“Welcome to this land and welcome to us all”.
That’s how on 11th March Aunty Margaret Iselin opened the (tenth or eleventh) Australian Languages Workshop held this time at the University of Queensland’s Marine Biology Research Station on North Stradbroke Island. She grew up on Myora mission, and learned some language from two old grannies. Three years ago she and other elders decided they wanted a dictionary of their language, Jandai. They got Colleen Hattersley involved, and now have a dictionary of nearly 1,000 entries in a good open-source software format, Lexique Pro, which will contribute to its longevity. Aunty Margaret and others of her community plan to publish it along with an audio CD:
We just hope and pray that all this will be lovely with our dictionary coming into the school; it’s my culture that I’m putting to them to make them realise where I’m coming from.
Following that welcome, it was a day full of re‘s: reclaiming, restoring, revitalising, revisiting, reawakening languages.
In the evening I was honoured to launch Fragments of Budderer’s waddy: a new Narungga grammar (Christina Eira with the Narungga Progress Association, Pacific Linguistics, Canberra 2010. This, give or take a lot of ums and ahs etc, is what I said.
Narungga is the language of Yorke Peninsula, the boot shaped part of South Australia. Narungga people suffered colonisation early and only word lists and small sentence fragments remain, both in written sources and in people’s memories.
When I first saw the title of the grammar, “Fragments of Budderer’s waddy”, I thought it was melancholy, as I imagined shattered pieces of wood in a museum. But that’s precisely what it is NOT. The title actually refers to stones that are what we can see now of an ancestor’s waddy. It’s a lovely title that brings up the image of the language as an enduring part of landscape like the rocks of the ancestral being.
I also like the two meanings of the subtitle of the book: a new grammar of Narungga, and a grammar of new Narungga. It’s a new grammar in that it’s a grammar for today. It’s a grammar of new Narungga in that it is a reconstitution of a language. Narungga people have worked out with Christina ways of creating new words and phrases and sentences that they can use.
In their reclamation paper, Tonya Stebbins and Vicki Couzens described a “glass half-full” approach to language reclaiming, which concentrates on the strengths that the Aboriginal communities bring to language reclamation. Fragments of Budderer’s waddy represents more strengths, the achievement that the publication of this book represents, the achievements of Christina and Tania Wanganeen and the Narungga Progress Association.
The first and obvious strength of this book is that it comes from a partnership between community members and a linguist. This has resulted in materials that community members can use easily. And it enriches the book – so there’s a really nice map of Narungga place-names marked with important properties- old missions, dreaming sites, quarries, fish catching places and so on.
Other strengths that linguists can bring to bear are: data collection, informed data analysis, informed comparison with other languages.
1. First is the data collection. Narungga was recorded by a variety of people over a hundred years. Christina had to bring all these together, and piece together the fragments.
2. That brings in the data analysis. The old sources are in a variety of spelling systems, and Christina had a lot of work to do making sense of the spelling systems. That means bringing a linguist’s understanding of what the likely mis-hearings are. How does a German hear and write down sounds of Narungga, how does an English man do this?
3. Then there’s the comparison with other languages. Narungga is closely related to other Thura Yura languages about which more is known, and Christina’s made good use of this in working out the new grammar of Narungga (in both senses).
I ended the launch with one engaging item of new Narungga. graadidja is a word that Narungga people remembered as meaning vain and stuck up. But they wanted a word to say ‘honoured’ or ‘proud’, and there was no obvious word. So Christina’s colleague, Tania Wangaeneen, co-opted graadidja. People can now say
Ngadlugu burlga graadidja ngadlu warra wanggadja.
Our elders are honoured that we can now speak.
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Was really surprised to see the size and depth of the Jandai dictionary. As a Brisbane-native, I had no idea there was so much traditional knowledge and language so close to home.
And Christina Eira really is a super-linguist in my eyes. I enjoyed Vicki and Tonya’s presentation too – I have a growing awareness and appreciation for the work Vicki does for her language Keeray Woorroong – well done!
Looking forward to hearing about Day 2 and 3!
More accurately, I believe what Tonya said is that while a traditional approach to language reclamation is based on “glass half-empty”, what we need to see is that “there’s something in the glass”.
thanks jane for a great ‘launch speech’ that really understood what we were trying to do.
Thanks again wamut (much rolling of eyes)