-carrying linguists and IT professionals, and technicians Tom Castle and Bernard Howard having specialist skills in digital and analogue audio techniques and equipment.
With these resources, skills and experience, ELAR is able to help people who want to archive resources for endangered languages, including individual and retired researchers who may not have alternative sources of equipment or advice. Dietrich Schüller, the former Director of the Austrian Phonogrammarchiv, has warned in a recent paper[.pdf] that the great majority of the world’s human cultural heritage is sitting unpreserved and uncatalogued on the shelves of individual researchers. We can help these researchers with preparing materials, including digitising and converting audio, as well as providing advice and training in how to create metadata and cataloguing information.
Over the last few years ELAR has collaborated with a number of individual researchers in preparing their materials for deposit:
✝ Geoffrey Noel O’Grady 1928-2008
I was sad to learn that Geoffrey O’Grady [1] has died – on 28th December at home in Victoria, British Columbia. He was a fine linguist, who documented Australian languages (Nyangumarta most extensively), wrote the report with Ken Hale that started bilingual education in the Northern Territory, and loved with a great passion the work … Read more
Read all about it
Due to the hard work of Mike Franjieh who is doing a PhD on a language of Ambrym, Vanuatu, the Endangered Languages Project at SOAS now has an on-line catalogue of the more than 300 books and journals we have acquired over the past few years. The materials in our collection come from several sources, including:
- donations by publishers, such as the Atlas of the World’s Languages that we launched two years ago
- donations by colleagues, including ELDP grantees, of outputs from their research projects, such as Adivinanzas en mixteco a collection of stories in Mixteco, from Mexico. Some of the materials in this part of the collection are otherwise difficult to find in Europe
- MA dissertations written by students in the MA in Language Documentation and Description, including original work with native speakers of endangered languages, such as Aromanian, Bajjika, Dolpo, Dulong, Khasi, Khorchin Mongolian and Uighur
Brand new day for the Darkinyung language
Late in the nineteenth century, probably on the left bank of the Hawkesbury River, Tilly Clarke and Annie Barber took the trouble to teach a surveyor, Robert H. Mathews, something of their language, Darkinyung. He wrote down words, sentences and phrases in his No. 7 notebook, and published a little about it. The notebook is preserved among his papers in the National Library of Australia. This is the main surviving written source for the Darkinyung language.
On Monday 15 December, at the Ourimbah campus of Newcastle University, the Darkinyung Language Group launched Darkinyung grammar and dictionary: revitalising a language from historical sources, by Caroline Jones. It’s another terrific Muurrbay/Many Rivers product. At the launch, Darkinyung people were centre-stage, but celebrating too were Wiradjuri, Gamilaraay, Gumbaynggirr, non-Aboriginal people, and the staff of Muurrbay and Many Rivers who made the publication possible.
Directions in Oceanic Research Conference (DORC) – Jeremy Hammond
[from Jeremy Hammond, one of our men in Ourimbah]
A conference on Oceanic linguistics has been held over the last three days at the Ourimbah campus of the University of Newcastle (Australia). The goal was to investigate the current state of research into Oceanic languages and cultures and to highlight their important role in current linguistic science. Participants from a diverse variety of institutions (including Australian, Dutch, Canadian, NZ, Pacific and French universities) converged to display how Oceanic languages are still worthy of attention from all areas of linguistics. Documentation, description, typology and linguistic theory were all addressed over the three days. Languages presented ranged from the West Papua ‘Birds Head’ languages to the Polynesian Niuean with many more in-between.
Language rights and human rights
Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal declaration of human rights (UDHR). On the UN’s website you can find translations of UDHR in 337 languages. Given Ethnologue‘s current claim of 6,912 living languages, there’s a long way to go. But they claim it is the “most translated document in the world” (I’d’ve thought Genesis probably beat that). Recent additions include Seselwa Creole French, Sierra Leone Krio and Cook Islands Maori. And you can hear it read in 60 plus languages [1] on the World Voices site. They’re mostly large languages, apart from Chamorro, Gaelic and Icelandic, and there are no Indigenous Australian languages – not surprising, since translating it would not be easy.
According to Amnesty Australia, “Australia is the only Western democracy without a Human Rights Act or similar human rights protection”. They are running a campaign for human rights protection. Ditto Get-Up. An Amnesty supporter, Julian Burnside, writes:
“I once shared the formerly popular view that we don’t need a Human Rights Act in Australia, but events of the past decade convinced me otherwise. They revealed that we cannot rely on our rights being protected by the common law. In Australia’s constitutional democracy, the parliaments are able to set aside the common law if they choose to do so.” Human Rights Defender 27,4, Dec. 2008-Feb.2009: p.9.
So, to language rights. These have come to attention recently with the decision by the Northern Territory Government to introduce a standardised curriculum into primary schools which will make it difficult to run properly managed bilingual programs using Indigenous languages as the medium of instruction. “The first four hours in English”, a few words uttered by a Minister in Parliament, can change irrevocably how Indigenous children experience school, and the use of their languages in school, and will probably cause the irreversible loss of their first languages.
The Minister could not have made a decision so quickly, if Australia accorded recognition to Indigenous languages officially. She would have had to consider the educational evidence for and against using the Indigenous language as a medium of instruction, and there would have been public debate before the policy could be implemented. This would have been an excellent thing, because there is no magic bullet for improving Indigenous children’s knowledge of spoken and written English. It has many many causes, from massive hearing loss, to poverty, to truancy, to lack of good ESL teaching, to failure by Governments to spend equitably on Indigenous communities. But bilingual education isn’t one of the causes.
There’s a stupid opposition made in the media between ‘a rights agenda’ and ‘basic services’. As if pushing for recognition of human rights somehow gets in the way of providing basic services. In fact, what recognition of human rights does is require governments to reflect a little before forming policies which damage human rights.
UNESCO has a general site on language rights. Here’s Australia’s position as I see it. Corrections, improvements etc gladly received!