Kim Scott gave a talk in Melbourne last night titled “Language & Nation”. (you can see a video of the talk here). His writing has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Western Australian Premier’s Book Award among other honours. Last night he described the way in which his work has been intertwined with a rediscovery of the rythms and meanings of his ancestral language, Nyungar, from Albany in Western Australia. He works with the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project to, as he put it, ‘creep up on an endangered language’ through community meetings, creating artwork, and visits to country.
He showed us images of Nyungar people now working on various historical records to reconnect with their language, and, in particular, with the voluminous legacy of written texts created by Gerhardt Laves in the late 1920s, who worked with their grandparents, uncles and aunties.
This is a wonderful example of historical language material being given new life through community activity. The activity of reconnection with the records is probably more important than the resulting books, but both are indications of engagement that was conveyed eloquently in Kim Scott’s lecture.
For more on Laves see David Nash’s Laves pages, on the Laves collection of Nyungar texts see John Henderson’s article on preparing the Laves manuscripts, Capturing Chaos: Rendering Handwritten Language Documents or Claire Bowern’s blog post here . See also a pdf file of the protocols for building on the Laves work, including images of several pages and discussion of how the work should proceed in consultation with descendants of the people Laves worked with.
Follow
Here at Endangered Languages and Cultures, we fully welcome your opinion, questions and comments on any post, and all posts will have an active comments form. However if you have never commented before, your comment may take some time before it is approved. Subsequent comments from you should appear immediately.
We will not edit any comments unless asked to, or unless there have been html coding errors, broken links, or formatting errors. We still reserve the right to censor any comment that the administrators deem to be unnecessarily derogatory or offensive, libellous or unhelpful, and we have an active spam filter that may reject your comment if it contains too many links or otherwise fits the description of spam. If this happens erroneously, email the author of the post and let them know. And note that given the huge amount of spam that all WordPress blogs receive on a daily basis (hundreds) it is not possible to sift through them all and find the ham.
In addition to the above, we ask that you please observe the Gricean maxims:*Be relevant: That is, stay reasonably on topic.
*Be truthful: This goes without saying; don’t give us any nonsense.
*Be concise: Say as much as you need to without being unnecessarily long-winded.
*Be perspicuous: This last one needs no explanation.
We permit comments and trackbacks on our articles. Anyone may comment. Comments are subject to moderation, filtering, spell checking, editing, and removal without cause or justification.
All comments are reviewed by comment spamming software and by the site administrators and may be removed without cause at any time. All information provided is volunteered by you. Any website address provided in the URL will be linked to from your name, if you wish to include such information. We do not collect and save information provided when commenting such as email address and will not use this information except where indicated. This site and its representatives will not be held responsible for errors in any comment submissions.
Again, we repeat: We reserve all rights of refusal and deletion of any and all comments and trackbacks.