Endangered Languages and Cultures

2nd Sydney Papuanists’ Workshop Update

5 February 201120 May 2008 by admin

The program for the 2nd Sydney Papuanists’ Workshop is now up at http://conferences.arts.usyd.edu.au/program.php?cf=19. There will be lots of interesting papers from Papuanists from around Australia and overseas. The discussion session on Saturday afternoon on the theme ‘giving back to the community’ may be of particular interest to fieldworkers outside the Papuanist community. If you’re interested … Read more

The times they are a changin’

5 February 201116 May 2008 by admin

At the Australian Languages Workshop 2008 held in March at the ANU field station at Kioloa (recounted in Jane Simpson’s blog post) there was an after-dinner quiz organised by Harold Koch. It consisted of a series of trivial pursuit style questions to identify scholars who had published on Australian Aboriginal languages (some recent, some not so recent). The questions went something like this (some of these are ones I remember from Harold’s quiz, others I have made up):
Identify the following six people each of whom published on Australian Aboriginal languages and:

also wrote a book on scurvy in sheep
published on middle-Indo-Aryan under another name
prepared a handbook for coroners
was a jackaroo on a station in the north-west of Western Australia
is an expert in Ergodic Theory and has published a book on Multidimensional Continued Fractions
spent time in an Australian internment camp as a Nazi spy during the second world war

The answers to most of these questions are to be found in a new 526 page book published this month by Pacific Linguistics and edited by William B. McGregor entitled Encountering Aboriginal languages: Studies in the history of Australian linguistics. My copy just arrived in London and I am having trouble putting it down, the contents are so interesting.

5th European Australianist workshop – Eva Schultze-Berndt

5 February 201116 May 2008 by Jane Simpson

[from our woman in Kununurra, Eva Schultze-Berndt]
This email is a call for expressions of interest in a 5th European Australianist workshop, to be held at the University of Manchester in September 2008.
The suggestions for dates are either of the following:
a) Su/Mo, 14th/15th September. This is adjacent to the LAGB conference in Colchester/Essex from 10-13 Sept; train travel between Colchester and Manchester is about 5 hrs.
b) Fr/Sat, 19th-20th September.
c) Sat/Su, 20th-21st September.
Of course depending on the number of participants we might only need one day. But hopefully many of you will be able to come!
The suggestion for a workshop theme is “Discourse, prosody and information structure in Australian languages”. As usual, participants would be free to present papers not related to this theme.
I will be able to apply for a very limited amount of funding towards accommodation and travel costs of students or other participants who are not in full-time employment (success not guaranteed of course). Please indicate if you are interested in participating and belong to this category.

Your language footprint

5 February 201115 May 2008 by admin

One of the events which featured in Endangered Languages Week 2008 at SOAS was called What is your language footprint?. This concept of a Language Footprint and the ideas behind it were developed by David Nathan, and presented by his team that also included Chaithra Puttaswamy and Juliette Rutherford (Tom Castle created the dramatic poster).
It has since attracted the attention of several bloggers, including Bulanjdjan (Langguj Gel) and Hoyden about town.
The basic concept is simple. A language footprint is the influence of those speaking a dominant language on the behaviour of speakers of other languages. In any communication, if your choice of language makes another person shift from their language to yours, you have made a language footprint. The concept is intended as a metaphor similar to the”carbon footprint”notion and, like it, includes the potential that individuals can reduce or offset their language footprint. You can reduce your language footprint by:

Chirac Foundation sponsors Endangered Languages event

5 February 201113 May 2008 by admin

The recently established Fondation Chirac in collaboration with the Musée du quai Branly and Unesco is organising a one-day public event to be held on Monday 9th June in Paris called “SOROSORO pour que vivent les langues du monde!” (SOROSORO long live the languages of the world! ). Sorosoro in the Araki language of Vanuatu means “breath, word, language”. The event will highlight the current situation of language diversity and endangered languages and includes presentations by linguists from France, Gabon, Guatemala, UK and Vanuatu.
The programme begins at 3pm in the Claude Levi-Strauss Theatre at the Museum and includes the following presentations (my translations of the French original):

OzCLO – Inaugural Computational and Linguistics Olympiad

5 February 201111 May 2008 by Jane Simpson

The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) is a linguistics competition aimed at high school students from years 9 to 12. The state rounds will be held at University of Sydney, and University of Melbourne on the afternoon of June 25th 2008, with the national round to be held (in each location) on August 6th … Read more

Endangered Languages Outreach

5 February 201110 May 2008 by admin

Well, Endangered Languages Week 2008 has drawn to a close, and apart from feeling knackered after a week of full-on EL activities, we at SOAS reckon it all went pretty well. We had a lot of fun, especially during the kick-off debate about What is your language footprint? when the “for team” of David Nathan, Chaithra Puttaswamy and Juliette Rutherford were soundly defeated by the “against team” of Peter Austin, Julia Sallabank and Peter Sutton. Superior debating skills combined with some bad jokes won the day. Another highlight of the week was the UK Premiere of the film “The Linguists” which was attended by over 90 people, many of whom got to meet in person K. David Harrison, one of the dynamic duo who star in the film.
Our main goal for EL Week 2008 was showing what we are doing in EL research, teaching, and archiving at the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project and communicating with as wide an audience as possible. We feel we achieved that, both in the real and virtual interactions we had with visitors, most of whom have never come to Project activities before. Some students even travelled from Paris to attend the workshops and films. We also made contact with the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies which is a publicly funded service, providing UK-wide support and services for higher education in these three areas. They featured EL Week 2008 on their website and mailed out a special e-bulletin about our activities to their 3,000 subscribers – as a consequence, a number of teachers came to SOAS during the week, and we now have great opportunities for future collaboration.
So, here are some statistics about the week (all numbers are approximate):

Indigenous languages – staying in the background

5 February 201128 April 2008 by Jane Simpson

Mirabile dictu… The 2020 summit background material on Indigenous Australia,

Fluency in revival situations – John Giacon

5 February 201126 April 2008 by Jane Simpson

[From John Giacon]
As noted in the blog post on John Hobson’s lecture, the Koori Centre has been one of a number of forces which have pioneered major developments in Indigenous Language education in NSW and other parts of Australia. I want to comment on two sentences in the review:
‘Indigenous children need qualified teachers who are fluent speakers of the language’ and ‘Majors in Indigenous languages just aren’t on offer [in Universities]’.
I will use my experience of Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay to reflect on these. I started working in the languages 12 years ago. Sadly, I have not met anyone who has or had elementary fluency from ‘handed down’ language. For instance I have met a number of people who know that yanay is ‘go/walk’, but none who knew the past-tense form ‘yananhi‘ or the various continuous forms. Nor have I met anyone could productively use the locative suffix for meanings like ‘in, on, at’. Just two examples of the many elements you would need to know for even moderate fluency. People who have done courses now know these elements of Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay, and much more. Fluency is growing, slowly.
So, the fluent teachers necessary for language teaching are not there, ‘in the community’. However the rules for forming past tense and the forms and meaning of the locative suffix, and much more, are in Corinne Williams’ Grammar of Yuwaalaraay (1980). And there is much more information that she did not have time to process in tapes and other Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay sources. So if those sources are used, then resources and courses can be developed: for instance the Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay Yuwaalayaay Dictionary, the ‘Speaking Gamilaraay‘ course at the Koori Centre/University of Sydney and the TAFE Certificate 1 in Gamilaraay and Gumbaynggirr courses.

Endangered Languages Week 2008

5 February 201125 April 2008 by admin

Following on from our successful experiment in April 2007 the Endangered Languages Project at SOAS is running an even bigger and better Endangered Languages Week from 30th April to 8th May 2008.
Through films, displays, discussions and workshops we are presenting what is being done to document, archive and support endangered languages at SOAS and around the world. The theme of the week is “What can WE do?”, exploring how researchers, students, language community members and members of the public can work together to address the challenges of global language and cultural loss.
Activities include: