Endangered Languages and Cultures

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?

Vectors, aboriginal kitsch and isoglosses

5 February 201114 November 2006 by admin

I wandered into the office today to see Jane and Mark with a large map of part of the northern territory rolled out on the floor, discussing the issue of iso-glosses, and boundaries. Maps maps maps. They’re just everywhere at the moment!

CALL FOR PAPERS: Fifth International East Nusantara Conference

5 February 201113 November 2006 by Jane Simpson

Following on our previous posting…..
The Fifth International East Nusantara Conference (Kupang, Indonesia, 1-3 August 2007) has an important theme for speakers of many endangered languages: Language and Cultural Aspects of Tourism and Sustainable Development. I don’t know of work on this for endangered languages (apart from the negative – we can’t share our language with outsiders because outsider tourist operators might use it and take business away from us) . So it’ll be very interesting to hear the results.
Here’s a call for papers from John Haan.

Digging up prehistoric language spread

5 February 201110 November 2006 by Jane Simpson

It was a perfect cool and sunny Canberra afternoon. Some of the Wednesday Lunch Linguists wanted to avoid spending it on marking. And so we headed off to Peter Bellwood’s seminar at ANU, Early farmers and the spread of languages in South Asia. This was partly based on a paper he gave at the Harvard Kyoto Roundtable in 2005 [1]. Prehistorians can tell grand stories, and this was grand by their standards – wheat, barley, rice and the linguistic history of the whole of India and Pakistan.

Zotero: endnote for e-research?

5 February 20118 November 2006 by admin

Last week, one of my favourite blogs, BoingBoing, had an interesting link to a new web based research tool. I’ve been having a go over the weekend.

Good things in the Language Archives Network News newsletter (No.8)

5 February 20117 November 2006 by Jane Simpson

Check out the latest Language Archives ~~Network~~ News [sorry Dave!]newsletter here. It’s got helpful information on how the Max Planck Institute (Nijmegen) can help you set up a local archive, a system of cataloguing linguistics information (IMDI) about your recordings, and on getting permanent unique resource identifiers for stuff stored on the web. And it’s also got an article on recording information about plants and animals in the field that you might read in conjunction with Tom’s post on this topic.