General News – Page 6 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Happy IDWIP!! 29 years on

9 August 2011 by Jane Simpson

I nearly missed this [thanks Bruce!] Mick Gooda, the Social Justice Commissioner celebrates International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples – the birthday cake theme this year being ‘Indigenous designs: celebrating stories and cultures, crafting our own future’ His press release notes that International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples marks the day of the … Read more

Gresham College webcasts

30 June 2011 by admin

On 16th June, Nick Ostler, Mark Turin and I participated in a packed symposium at Gresham College in London (founded in 1597 and the capital’s oldest Higher Education Institution — read about its fascinating history here). The Symposium was entitled Rare and Endangered Languages, and the topics of our talks were as follows: Nick Ostler … Read more

Iwantja Band launch ‘Palya’

29 May 201129 May 2011 by David Nash

Around the remoter parts of Australia there’s a ferment of contemporary music and Australian languages. I had a taste of this a week ago in Tennant Creek, where I learnt of a freshly released album from Iwantja Band, now on their launch journey (Iwantja Band launch Palya).

cover art for 'Palya' — Cover art for 'Palya'

I caught some of the enthusiasm from Patrick McCloskey, a freelance music producer working with the Winanjjikari Music Centre¹ at Tennant Creek.

Most of the songs on the album (eg Kungka Nyuntu, Wamanguru) are in Pitjantjatjara / Yankunytjatjara, languages spoken at Iwantja (perhaps better known as Indulkana), some 900km south of Tennant Creek. It suited the band to use a studio not in a city, or in intermediate Alice Springs, but at Winanjjikari in Tennant Creek. And there is more to the mix, as the band’s manager says in an interview:

Notes

The name is Warumungu, wina-njji-kari ‘sing-Nom-Genitive’; see also WMC’s blog

Books, HTML, audio, images – falling out from fieldwork

10 June 201128 May 2011 by Nick Thieberger

I’ll be going to Vanuatu next month courtesy of Catriona Hyslop’s DoBeS project, to help build an installation of three computer-based interactive dictionaries (Vurës, Tamambo and South Efate) for the Museum there. We will have hyperlinked dictionaries with sound and images where possible. All of this will be HTML-based for low maintenance and to allow new dictionaries to be added to the set over time. This post is aimed at outlining the method used to get these various files into deliverable formats and follows on from an earlier one where I talked about using ITunes to get media back to the village.

Transcribing and giving back

22 May 2011 by admin

There is an interesting post on the That munanga linguist blog about what he calls “slow fieldwork” where community members in the Northern Territory do their own transcriptions of recordings. He relates this to part of the process of “giving back” that has been talked about here and here and here.

A Warlpiri double launch

4 July 201118 May 2011 by David Nash

The annual meeting of Warlpiri-patu-kurlangu Jaru Inc. and its professional development workshop known as Warlpiri Triangle this year is being hosted by Yuendumu CEC, 16-19 May 2011.

This evening in the Yuendumu school library two resources were launched to a large gathering including senior Warlpiri women.

Have your say

16 May 2011 by admin

As regular readers of this blog may know, Clair Bowern has been compiling a massive database of lexical materials on Australian languages in her NSF-funded project on reconstruction and language classification. She now has over 600,000 items in her database from 1,000 sources (all individually referenced and attributed, unlike some other collections: see here and … Read more

London’s Language Landscape

6 May 2011 by admin

A group of SOAS students taking the MA in Language Documentation and Description this year organised a project to map the diversity of languages spoken by staff, students and visitors to SOAS, and to record language samples. They have identified scores of languages in use around SOAS and recorded 40 samples, including proverbs, poetry and … Read more

Interpreters for speakers of Indigenous languages

4 May 2011 by Jane Simpson

Thanks to Kazuko Obata, thanks to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald , thanks to a media release (19/4/2011) from the Commonwealth Ombudsman, I came across the report Talking in language: Indigenous language interpreters and government communication [.pdf].

The report contains an interesting table detailing how various government agencies are currently deploying (or not) interpreter services. As they indicate, having good policies is a good start. What’s important is whether the people charged with carrying them out know how to carry them out, can carry them out, and do carry them out.

Here are some of the good recommendations and observations that struck me:

A new transcription system

10 May 20111 May 2011 by admin

Just over a year ago I wrote a blog post about some of the parameters involved in transcribing media files, and how long it takes to do various sorts of transcription, translation and annotation tasks. In the commentary on my post, the ELAN transcription software tool developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at … Read more