Endangered Languages and Cultures

There’s copying, and there’s research

5 February 20114 July 2008 by admin

This is a follow up to my posting about materials from the Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay Web Dictionary and my 1993 book Reference Dictionary of Gamilaraay, northern New South Wales being copied without attribution, repackaged and sold in book form.
The ever vigilant David Nash has brought to my attention this wiki which contains Gamilaraay language materials with English glosses, roughly 100 vocabulary items in all. The site is organised into eight subsections:

Topics
Adverbs
Interjections
Nouns
Particles
Verbs
Pronouns
Suffixes

Copy, right?

5 February 20113 July 2008 by admin

Today I have a story to share that involves intellectual property violations, taking materials without attribution from a copyrighted dictionary of an Australian indigenous language, and publication of a book that contains such bad scholarship, ridiculous claims, nonsense, and stupid howlers that it is actually funny.
Over the past couple of years I have presented sessions at various workshops and training courses (most recently at a grantee training workshop held at SOAS 11-17th June) on the topics of "ethics, intellectual property rights and copyright". I have learnt a bit about copyright and moral rights in the process – my Powerpoint slides for the most recent presentation can be found here.
One of the issues that is often raised by fieldworkers and researchers during these presentations can be summarised as: "I don’t want to make my data publicly available because someone will steal it and publish it under their own name". I usually reply in terms of the low likelihood of such an event happening (as Andrew Garrett said at an archiving workshop at the January 2008 Linguistic Society of America annual meeting (and I paraphrase): "Sorry to tell you this, but actually no-one wants to steal your data") and the protection afforded by copyright and moral rights (mentioning the World Intellectual Property Organisation and various other lobby groups).
Well, unfortunately, I have to change my tune, folks, because it has happened to me. A subset of materials which I have published in book form (and deposited as Word .doc files with the ASEDA archive) and co-published with David Nathan on the web as the Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay Web Dictionary that are all clearly marked as copyright have been reproduced without attribution or recognition of our authorship both on a website and in a recent book publication. Fortunately, they have been done in such as way as to reveal the ignorance of the violator that is truly laughable. Sadly, this individual is attempting to profit financially from both our intellectual property and that of an Australian Aboriginal group, along with potentially damaging the trust we have built up by years of work with the community.
The story goes like this.

Directions in Oceanic Research – Call for papers

5 February 20113 July 2008 by Jane Simpson

So you haven’t had enough conferences on languages of the Pacific – or you missed AFLA and the Papuan languages workshop??
Head to Ourimbah, 9-11 December 2008 for for the Directions in Oceanic Research (DOR) conference.
Here’s the info:

2000 Hours

22 April 201330 June 2008 by Aidan Wilson

Early this morning, a delivery of audio files was quietly sent from Paradisec’s local server at the University of Sydney to permanent near-line tape storage at the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing in Canberra. This happens on many days, as you might imagine, but what makes today’s delivery special, was that somewhere in that bunch of files was our 2000th archived hour of audio.
Moreover, we will soon be celebrating five years of operations, in which case, 2000 hours might not seem so impressive – it’s just 400 hours per year after all – but we at Paradisec are very proud of our collection. Especially given that just about everything here is done on a shoestring budget and there have been some lengthy hiatuses of funding lately.
Speaking of which, this may be an opportune time to mention that we are always amenable to generous donations from people wishing to sponsor the digitisation and preservation of a collection of data. See our website for more details.
So, just which file was the lucky 2000th hour? Well, we can’t really be sure, but we do know that it was among a collection of Mark Durie’s research into the dialects of Aceh, an area that was devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami of Boxing Day 2006.
To help us celebrate both these milestones, Mark has kindly written a small piece for us about Aceh’s dialects, his research of them and the importance of preserving the collection. He has also allowed a small portion of one of these recordings to be posted with this piece, which you can download here.

3L Summer School

5 February 201128 June 2008 by admin

As it approaches the halfway point, the 3L (Leiden-London-Lyon) Summer School on Language Documentation and Description is humming along. It started on Monday 23rd June and ends on Friday 4th July.
So far we have had five days of plenary lectures (in English) and discussions (in English, and French) on a range of topics, practical classes (on phonology, tonology, audio recording, Toolbox, multimedia, applying for research grants — most available in both English and French), and areal classes (on Cushitic, and Mayan languages). There is a full list [.pdf] of course descriptions on the 3L website. There are around 65 students and researchers attending from a wide range of countries as varied as Togo, Gabon, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Guatemala, USA, Netherlands, Germany, France, Russia, UK, Taiwan and Australia. Teachers are from the University of Lyon-2, SOAS and Leiden. The local organisational team is made up of students and staff from Lyon-2 together with student volunteers.
On Wednesday evening there was a very interesting soirée which brought researchers and students attending the 3L Summer School together with researchers and students attending a summer school on Interactional Linguistics being run by the CNRS ICAR laboratory headed by Professor Lorenza Mondada at the recently opened École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (with brand new architecturally outstanding buildings and facilities). There were many interesting issues of common interest that surfaced in the short presentations given by researchers from the two groups, including problems of fieldwork (entering, being in and leaving the field, the role of gatekeepers and brokers), research methods and tools, and giving back to those participating in the research. There are sure to be more useful interactions between the ICAR and DDL research groups in Lyon in the future.
Today there is a student conference, or rather two conferences since there will be presentations of around 20 papers in two parallel sessions, one in French and one in English. The students are so keen to discuss their work that the programme starts at 9:30am and goes to 7pm (on a Saturday, mind you!). This level of enthusiasm and willingness to share ideas and experiences has been a feature of the past week both in class and outside.
Some other features of the summer school so far that I have noticed include:

1000 Languages

5 February 201126 June 2008 by admin

I just received copies from the publishers of a new book that may be of interest to readers of this blog. It is called 1000 Languages: The Worldwide History of Living and Lost Tongues and is edited by yours truly. The book was published by Thames and Hudson in the UK and associated countries, and by University of California Press in the US. It is available on UK Amazon, or readers in the UK can get it for an even cheaper price via the Tesco on-line store.

The book is issued in hard cover and runs to over 300 pages and includes over 400 colour illustrations, a series of maps, a glossary of linguistic terms, and a list of references. It is organised topically by geographical regions and each chapter explores the sources, interrelationships and characteristics of that region’s languages, including the major and minor ones of the area. It includes chapters on the topical issues of endangered and extinct languages. Each main entry details numbers of speakers, geographical spread, growth, development and key features of the language. The following is a list of the chapters and authors:

Coming down from the OzCLO State round

5 February 201125 June 2008 by Jane Simpson

In the flurry of exam marking and LingFest preparation, the top floor of the Transient is still coming down from the ascent of 64 high school students today. They came from as far away as Camden (Macarthur Anglican), and James Ruse, to as close as Fort Street and St Marys in Sydney proper. Year 9, … Read more

Ways to deserts

5 February 201123 June 2008 by Jane Simpson

Two great supporters of Australian Indigenous language work died recently. Dr R. Marika was widely known and well-respected for her passionate advocacy for Yolngu languages, and the importance of maintaining them and using them in schools. She was only 49. Short obituaries are on the web from ANTar, and The Australian.
J. Jampin Jones died yesterday. In 1998, as a middle-aged man, after many years of hard manual work, and in the midst of the grief and the havoc wrought by kidney failure on many of his family, he went to Batchelor College to learn to read and write Warumungu. An astonishing thing to do, and his charm, enthusiasm, and undauntedness gave hope and encouragement to other Warumungu students. Those of us studying Warumungu were helped immensely by his gift for explaining meanings, and by his belief that it was a good thing we were doing together.
We honour them both.

LingFest – time to register!

5 February 201119 June 2008 by Jane Simpson

LingFest HQ (aka Transient Building) is stacked with boxes of large blue bags paid for by publishers in return for inserting flyers (that’s why the bags are so large). You could probably eat the bags, they’re so enviro-friendly. 30 keen student volunteers are zooming around in between (we/they hope) doing brilliantly on their exams, (they have set up a Googlegroups for coordinating volunteers with an online spreadsheet and forms that beat hands-down our Open Conference Systems/Events Pro conference site (I like the idea of OCS, I liked the old version (used in the Papuan Languages workshop successfully), but the implementation of this one at the hands of an inexperienced central IT crew…, sigh and super sigh). And the organising committee is pondering deep questions such as – is it possible to have a book launch without alcohol? (Answer: of course not – this is Australia, we Don’t DO teetotalism).
The program for the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (Marshallese, Malagasy, Indonesian, Seediq, Samoan…and more), is here.. The program for the Papuan languages workshop is here (One, Fas, Oksapmin…). The program for the International Lexical Functional Grammar Conference is here (Gunwinyguan, Turkish, Sinhala, Welsh..). Other programs include those for the Australian Linguistics Society [.pdf], and for the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia [.xls].
You can find out all about the units on offer for the Australian Linguistics Institute here [.pdf]. Units of particular interest to Transient Languages readers include:

Volunteer work in Vanuatu – Jeremy Hammond

5 February 201116 June 2008 by Jane Simpson

[from Jeremy Hammond, who’s writing a grammar of Whitesands]
I was standing at the airport on Sunday night as you do, when I bumped into the director of Ausaid services in Vanuatu. One of the big things that they are doing this year is allowing volunteers to go and stay for long periods on outer islands. For linguists this means access to remote communities and languages that have had little work done on them.
Having just come back from living on an outer Island in Vanuatu I can strongly recommend going there to do work. Plenty of pluses; it is close and accessible to Australia/NZ so you will get plenty of visitors (if you want), the people are super friendly and the environment (outside of Vila) is not yet spoiled.
Languages there are changing very quickly (like elsewhere) but the kids still mainly learn a vernacular until about 5 years old and in general there is a strong attachment to their language, identity and culture. But change can happen quickly and who wants to lose more indigenous knowledge.
Anyway I was alerted to this position at the Malakula Kaljorol Senta (MKS) , who are looking for a resident cultural officer to particularly look after vernacular development (for 2 years).