In celebration of the International Year of Languages and the diversity of London’s languages and cultures, East Gallery in Stratford (home of the 2012 London Olympics) is hosting an exhibition called Living Language.
Follow‘Education restructure includes greater emphasis on English’ – Inge Kral
[ from Inge Kral, Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, The Australian National University ]
On Tuesday October 14 Marion Scrymgour, the Northern Territory Minister for Education and Training, announced a greater emphasis on teaching English in NT DET remote community schools. Why? Because she is “committed to making the changes needed to improve attendance rates and lift the literacy and numeracy results in our remote schools” as the literacy results in remote schools are still “unacceptable” while the results being achieved in Darwin, Alice Springs are comparable to schools in similar parts of Australia. So what is the aim here? To improve English oracy, literacy and numeracy, and to increase the employability of Indigenous youth in the real economy, one assumes.
For those of us who have worked in Indigenous education on the ground in remote areas over the past few decades, it is clear that these policy decisions are not evidence-based. Yes, English is important, however a critical flaw in the argument is that more “teaching” in English will not necessarily equate to better “learning” of English. Rather, the best path to increasing remote Indigenous students’ English involves increasing the relevance of what is offered to students and communities, and paying more attention to the provision of meaningful post-school contexts that allow for application of the learning. To assume that increasing the requirement in remote schools to spend more hours of the day teaching English, in English, by non-Indigenous teachers who speak English only will increase school attendance and lift literacy and numeracy rates is way off the mark. Furthermore, literacy levels are comparable whether a school teaches in English or the children’s own language for the first four hours of the day – only 10 out of 55 remote schools are bilingual, and there is considerably more community commitment to the children’s education in the bilingual schools than in non-bilingual. Communities want bilingual education [1] – why is this government not listening to them?
Black Day for Indigenous Languages in NT – Felicity Meakins
[from Felicity Meakins, 2009 ARC recipient] The bad news about Australian languages continues with the announcement by the NT Minister for Education and Training, Marion Scrymgour of a NT schools restructure which will place the emphasis on English and will essentially wind back two-way education. “… I’m … announcing today that the first four hours … Read more
On technology training in the speaker community – Andrea L. Berez
[From Andrea L. Berez, University of California, Santa Barbara]
A few weeks ago in Uppsala, Nick Thieberger and I gave a talk on the need for digital standards and training in language documentation. During the Q-and-A, a distinguished member of the audience asked us, “How do you suggest we go about making communities do all the things you’ve been talking about?”
He was referring to the examples I had just been discussing regarding Alaska, where local (i.e., non-university) efforts at documentation and archiving are underway in several villages. He wanted to know how we, as linguists, can convince speaker community members to take up arms in the race for documentation and revitalization. After a moment’s consideration, I could only reply, “I’ve never had any luck making the community do anything.”
Although it may have seemed like a flippant response at the time, it was also a true one: any time I have been involved in proactively bringing technological standards and digital language-related activities to Alaskan communities, the result has always been different from what I expected.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge proponent of local training in language technology, and I’ve actively participated some of that training myself. I believe knowledge is power, and I don’t subscribe to the notion that technology is somehow harmful or hegemonic. I consider it my responsibility to pass on my technical skills to anyone who wants to know. What I’m saying is that in my experience, attempts to introduce academic ideals about the “proper” way to do language documentation into the speaker community when nobody’s asked for it has led to frustration.
New languages two – Old languages love
[Update! See the comments! Darkness is lightened! How I overlooked Nick Thieberger’s QE2 I don’t know, but it is FANTASTIC news for PARADISEC! And on the computational linguistics side, good about Tim Baldwin’s project]
It’s Poverty Action Day. Whaddya know, speakers of small endangered languages are usually the poorest of the poor, and often don’t have the time/money to work on their own languages. That work gets done in partnerships with linguists and others from rich countries like Australia. No joy for this in the Australian Research Council funding results. This must be the worst year for funding endangered language work for a very very long time. (I whinged in 2006 about the ARC lottery results – but that was a FAR better year).
After wading through piles of .pdfs, I could only spot two grants for endangered language work – both for work on new languages in the Northern Territory, [plug! stemming in part from the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project]. Congratulations to
- Caroline Jones, (based at the University of Wollongong) Phonological development in child speakers of mixed language
- Felicity Meakins (based at the University of Queensland) Life after death: Exploring the birth of Gurindji Kriol, a new Aboriginal mixed language.
Also connected to Indigenous languages and cultures are:
- PARADISEC’s Linda Barwick, who is a CI on a Linkage grant (Sustainable futures for music cultures: Toward an ecology of musical diversity [.pdf], first CI Prof Dr H Schippers, Griffith University)
- Paul Burke’s ANU anthropology project Indigenous Diaspora: a new direction in the ethnographic study of the migration of Australian Aboriginal people from remote areas. Dead relevant to the Intervention…
Please lighten my gloom by noting if I’ve missed any projects of direct relevance to Transient Languages readers.
Pilbara language dictionaries – free, interactive and downloadable
Wow! Sally Dixon has just pointed me to Wangka Maya (the Pilbara Language Centre)’s free downloadable interactive Pilbara language dictionaries for the following languages: Bayungu, Burduna, Jiwarli, Martu Wangka, Nyamal, Nyangumarta, Thalanyji, Warnman, and Yulparija.
“These may be downloaded and used for personal use at no cost.”
What a fantastic resource! And what a good way of ensuring that the material isn’t lost.
Lucky PC users, unlucky Mac users – they’re made in Lexique Pro, and so they run under Windows only. Off to the Windows emulator sigh.., as the LP people say firmly that they have NO plans to make Mac or Linux versions.
Road Testing the Nagra Ares BB+ – Ana Kondic
[from Ana Kondic at the University of Sydney]
I have just spent eight months doing field work in Mexico where I used a Nagra Aress BB+ (with a Sony ECM-MS 957 Microphone) for audio recording that I borrowed from PARADISEC at Sydney University.
I worked with a highly endangered Mayan language, South Eastern Huastec. It is spoken in the region of La Huasteca, in the municipality of Chontla, in the North of Veracruz, Mexico, where the majority of the population speaks this as their first language, alongside Spanish.
The area of la Huasteca is tropical, with high temperatures and a very high humidity. I chose the “cold” period from October to May, with pleasant months of December and January (about 20 C during the day, and gets to low 5 C or so during the night), but very warm April and May (up to 35 C). The humidity is very high all year, mostly 85-95%.
More on munanga – John Avery
[from John Avery]
It’s inevitably guesswork, but I reckon munanga is one of those spirit-connected words – not far off devil or ghost. It is used widely in the central NT Gulf of Carpentaria and Tablelands.
Another word for white people is mandaji – the feminine is mandanga. You can hear these words at Elliott, especially from Gudanji, Wambaya or Nanka (Ngarnji). Aji/anga (also f. -ana) are personal suffixes. So -anga also could be a personal suffix attached to mun-.
Mun by itself means to curse or place a deadly curse on someone. The usual motive is jealousy. For example, a long time ago a devil from Manda waterhole on Beetaloo went up to Tanumbrini station which was the home of another devil. The Manda traveller was turfed out by the Tanumbrini devil who was jealous for the country. The Tanumbrini bloke ‘bin mun’ the Munda fella, so old Tanumbrini station is called Mun-min. The mun bit is more like muyin in Muyinmin, but by itself my informants say mun (i.e. shortway).
Uppsala Language Documentation and Language Description workshop
A workshop on Language Documentation and Language Description was held at Uppsala University (30 September – 1 October 2008) as part of the 23rd Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics. Uppsala University was established in 1477 and the town has grown around the university, famous also as the place where Carl Linnaeus taught in the late 1700s.
The keynote speakers for the workshop were Michael Noonan and Donald Stilo, and the list of presenters can be found here. Of interest to ELAC readers will be the paper by Michael Riesler and Jacquelijn Ringersma on the software tools used to annotate Kildin Saami lexical data. They are using LEXUS, a lexical database created by the MPI for their DoBES teams. It has lots of nice features if you want to create various kinds of lexicons and if you don’t want to gloss texts (this team is using Toolbox to gloss texts), but it is only an online tool at the moment. It conforms to the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) also incorporates ViCOS (Visualising Conceptual Spaces) which provides for semantic domains and for navigating a word-net through the lexicon.
An “unsaleable bent stick”, boomerangs, and yardsticks
The (in)authenticity of accounts of early Sydney have been in the news recently. The fictionalised account of Lt William Dawes and his pioneering documentation of the Sydney Language in Kate Grenville’s new novel The Lieutenant has had mixed reviews, but the concurrent story about a possible 1770 boomerang has gripped me more.
Ten days ago the Sydney Morning Herald reported
A boomerang claimed to have belonged to Captain James Cook appears to have been withdrawn from sale on the eve of a London auction after advice from the National Museum of Australia that it was probably not the real thing.
The Times reported bluntly that
Arthur Palmer, an Australian ethnographer who independently appraised the boomerang, described it is [sic] an “unsaleable bent stick” which hails from about the 1820s — 40 years after the explorer’s death.
The colourful Arthur Beau Palmer‘s sizeable bucket of cold water can be hefted here; it is worth consulting for the view of early Sydney weapons. The story began in The Times of 21 August (with a photograph) and here in The Age on 22 August; there was an update in the SMH on 10 September.