Endangered Languages – Page 6 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Another one bites the dust (with apologies to Queen)

1 April 201230 March 2012 by admin

The situation with projects focussed on the documentation and support of endangered and minority languages is starting to look, well, endangered, if not downright moribund. Apparently, Unesco shut down its project on endangered languages within the intangible cultural heritage area towards the end of last year. Volkswagen Foundation held its last DoBeS grants committee meeting … Read more

Retrofitting a collection? I’d rather not

25 March 201212 March 2012 by Nick Thieberger

I just had a visit from a student wanting to deposit a collection of recordings made in the course of PhD fieldwork in the PARADISEC archive. It is a great shame that they are only just now thinking about how to deposit this material, as it will need considerable work to make it archivable. If they had sought advice before doing all of the research (or looked at the PARADISEC page ‘Depositing with PARADISEC’, or looked at the RNLD pages, e.g, http://www.rnld.org/node/40) it would have been so much easier for all of us. Why?

7th European Australianist workshop

25 March 20125 March 2012 by admin

Candide Simard (ELAP) is organising the 7th European Australianists workshop 2012 which will be held at SOAS on 3-4 April. The purpose of the workshop is to provide a venue for the presentation and discussion on current research on Australian languages. As in previous workshops a theme is suggested: ‘Contact phenomena in Australian languages’. However, … Read more

3L Summer School in Lyon, France, July 2012

5 March 2012 by admin

The fourth International Summer School of the 3L Consortium (Lyon, London, Leiden) will be hosted by the LED-TDR team (Langues En Danger-Terrain, Documentation, Revitalisation), members of the DDL and ICAR laboratories (University Lumière-Lyon 2 and ENS Lyon, France), from 1st to 13 July 2012. It follows on from the highly successful 3L Summer Schools in … Read more

ELAR turns 50

2 March 20121 March 2012 by admin

The latest, and fiftieth, deposit to go online at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) is Trevor Johnson’s magnificent Auslan Corpus. Auslan is Australian Sign Language and the corpus consists of over 900 bundles (including over 850 video recordings) of one hundred native or near-native deaf signers filmed in pairs between mid-2004 and mid-2007 in five … Read more

Re-posting – creating interfaces in different languages for Facebook

25 February 2012 by Jane Simpson

That munanga linguist has a nice post on how he used Kevin Scannell‘s code to develop a Kriol interface for Facebook. (Kevin Scannell also records Indigenous language tweets, and his web-page has lots of papers and comments on Indigenous languages and Natural Language Programming.

Sustainable data from digital research – presentations available

22 February 2012 by Nick Thieberger

In December 2011 PARADISEC hosted a conference titled ‘Sustainable data from digital research: Humanities perspectives on digital scholarship’. Presentations from that conference are now available as audio or video downloads from the following repository: http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/7890. Ten of these presentations also include a peer-reviewed chapter in the conference proceedings.

See below for an RSS feed of all titles and links in the The University of Sydney eScholarship Repository

Get stuffed endangered languages!

22 February 201221 February 2012 by admin

I thought a low point of journalistic reporting about endangered languages was reached yesterday when the Australian press ran a story entitled “Cyber zoo to preserve endangered languages” that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Brisbane Times (and apparently also the Brisbane Sunday Mail, hat tip Felicity Meakins), the Melbourne Age, the Canberra Times … Read more

Endangered languages, technology and social media (again)

20 February 201219 February 2012 by admin

There has been a little flurry of media stories about endangered languages in the last couple of days with titles like “Digital tools ‘to save languages’” on the BBC News website and “Cyber zoo to preserve endangered languages” in the Sydney Morning Herald (readers who are on Facebook can find a full listing on David … Read more

Hopes and dreams

11 February 2012 by Jane Simpson

On Thursday I had an interesting time in a sleek-looking conference room at Parliament House with the House of Representatives Inquiry into language learning in Indigenous communities. The terms of inquiry cover learning English and learning Indigenous languages. Lots of people have put lots of time and thought into their submissions and appearances (available online). They are a fascinating snapshot of current concerns, hopes and dreams. (A couple contain not-so-subtle touting – gimme a gazillion and I’ll solve literacy/attendance/savethelanguage, but they’re the exception).

So I was answering questions about my submission [.pdf] on language learning in Indigenous communities. Here goes with points that I wanted to make, and then what I remember of questions asked by the Committee: