Endangered Languages and Cultures

An “unsaleable bent stick”, boomerangs, and yardsticks

5 February 20116 October 2008 by David Nash

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A boomerang claimed to have belonged to Captain James Cook appears to have been withdrawn from sale on the eve of a London auction after advice from the National Museum of Australia that it was probably not the real thing.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.

Munanga

11 February 20114 October 2008 by David Nash

Munanga, ‘white person’ is widespread among the languages of the Arnhem Land region

as Jay Arthur (1996:161) notes in her compilation of written Aboriginal English, supported by citations from the northern NT 1977-1995.¹ This extends to the present, as Wamut that munanga linguist can testify.
I was intrigued to learn recently that scholars don’t have much of an idea of the origin of the word. The AND (Australian National Dictionary 1988), now available online, has the earliest written citation

1912 Bulletin (Sydney) 15 Feb. 13/2 There is the much less widely known aboriginal term ‘myrnonga’. The myrnonga is a person of more promiscuous habits [than the combo] who – prowls with furtiveness when the moon is young.

but this is under the obscure headword murlonga ‘A white man who sexually exploits Aboriginal women’, with etymology

[Poss. a. Yolŋu sub-group munaŋa a white person.]²

Recognition for PARADISEC!

5 February 20113 October 2008 by Jane Simpson

Last Wednesday, at the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference, PARADISEC was announced as the winner of the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) eResearch Prize (Humanities and Social Sciences category) for 2008. In the words of the judges: “PARADISEC is an outstanding application of ICT tools in the humanities and social sciences domain that harnesses the work … Read more

Talkin’ ’bout them endangered languages, y’ know

5 February 201128 September 2008 by admin

I was interviewed last week for PRI’s the World: The World of Words for a podcast that was published on 26 September. The interviewer, Patrick Cox, who is based in Boston, contacted me after reading my Guardian Top 10 Endangered Languages and seeing a copy of the book 1000 Languages which I edited and which was published in North America on 1st September.

FEL, Fryslân and cultural wealth

5 February 201124 September 2008 by Jane Simpson

The 26th of September 2008 is the annual European Language Day, and this year is the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which among many other good things recognises “regional or minority languages as an expression of cultural wealth”.
So, when and where better to hold the Foundation for Endangered Languages‘ annual conference, than in Fryslân? It’s all happening from September 24 to 27 in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, at the Fryske Akademy, (who incidentally sponsor a Frisian spell-checker for MS Office – yes!)
The abstracts are on the web [.pdf]

Heard on the radio

5 February 201123 September 2008 by admin

Along with the use of mobile phones for fieldwork and dictionaries (noting that the latter wouldn’t work (yet) in Africa due to the lack of 3G phones that could run the required software), another information and communication technology that has applications in endangered languages research and language support is radio. In Australia the Central Australia Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) has been in operation since the1970’s and is well known for its promotion of central Australian Aboriginal languages.
I have recently heard of two other more grass roots instances of community radio stations broadcasting in indigenous languages. At a workshop on “Engagement and Activism in Endangered Languages Research”, Maurizio Gnerre of Universita Orientale in Naples spoke about the use of radio in two Latin American communities, as his abstract states:

Engaged Scholarship

5 February 201122 September 2008 by admin

The issues of the engagement of social science researchers in direct involvement in community activism, integration of activism with research and scholarship, and ways to ensure wider communication of our research results were topics of a one-day meeting held in Chicago last week. The Interdisciplinary Institute on Engaged Scholarship and Social Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) organised a workshop entitled “Engaged Scholarship and Social Justice: Transcending the Campus, Transforming the Academy” on 12th September.
The topics explored at the workshop were:

How do we translate our scholarship and research findings into an accessible language that allows us to then engage in discussions and debates with a diverse range of communities? Can we write books and dissertations that working class friends and relatives can actually read?
How do we reconcile notions of ‘objectivity’ with our own passions for and commitment to issues and communities? Can you love a subject and still analyze, research and assess it as a scholar? Should we be accountable, responsible or concerned with the application and outcomes of our research?
How do we forge creative new methodologies that help us ask new questions and get at new insights and information? How does pedagogy reflect politics? What’s the connection between what we teach and how we teach it?
Where does ‘utopia’ and imagined futures fit into our work as social scientists and scholars in the humanities, and as teachers and students? Is our job to help students acquire skills and to better understand the known world, as well as to ‘dream’ of what we can only imagine?

Fieldwork by phone

5 February 201117 September 2008 by admin

The telephone has a deal of history as a device for collecting data on languages. For example, the English language Switchboard Corpus was collected from telephone conversations in 1990-91 and, according to the manual:

“is a corpus of spontaneous conversations … [c]ollected at Texas Instruments with funding by DARPA, … [and] includes about 2430 conversations averaging 6 minutes in length; in other terms, over 240 hours of recorded speech, and about 3 million words of text, spoken by over 500 speakers of both sexes from every major dialect of American English”

Quite a number of researchers working on minority and endangered languages have also used phones to make calls from their offices or homes to their consultants in the field to collect data and/or check data and analyses. I recall Frank Wordick, author of The Yindjibarndi language [published 1977 by Pacific Linguistics, C-71 — for more on Yindjibarndi go here], saying in the mid-1970’s that he spent many hours calling his main consultants in Roebourne when he was back in Canberra following fieldwork in order to check aspects of his data. He even suggested he found it easier to distinguish retroflexes on the phone compared to face-to-face.

FATSIL 2008 Indigenous Languages conference

5 February 201117 September 2008 by Jane Simpson

Indigenous voices of the language to come together in the International Year of Languages Federation of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Languages (FATSIL) 2008 Annual General Meeting & Indigenous Languages Forum Theme 2008: Same kinship, different languages Place: Watermark Hotel, Gold Coast, Queensland Dates: 29th and 30th October 2008 Deadline for proposals: 29th September Contact: … Read more

Spreading the word

5 February 201116 September 2008 by admin

At the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB) conference held at the University of Essex last week, there was a discussion session with Professor Shearer West, recently appointed Director of Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). During the discussion she emphasised that “knowledge transfer” is now an essential expectation of all AHRC grant applications, where “knowledge transfer” means “ensur[ing] that the research we fund can be used to make a difference beyond academia”. Apparently the AHRC feels that researchers in Arts and Humanities in the UK have been traditionally rather poor at disseminating their knowledge outside the ivy towers and wants to push them more in this direction. Specifically, this includes:

promot[ing] the interests of arts and humanities research and its value to our social, economic and cultural life
increas[ing] the amount of high quality research supporting special exhibitions, resdisplays and conservation