A series of five documentaries on languages is scheduled to air on OBE (Original Black Entertainment) TV in the UK starting on 13th April 2008. OBE TV is a freeview 24 hour Channel on Sky Digital Channel 204 with a primary target audience from the African, Caribbean and other ethnic communities in the UK and Ireland, Europe, North Africa and beyond. OBE TV reaches over 7.8 million satellite subscribers in the UK and Ireland alone.
The documentary series is called World – Speaking in Tongues and the episodes are…..
FollowCulturally appropriate education – ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘and’
The Australian‘s running a campaign against cultural appropriateness where it pertains to Indigenous Australians. Cultural awareness courses, out the window! Cultural training for journalists? No need! Last Saturday they had a front-page story taking up a paper due out this week on Indigenous children’s education by the economist Helen Hughes of the Centre for Independent Studies. Helen Hughes, so The Australian claims, is saying that educational apartheid exists in the Northern Territory (a claim denied by Nadine Williams, the very experienced President of the NT Branch of the Australian Education Union, but The Australian buries her view at the end of the article. A teacher talking about education isn’t sexy; an economist is).
What The Australian is licking its chops over is that apparently Hughes is inveighing against ‘culturally appropriate’ teaching methods.
I’m with them in that the term ‘culturally appropriate’ has been over-/ab-/mis- and sloppily -used ( Lexical Integrity, die!), and in that the idea of Western science and Western maths versus Indigenous science and Indigenous maths looks like a false opposition. Science is science – I want the bridges I cross over and the planes I fly in to be constructed according to the best available science and technology, Indigenous, non-Indigenous, Chinese, English or whatever.
Where we part company is as to how the best available understandings of science and maths are to be taught and in recognising that Indigenous people have knowledge which should be built on.
Honourable mentions
Since 1963 the Australian National University has annually awarded the University Medal as its most prestigious undergraduate academic prize. At each conferring of degrees ceremony the University’s most outstanding first class honours students are recognised with the award. An Honour Board displaying the names of all University Medal winning students was launched in February 2008 and is now on display in the Great Hall, University House, Canberra. There is a Virtual Honour Board on the ANU website.
Between 1974 and the present 17 Linguistics students have been awarded the medal, and quite a few names that will be familiar to readers of this blog are among them. They include a number of students who went on to do PhDs and further research describing and/or documenting endangered languages:
2nd Sydney Papuanists’ Workshop
It’s been almost two years since the first Papuanists’ Workshop and now it’s time for another. The linguistics departments at Sydney University and in RSPAS at the ANU are organising the second Papuanists’ Workshop. It will be held on Saturday and Sunday 28-29 June 2008 at the University of Sydney, right before Lingfest gets started. … Read more
Cool times at Kioloa
This year’s Australian languages workshop, the seventh, was very well organised by Kazuko Obata, Jutta Besold, Jo Caffery and the rest of their committee. It was held at Kioloa [kai’oʊlə], ANU’s field station on the NSW south coast. Spongy green grass and tall green trees make it a far cry from drought-ridden Canberra, and the extent of the wilderness is restful. Walking along a white beach to the Murramarang Aboriginal area (very good signs with information on local words for sea creatures and traditional practices). Generations of rainbow lorikeets trained by generations of students to perch on arms, shoulders, knees. Boobook owls calling in the night as we looked at the Milky Way during Earth Hour.
The weather was perfect, warm, and the papers were cool..
Australian Linguistics Institute and LingFest 2008
The Australian Linguistics Institute is now open for online registration [finally – oh the pain of making a rego page that’s secure AND university-compliant, tax-compliant, human-compliant...]. Short, intensive courses will be presented by some excellent linguists from 7th – 11th July 2008, at the University of Sydney. It is a great opportunity for linguists, language professionals, graduate students and advanced undergraduates to learn more about a wide range of topics in language. Plus there’s to be a three day Indigenous Languages Institute sponsored by the Koori Centre which will bring heaps of Indigenous people working on languages together to work on problems of language maintenance and language revitalisation.
Participants may register for up to four courses during the week-long ALI. Each course is offered for 1.5 hours each day for five days. Topics include psycholinguistics (Anne Cutler), first language acquisition (Rosalind Thornton and Stephen Crain), morpho-syntax (Brett Baker, Greville Corbett, Mark Harvey, Rachel Nordlinger, Gert Webelhuth and Regine Eckhardt), computational linguistics (Robert Dale, Mary Dalrymple, Mark Dras), Japanese grammar (Nerida Jarkey and Harumi Minagawa), sociolinguistics (Jennifer Hay, Michael Clyne, Diana Eades), semantics (Bert Peeters, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka), discourse and conversational analysis (Celia Kitzinger, Jim Martin, Sigrid Norris), sign language linguistics and grammaticalisation (Louise de Beuzeville and Trevor Johnston), contact language typology (Ian Smith), quantitative methods (Carsten Roever) and educational linguistics (William Armour, Ryuko Kubota, Ahmar Mahboob, Aek Phakiti).
Do book your accommodation early, as the combination of World Youth Day and the Pope’s visit the following week mean that accommodation may be taken up.
Literacy is not soma
In 1838 Governor George Gawler gave a speech to the local Aborigines in the Adelaide area, which was translated into their language, Kaurna, by William Wyatt.
Black men–
We wish to make you happy. But you cannot be happy unless you imitate good white men. Build huts, wear clothes, work and be useful.
Above all things you cannot be happy unless you love GOD who made heaven and earth and men and all things.
Love white men. Love other tribes of black men. Do not quarrel together. Tell other tribes to love white men, and to build good huts and wear clothes. Learn to speak English.
Two hundred years later, the descendants of Gawler’s audience are re-learning their language using the materials left by missionaries in new ways (see Jangari’s post on this). Gawler’s successors in Government are still wanting to make Aborigines happy by urging them to learn English, and more particularly to read and write English. Sometimes they translate this call into Indigenous languages.
Inge Kral gave a great seminar not so long ago on Ngaanyatjarra literacy, and the importance of ‘administrative literacy’. She also blogged here about the foolishness of closing down local Indigenous TV in remote areas if you want to encourage literacy. Well, she has a piece in the Courier Mail (11/03/08) on literacy in remote communities where the first language is often not English. She makes the point that:
Much of the present discussion is based upon the assumption the only valuable literacy is English literacy. There is no acknowledgement of the importance of the bilingual/bicultural learning environment and the important role local indigenous staff employed on award pay and conditions can play as teachers and language workers in bilingual and non-bilingual programs.
Renovations, Repairs and Repositories
A lot of work has been happening at the University of Sydney over the past six months, and at the end of last year the top floor of the Transient Building, which houses Linguistics, Paradisec and a few other offices, got renovated. Unfortunately, since the entire exterior of the building is composed of fibrous asbestos, it’s unlikely that the University will outlay the mammoth insurance costs to do any exterior work. But anyone who knows the Transient building knows that the best option would be to demolish the whole thing and start again from scratch.
Words for new ideas: ‘What’s your age?’
Mari Rhydwen is working with people developing resources for teaching Indigenous languages of New South Wales. She asks if speakers of traditional languages in Australia have engineered terms for talking about age in years and, if so, how they did it. It’s quite possible that they have invented terms for other things (reading, school, money), but haven’t felt the need to talk about people’s ages in terms of years, except in English.
I could only think of age grade and status terms (child, woman with children etc) in traditional languages to describe someone’s age, and of the use of ‘Christmas’ to mean ‘year’, but I couldn’t recall an instance where someone described someone’s age in terms of Christmasses.
Over to blog-readers for their ideas. Here’s a start from Robert Hoogenaad: