Jane Simpson

Blog catcher: Africa, America, Australia, art, language, literacy, software, travel

5 February 201127 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Sociolingo’s Africa is a general blog which includes posts about languages (the writer’s based in Mali but draws together material from across Africa). There are some interesting posts on linguistics, literacy – including mother tongue language education. So much seems so familiar. Thanks to this blog I’ve learned about Litcam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for … Read more

One crap spelling system is better than two good ones

5 February 201124 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Suppose you’re a linguist working in a community where
• the speakers have a shaky grasp of literacy
• community development workers have a shaky grasp on the speakers’ languages
• there’s an existing orthography which is crying out for improvement
My advice – block your ears to its cries….

Language of poetry and song: CALL FOR PAPERS

5 February 201122 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

We don’t know very much about the language of songs and poetry in many of the small societies in our region, so it’s excellent that a group of researchers (Myf Turpin, Christina Eira, Tonya Stebbins and Stephen Morey) are putting on a workshop on the topic at the Australian Linguistics Society Conference 2007 in Adelaide, September 26-28. Here’s the information:

Ngapartji-Ngapartji online course in Pitjantjatjara

5 February 201119 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

It’s been very hard for ordinary city-dwelling Australians (i.e. most of us) to learn Indigenous Australian languages. Most universities don’t teach them, and getting to Alice Springs for courses at the Institute for Aboriginal Development is out of most people’s reach. Summer schools, such as the Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay ones mentioned in a previous post are rare. So it had to come, and it has, but in a rather unusual way. The first public online course in an Australian Indigenous language is run out of a demountable building in Alice Springs by the Ngapartji Ngapartji group. Trevor Jamieson and his family want to tell the story of how they, some of the Spinifex people, were forced to leave their lands during the missile testing in the 1950s and 1960s. They do this at arts festivals, using Pitjantjatjara, English, songs and dance. And they run an on-line language program, so that future audiences can understand the Pitjantjatjara talk in their performances.

Sand talk – and how to record it

5 February 201116 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

In Central Australia, you often see Aboriginal people sitting on the ground, talking, and simultaneously drawing on the sand, smoothing it over when they’ve finished a point, and starting again. They might be recounting places along a journey, listing family members, drawing maps, or describing the movement of characters in a story. I’ll call this ‘sand talk’.

Desert: forcing Aborigines off their land

5 February 201113 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Pretty soon the remote areas of Australia will be uninhabited. Drought and high fuel prices are forcing farmers and graziers off their land. And these, together with Government policies, are forcing Aborigines off their land. Along with the departure of the people will go their languages and societies. Gary Johns writes in The Australian (11/10/06):
“The Government has begun to stop supporting a recreational lifestyle in the name of preserving a culture.”
Apparently Aborigines are to be ‘refugees’ or ‘migrants’ (Johns’ words) in fringe camps around bigger towns. He thinks this is a Good Idea.

Endangered languages, cultures and the Australian Research Council lottery

5 February 201111 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

The Australian Research Council’s website today has survived the pressure of everyone wanting to know whether they’ve got winning tickets. I was in a few syndicates (PARADISEC, continuing the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition (ACLA project), and a new project on Indonesian). And the lucky winners are…

Indigenous language teaching and tasting

5 February 201111 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

There’ve been two recent stories in the media about Indigenous language education – one on teaching Yuwaalaraay, the language of the Walgett area of NSW to local children, and the other on teaching the Western Australian language Bunuba in a private school in Melbourne. One’s about language revival, and the other’s about language tasting.

Two new jobs in language documentation and endangered languages

5 February 201111 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

The Endangered Languages Academic Programme, Linguistics Department, School of Oriental and
African Studies, University of London, is seeking to appoint a Lecturer in Endangered Languages and a Post-doctoral Researcher in Language Documentation .

Ethics and the researcher

5 February 20119 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Behaving in a good way to the people one is working with is vital – unethical researchers do damage to communities in the short-term. And they do incalculable longterm damage, because communities that feel burned by researchers will reject other research proposals which might benefit them. There’s a new publication addressed to Indigenous people on how to deal with health researchers. It’s a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) booklet Keeping research on track: a guide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples about health research ethics. In the past, the NHMRC guidelines for working with Indigenous people have been taken as models in other disciplines. And so it’s important for us to look at them, even though linguists don’t go sticking needles into people, and a grammar is of less direct benefit than the results of a study of the causes of kidney failure.