Re-awakening languages: Theory & practice in the revitalisation of Australia’s Indigenous languages
Proposals are invited for an edited volume that will include contributions from a broad range of authors involved in the revitalisation of Australian languages. If you, your colleagues or your students are participants in Indigenous languages revitalisation anywhere in Australia you are strongly encouraged to contribute.
The book will be independently edited by a panel consisting of John Hobson (University of Sydney), Kevin Lowe (NSW Board of Studies), Susan Poetsch (NSW Board of Studies) and Michael Walsh (University of Sydney) and be published by Sydney University Press (SUP). It is intended that the final product will be a significant Australian resource comparable to Hinton & Hale (eds.) (2001) The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice.
FollowHow to import a basic transcript into ELAN
The problem: you have text files and audio files, but the text files are not aligned to the audio files.
I imagine there are a few readers out there who have transcriptions of audio files that never made it past an utterance per line text file. This is a post for you, if you’d like to know how to import and time-align those files in ELAN.
These things will always be
Darkening clouds are looming over Indigenous languages in the Northern Territory. Tom Calma, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and national Race Discrimination Commissioner, has put up a defiant umbrella – the Eric Johnston lecture which includes a well argued section in support of bilingual education. I was struck by the comment that this year “seven students from five homeland communities in North East Arnhem Land will be the first homeland students to graduate with the Year 12 Certificate.” Tremendously good news.
Other umbrellas are going up too – some honourable souls have leaked to AAP the following:
“preliminary results from the Evaluation of Literacy Approach (ELA) report, .., found that for “active reading skills in English” students at bilingual schools achieve better results than non-bilingual schools by the time they reach Grade 5.”
[Update: And there’s a good letter by Patrick McConvell in the Sydney Morning Herald, along with Wendy Baarda’s letter in Crikey. Anggarrggoon has several posts on the topic.]
Gleams of sunlight come from the Araluen Art Centre in Alice Springs. They have a travelling exhibition about Darby Jampijinpa Ross of Ngarliyikirlangu, north of Yuendumu. Jampijinpa was an extraordinary man; there’s a beautiful book about him, by Liam Campbell Darby : one hundred years of life in a changing culture, Sydney : ABC Books for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ; Alice Springs, N.T. : Warlpiri Media Association, 2006. It comes with a CD of Darby singing in Warlpiri, as well as telling stories about early days, about the Coniston Massacre. For these he uses the language which he learned as a young man, the Aboriginal English/Kriol which has become the spine of the new mixed language Lajamanu Light Warlpiri.
Araluen also have a new exhibition which brings language together with art (including text, sculpture, etchings, installation, and digital media). Intem-antey anem ‘These things will always be’: Bush medicine at Utopia, is opening at the Araluen Gallery in Alice Springs,on Saturday November 29th at 2 pm, with Lena Pwerl and Josie Douglas speaking and a performance by Utopia women. The exhibitors are students from Utopia (Alyawarr and Anmatyerre) who are studying their own languages, art and craft at the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Education (BIITE), Alice Springs campus.
The exhibition runs until 8th February. A week after the exhibition opens, nine women from Utopia together with some BIITE staff will head to the World Indigenous People’s Conference on Education to present on the teaching /learning aspect of the project.
Sunlight through the clouds
[Updated with pictures – 21/11/08, 25/11/08, 30/11/08 ]
Three excellent books were launched yesterday, on a misty rainy day in the area of Nyambaga (Nambucca Heads). Long may they float, and God bless all who read them, buy them and review them.
They are:
- Gumbaynggirr dictionary and learner’s grammar = Gumbaynggirr bijaarr jandaygam, ngaawa gugaarrigam, by Steve Morelli, Nambucca Heads, N.S.W. : Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative, 2008.
- Barriyala – Let’s work : Gumbaynggirr language student workbook, by Julie Long.
Nambucca Heads, N.S.W. : Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-Operative, 2007. - and the most significant general reference work on Indigenous intellectual traditions published in a long time, A handbook of Aboriginal languages of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, by James Wafer, and Amanda Lissarrague with a chapter by Jean Harkins. Nambucca Heads, N.S.W. Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-Operative, 2008.
You can order the books from Muurrbay. More about the books below, but now to the launch.
Photo from Muurrbay: L-R Aunty Vilma Moylan, Aunty Jessie Williams, Uncle Ken Walker
“Thank you for supporting us as a people, and keep the spirit alive eh?” That’s how the Master of Ceremonies, and Chairman of Muurrbay, Uncle Ken Walker ended a cheerful, joking, rousing morning’s celebration of Gumbaynggirr language survival and revival. When you have 200 people to help launch three books, everything connects.
Black Swan redux
Back in August I contributed a post on the book The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his idea that there can be totally unexpected events or discoveries that have a major impact on beliefs and theories of the world that require post-hoc revisions to accumulated wisdom.
Well, it seems my post has become part of a web of unexpected discoveries that reaches as far as Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. I was just contacted by David Hirsch, a Sydney barrister, who recently came across my web post and told me the following story.
Sydney Language –mb– ~ –m– and dingo
Update: The contents of this post have been incorporated in the paper ‘Dawes’ Law generalised: cluster simplification in the coastal dialect of the Sydney Language’, published in 2011 in Indigenous languages and social identity: Papers in honour of Michael Walsh. Pacific Linguistics 626, pp.159-178.
Aspects of the Sydney Language are a perennial fascination. Last month recent events prompted me to look into the etymology of boomerang. In recent weeks the gripping SBS documentary First Australians first episode (available as a 227MB MPEG4) took us to the early days of Sydney. And now I’ve noticed what I think is an unreported sound correspondence, as I’ve become more familiar with sources on the Sydney Language.
Duelling languages
I began writing this post, appropriately enough it turns out, in Thessaloniki’s Makedonia airport on my way back to London after an international conference on Language documentation and tradition with a special interest in the Kalasha of the Hindu Kush valleys, Himalayas. The conference ran from 7th to 9th November and included five plenary talks, over 30 papers, three workshops, and several ethnographic films made last summer in Pakistan. It was attended from researchers from around the world, including blog contributor Ana Kondic, as well as five Kalashas from north-west Pakistan.
Local and national action for Australia’s Indigenous languages
[Update: in Crikey 14/11/08 there’s a good story by Samanti de Silva from the Areyonga community NT, on the community’s concern about the decision to abandon bilingual education. It links to a letter signed by around 35 community members saying among other things: “Learning in Pitjantjatjara first helps our children to learn better. It helps … Read more
TESOL association against scrapping bilingual education
Further on the decision of the NT Government to require schools to teach the first four hours of each day in English.. a media release from Misty Adoniou, President of the Australian Council of TESOL Assocations (ACTA), the peak body for professional associations for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.
Ignorant decisions exacerbate declining outcomes for Indigenous learners
Broadcasts about speakers of Australian Indigenous language
Today on ABC Radio National there were two broadcasts of interest to TLC readers: Lingua Franca had Patrick McConvell talking about the need for a National Indigenous Languages policy, (MP3 here, transcript here). It’s a clear summary of the perilous state of Australian Indigenous languages and of the way present government policy is imperilling them … Read more