Endangered Languages and Cultures

Canada’s Shame

5 February 20116 December 2006 by iansmith

In 1998, the Canadian government established the Aboriginal Languages Initiative (ALI) to fund projects aimed at preserving and protecting Aboriginal languages. Initial funding was CAD 5M per year. In Dec. 2002 the government announced funding of $175M for a proposed Aboriginal Languages and Cultures Centre (ALCC), which would replace the ALI. The Task Force on … Read more

Multiple distortions: the story of an Australian place name

5 February 20112 December 2006 by admin

Australian Indigenous place names often suffer distortion in form and meaning when they are adopted into English. The distortion can have many different causes: English speakers might not be able to hear the sounds of the source language properly or they might not understand what place the name really refers to. In the case of Tayan Pic (32º58’4″S, 150º12’58″E – picture shown below), a mountain near Kandos in New South Wales, however, the name has suffered further distortion after its adoption into English because of a misreading of the English transcription of the name. We first have to investigate the evolution of the name in English before we can begin to look into its Australian origin.

Click now – thesis on acquisition of Light Warlpiri and classical Warlpiri

5 February 201129 November 2006 by Jane Simpson

Carmel O’Shannessy has just lodged her doctoral thesis Language contact and children’s bilingual acquisition: learning a mixed language and Warlpiri in northern Australia in the Sydney eScholarship Repository (D-Space) at the University of Sydney. It’s on the emergence of a new language, Light Warlpiri, in the multilingual community of Lajamanu in northern Australia, and on … Read more

‘Letter game’ Warlpiri phonics

5 February 201128 November 2006 by Jane Simpson

Wendy Baarda’s 2003 report The design and trial of an interactive computer program Lata-kuunu to support Warlpiri school children’s literacy learning, can now be read here. It’s a report on a project she did as part of an M.Ed. at the Northern Territory University.

This is not a blog post

5 February 201127 November 2006 by admin

Please ignore this, I’m mucking around with technorati Technorati Profile

Sovereignty over languages and land

5 February 201125 November 2006 by Jane Simpson

Assertion of intellectual property rights over languages is happening. Here’s an FAQ in a public archive for Australian Aboriginal material (ASEDA, AIATSIS).

Q: Why do speakers restrict access to material in their languages?

A: Many speakers of endangered languages consider that their language is their intellectual property, passed down to them from their ancestors. If it is made freely available to others, then their rights in that language can be diminished. Usually they do not want strangers to use words and sentences of their languages in an inappropriate way, and want to be consulted prior to public use.

At Language Log, Mark Liberman has a couple of comments on Tom’s recent post about this with respect to the Mapuche people’s complaint against Microsoft, and following Geoffrey Pullum’s post on the same topic.

If this idea were really to be accepted into the system governing the usual laws of property, I suspect that the consequences would surprise and displease many of those who start out supporting it . For some discussion, see “The Algonquian morpheme auction” (3/3/2004).

When language met law

5 February 201124 November 2006 by admin

There’s an interesting post up on slashdot today about a legal battle between the Mapuche people of Chile and Microsoft. It seems that the tribal leaders of the Mapuche are unhappy about Microsoft working on a Mapudungan version of their Office suite of software.
Slashdot is a geek oriented web site that likes to track court cases against Microsoft. Cultural group ownership is a slightly left of field topic. The site generally advocates open source software and more liberal IP laws, so it was interesting to read the attitudes of the commenters on the main article.
UPDATE: 25/11/06
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Mark Liberman of Language Log weighs in.
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UPDATE: 27/11/06
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See a second post by Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log, and also see Jane Simpson’s post for a thorough and very interesting analysis of the Australian situation.
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Good news: Raymattja Marika and Ludwig Leichhardt

5 February 201123 November 2006 by Jane Simpson

Yesterday brought two good news stories: an Indigenous linguist has been honoured as the Northern Territory’s Australian of the Year, and the first relic of the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt’s last journey has been authenticated.

Old language materials: Elkin, Capell and gorilla linguists

5 February 201120 November 2006 by Jane Simpson

A visit to the University of Sydney Archives soothed my sorrow over a Sydney Morning Herald article (13/11/2006 p.10). In this article it’s said of a semi-phonics-based literacy project in Tennant Creek that:
“..Aboriginal languages have been approached by linguists as some kind of historical artefact, but this method makes them usable in a way that has the potential to transform literacy education in indigenous communities”.
This shows a basic confusion between what linguists do – prepare spelling systems, dictionaries and grammars – and what teachers do – devise ways to teach language using the dictionaries and grammars as references, and maybe using the spelling systems if they’re teaching reading and writing. What’s puzzling is the implied criticism in the phrase “some kind of historical artefact”.

Money – I can’t stop thinking about it

5 February 201116 November 2006 by Jane Simpson

If you had $350 to teach kids one word of an Indigenous language, what would you do with it?
• pay a skywriter to write Janapurlalki “eagle” over an Eagles grand final footy match in Tennant Creek?
• pay a cheersquad of 5 people to chant Ja na pu rlal ki at the Eagles footy game?
• buy 35 t-shirts printed with wawarta “clothes” and give them to the kids?
• pay someone to reprogram a Barbie doll to say “Ooooh wawarta!”?
• provide two big loaves of damper bread with, spelled out in raisins, kantirri “bread” or marnukuju jangu “with raisins”, once a week for a year?
or
• pay a language speaker to work with the children once a week for 4 weeks. And record the classes.
~~• pay a PhD student a scholarship for three years plus preparation, evaluation and testing expenses to work with speakers on devising a curriculum, lesson plans and teaching materials~~ ( oops – only a very cheap PhD student in a very poor country – thanks Ilan!)
Now you’ve got $80,000 to get the kids using 230 words. Would you spend it on 230 reprogrammed Barbie dolls? Or on weekly school language classes for fifteen years? Or on a multi-media CD?