Lots of opportunities to come up against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues in London these days:
FollowLanguages in crisis
Next week, on 7 June in Canberra, will be an event Languages in crisis, at the National Press Club. It’s billed as a “National Languages Summit, calling for simple, effective measures to utilise and develop our national language capacity”. It’s organised by the Academy of Humanities, and they’re going to launch a Research Paper. BUT, … Read more
Sorry Day
National Sorry Day, the fortieth anniversary since the Referendum, and here’s the Government’s response. Today the Prime Minister implied that “the right to live on remote communal land and to speak an indigenous language” keeps Indigenous people poor. But there is no causal relation between speaking an Indigenous language and living in poverty. In country towns across Australia many Indigenous people live on welfare and speak English.
And on Saturday, Sorry Day, I read that the Govenment is offering the 70 traditional owners of Ngapa (Water) country on Muckaty Station (NT) about $60,000 a year for the next two hundred years to experiment with storing nuclear waste on their land. Or alternatively, $171,000 today to each Ngapa clan member. That’s before tax, lawyers and accountants’ fees and administrative costs. And traditional owners (all family) of neighbouring country have said that they don’t want the future value of their land decreased by nearness to a nuclear dump.
Ignorance-based policy from Australia’s Indigenous Affairs Minister – by Carmel O’Shannessy
[ From Carmel O’Shannessy, who’s worked in the NT Department of Education for many years, and has recently finished a PhD on children’s Warlpiri]
Mal Brough shows how much he doesn’t know about Australian Indigenous children’s schooling when he suggests in today’s Australian that compulsory learning of English would be something new. All children in Australian schools compulsorily learn English. Children in bilingual schools in the NT, of which the school in Wadeye community is one, also learn an Indigenous language at school. By the end of their primary years, if the school is well run and good programs and teaching methodologies are in place, the children in bilingual schools perform slightly better in English than the children in similar communities who attend English only schools. And they can also read and write in the Indigenous language, so they have learned twice as much.
!Khwa ttu: San culture and education centre
We just heard from a Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) member about their recent follow-up visit to !Khwa ttu: San culture and education centre, 70 km north of Cape Town. The San (sometimes called ‘Bushmen’) are the indigenous people of Southern Africa, and, like indigenous peoples in many countries, they have suffered dispossession and loss … Read more
More on fieldwork
I have been thinking a bit about fieldwork methodologies (see my post on CDFM and the places where we can do fieldwork, such as London). It turns out I am not alone in this. In a recent discussion with David Nathan, Geoff Haig made the following points (thanks Geoff for allowing me to quote from your email exchange):
The dominant paradigm for field-work / documentation still seems to be based on something like an “exotic village”-setting, where the fieldworker comes from outside into a very different culture, adapts, observes as much as possible “in situ” what is going on, and then leaves. But there is a vast potential for documentation among diaspora communities, that is, communities who have more or less permanently left (or been forced to leave) their traditional settlements for (mostly) urban environments in the west; such communities may well attempt to preserve their language/culture in the new environment. This kind of context actually demands a rather different approach from the investigator, because the respective roles of the investigator and the community are quite different – but it also opens up a host of quite interesting perspectives on how documentation can be done. One can of course bemoan the lack of “pristine authenticity” of such contexts, but with migration on a global scale increasing steadily, it seems to me that much language/cultural documentation in the future is simply going to have to take such mixed contexts seriously, and develop its methodology accordingly.
Some commentators are dead opposed to this view. Perhaps the most vocal is Sasha Aikhenvald.
Open access or open slather? Nick Thieberger
[ from Nick Thieberger, PARADISEC, Melbourne University branch ]
I am a firm believer in open access to information, especially research information that has been created by taxpayers’ funds. Thus it came as something of a surprise to find myself likened to the main man of the dark forces of corporate information ownership on a site formerly known as the ‘Stolen Grammars’ site.
Constructed by a linguist in Stockholm, the site offered downloadable versions of many grammars which had been copied from various locations (“Browse my collection of stolen .pdf reference grammars if you’d rather not pay.”)
‘Baking Tapes’ or Analogue Audio Restoration
Last Friday was a bit of a milestone for me, since, in the 6 or so months that I have been involved in the audio preservation side of things at PARADISEC, I hadn’t yet actually cleaned a damaged audio tape. Unfortunately for me, the process isn’t quite as straight-forward as it is for a CD – warm soapy water, a non-abrasive cloth, wipe across the grain – rather, the entire process can take weeks, depending on how badly affected the tapes are.
Languages and dialects
As an Australian living and working in London (coming up for 4.5 years now) I have gradually come to realise how similar yet different British and Australian English are. I don’t mean the obvious differences like ‘lorry’ instead of ‘truck’, or avoiding terms like ‘mozzie’ and ‘salvo’ (see this helpful list), or turning off intervocalic alveolar stop flapping in favour of glottal stop. What I mean are more subtle things like ‘ambit claim’.