Endangered Languages and Cultures

Mutitjulu Community Statement

5 February 201127 June 2007 by Jane Simpson

Concern has been expressed about the re-posting of the Randalls’ statement about Mutitjulu which was sent to me for circulation. So I’ve removed it. You can read it here at Crikey, and it is commented on in The Age. See also this article in the Brisbane Times, in which Donald Fraser, a community member, is … Read more

Abuse of Indigenous children in towns and communities

5 February 201121 June 2007 by Jane Simpson

Last time John Howard’s ship came in, it was a Norwegian freighter, as Max Gillies observed. Today’s Crikey has a Special edition: Howard’s Aboriginal emergency, which suggests that this time, he’s running the Aboriginal flag up the masthead.
Ten years ago when Howard came to power, his new Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, Senator John Herron, said that his predecessors had got it all wrong. He wanted Aboriginal ‘self-empowerment and said that the Howard government would adopt ‘practical, commonsense policies’ on health, housing, education, employment and improve Aboriginal people’s lives.
That didn’t happen.

Endangered languages and Taiwan

5 February 201116 June 2007 by admin

[I began this blog on Saturday 9th June while sitting in Taipei Airport at the end of five extremely interesting but rather exhausting days in Taiwan. I was reflecting on the International Conference on Austronesian Endangered Language Documentation (held at Providence University (PU), and especially the two day post-conference excursion to Sun Moon Lake and Puli. I put the finishing touches to this post on Saturday 16th June sitting in Narita Airport, Tokyo, thanks to a four hour delay in the departure of my BA flight back to London.]
The International Conference on Austronesian Endangered Language Documentation, which was organised by Victoria Rau, Meng-Chien Yang, Yih-Ren Lin, and Margaret Florey brought together around 40 people from Taiwan, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, UK and USA working on endangered Austronesian languages.

Indigenous Languages Strand – LingFest 2008 – Call for expressions of interest

5 February 201114 June 2007 by Jane Simpson

LingFest 2008 will be held at the University of Sydney, Australia, 1 – 13 July 2008. LingFest is a series of linguistics conferences and the Winter Linguistics Institute.
In conjunction with LingFest 2008 , the Indigenous Languages Strand will run between 7 – 11 July 2008. It will be held at the Koori Centre of the University of Sydney. The Indigenous Languages Strand will be a useful forum for a wide range of people working in the area of the revival and maintenance of Australian Indigenous languages.
More details follow, or download the form for expressions of interest here – deadline Friday August 24.

Lewis O’Brien’s biography

5 February 20116 June 2007 by Jane Simpson

Lewis O’Brien continues to be one of the mainstays of Kaurna Warra Pintyandi, the Kaurna language movement. There’s a favourable review in the Sydney Morning Herald of a book about him And the clock struck thirteen – assembled by the linguist Mary-Anne Gale from conversations and archival research. Nothing on the language in the review … Read more

WOTA LOTA – Gail Woods

5 February 20115 June 2007 by Jane Simpson

[From Gail Woods, Lecturer, Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Education, with respect to the Languages in Crisis summit] Whilst the discussion paper is clearly focused on Languages Other Than Australian (LOTA) and the inherent security and economic risks associated with monolingualism, its sentiments could/should be subversively harnessed to develop the … Read more

More opinions on the loss of Indigenous languages

5 February 20114 June 2007 by Jane Simpson

A link here [thanks to Simon Musgrave!] to international linguistic opinion on Mal Brough’s and John Howard’s poorly informed English-only push. Here’s Geoff Pullum at Language Log today, Punishing speakers of Aboriginal languages:

Plenty could be done to improve the lot of aborigines in Australia without doing anything to insist on their learning English (which is probably going to happen anyway, along with the extinction of the aboriginal languages). Australia has a lot to atone for. Such atonement will probably not occur.

The Australian Greens are better informed than the Government about the language loss that’s happening:

Seen in London

5 February 201130 May 2007 by admin

Lots of opportunities to come up against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues in London these days:

Languages in crisis

5 February 201129 May 2007 by Jane Simpson

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

5 February 201128 May 2007 by Jane Simpson

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.