Ngapartji Ngapartji has launched a policy paper regarding Australian Indigenous languages. You can download it [.pdf] from their website. The press release is below.
Linguistics
FollowTop of the Pops
The Books section of the website of The Guardian newspaper here in the UK has a feature they call Top 10s. These are lists prepared by a prominent author featuring their pick of the top 10 items within a topic area, one usually connected to the publication of one of their books. There are the kinds of lists you might expect, like Sarah Anderson’s Top 10 books about wilderness, or Alison MacLeod’s top 10 short stories. But there are also cute ones like Simon Critchley’s top 10 philosophers’ deaths (would linguists’ deaths be quite so interesting?).
In connection with the recent publication of the book I edited called 1000 Languages, The Guardian asked me to prepare a Top 10 endangered languages list. “Great”, I thought, “given my interest in communicating about our work, here’s a way to reach thousands of Guardian readers and others and get them interested in what we do as linguists, as well as highlight some issues about endangered languages. But how do you pick 10 languages out of a potential list of 3,000 (or over 6,000 if Michael Krauss is to be believed?)”
It was an impossible task, so I figured I’d set some parameters and see what I came up with. I decided on the following rules of thumb:
There’s copying, and there’s research
This is a follow up to my posting about materials from the Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay Web Dictionary and my 1993 book Reference Dictionary of Gamilaraay, northern New South Wales being copied without attribution, repackaged and sold in book form.
The ever vigilant David Nash has brought to my attention this wiki which contains Gamilaraay language materials with English glosses, roughly 100 vocabulary items in all. The site is organised into eight subsections:
- Topics
- Adverbs
- Interjections
- Nouns
- Particles
- Verbs
- Pronouns
- Suffixes
Copy, right?
Today I have a story to share that involves intellectual property violations, taking materials without attribution from a copyrighted dictionary of an Australian indigenous language, and publication of a book that contains such bad scholarship, ridiculous claims, nonsense, and stupid howlers that it is actually funny.
Over the past couple of years I have presented sessions at various workshops and training courses (most recently at a grantee training workshop held at SOAS 11-17th June) on the topics of "ethics, intellectual property rights and copyright". I have learnt a bit about copyright and moral rights in the process – my Powerpoint slides for the most recent presentation can be found here.
One of the issues that is often raised by fieldworkers and researchers during these presentations can be summarised as: "I don’t want to make my data publicly available because someone will steal it and publish it under their own name". I usually reply in terms of the low likelihood of such an event happening (as Andrew Garrett said at an archiving workshop at the January 2008 Linguistic Society of America annual meeting (and I paraphrase): "Sorry to tell you this, but actually no-one wants to steal your data") and the protection afforded by copyright and moral rights (mentioning the World Intellectual Property Organisation and various other lobby groups).
Well, unfortunately, I have to change my tune, folks, because it has happened to me. A subset of materials which I have published in book form (and deposited as Word .doc files with the ASEDA archive) and co-published with David Nathan on the web as the Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay Web Dictionary that are all clearly marked as copyright have been reproduced without attribution or recognition of our authorship both on a website and in a recent book publication. Fortunately, they have been done in such as way as to reveal the ignorance of the violator that is truly laughable. Sadly, this individual is attempting to profit financially from both our intellectual property and that of an Australian Aboriginal group, along with potentially damaging the trust we have built up by years of work with the community.
The story goes like this.
Directions in Oceanic Research – Call for papers
So you haven’t had enough conferences on languages of the Pacific – or you missed AFLA and the Papuan languages workshop??
Head to Ourimbah, 9-11 December 2008 for for the Directions in Oceanic Research (DOR) conference.
Here’s the info:
3L Summer School
As it approaches the halfway point, the 3L (Leiden-London-Lyon) Summer School on Language Documentation and Description is humming along. It started on Monday 23rd June and ends on Friday 4th July.
So far we have had five days of plenary lectures (in English) and discussions (in English, and French) on a range of topics, practical classes (on phonology, tonology, audio recording, Toolbox, multimedia, applying for research grants — most available in both English and French), and areal classes (on Cushitic, and Mayan languages). There is a full list [.pdf] of course descriptions on the 3L website. There are around 65 students and researchers attending from a wide range of countries as varied as Togo, Gabon, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Guatemala, USA, Netherlands, Germany, France, Russia, UK, Taiwan and Australia. Teachers are from the University of Lyon-2, SOAS and Leiden. The local organisational team is made up of students and staff from Lyon-2 together with student volunteers.
On Wednesday evening there was a very interesting soirée which brought researchers and students attending the 3L Summer School together with researchers and students attending a summer school on Interactional Linguistics being run by the CNRS ICAR laboratory headed by Professor Lorenza Mondada at the recently opened École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (with brand new architecturally outstanding buildings and facilities). There were many interesting issues of common interest that surfaced in the short presentations given by researchers from the two groups, including problems of fieldwork (entering, being in and leaving the field, the role of gatekeepers and brokers), research methods and tools, and giving back to those participating in the research. There are sure to be more useful interactions between the ICAR and DDL research groups in Lyon in the future.
Today there is a student conference, or rather two conferences since there will be presentations of around 20 papers in two parallel sessions, one in French and one in English. The students are so keen to discuss their work that the programme starts at 9:30am and goes to 7pm (on a Saturday, mind you!). This level of enthusiasm and willingness to share ideas and experiences has been a feature of the past week both in class and outside.
Some other features of the summer school so far that I have noticed include:
Coming down from the OzCLO State round
In the flurry of exam marking and LingFest preparation, the top floor of the Transient is still coming down from the ascent of 64 high school students today. They came from as far away as Camden (Macarthur Anglican), and James Ruse, to as close as Fort Street and St Marys in Sydney proper. Year 9, … Read more
Review: Duchêne & Heller: Discourses of Endangerment – by Nick Thieberger
Alexandre Duchêne & Monica Heller. 2007. Discourses of Endangerment: Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages. London: Continuum.
Reviewed by Nick Thieberger, University of Melbourne / University of Hawai’i
This collection of thirteen papers addresses language ideology, in particular the use of ‘language endangerment’ as a rallying cry with broader ‘ideological struggles on the terrain of language’. If I could have done a concordance of the text, I’m sure that tokens including ‘discourse’ and ‘essentialize’ would have come out near the top of the frequency list. The use of the former is apparently necessary at least once a page (and preferably more often) and the second is a ‘Bad Thing’, although I have to say that most authors in this book essentialize linguists and the linguistic project as unproblematic, and not internally fraught in the way that everything else is (although the naivete of this postmodern critique would have one think that only they could consider such a thing to be possible).
Deconstruction is the trope of choice throughout this volume – unfortunately constructive critique is not. A certain amount of critical evaluation of linguists’ engagement with endangered languages is necessary, but I find it in general to be dealt with in a heavy-handed and unhelpful way by many of the contributions to this volume.
In this review I will give a brief sketch of the contents of the book which I approached eagerly, keen to read a critical account of the endangered languages (EL) movement in which I have had some interest over almost three decades now. My interest in ELs has focussed on small languages, typically spoken by marginalised groups in what used to be called the fourth world, pre-industrial people living largely traditional lives and, in general these language were not provided with much in the way of resources or existing documentation. This book, on the whole, deals with languages ranging from Corsican to French as endangered in some way and it takes some changing gear in my mind to sympathise with their plight. One chapter deals with indigenous languages (of Canada) but otherwise the volume has a strong European focus (the other exceptions being a chapter on the ‘Official English’ movement in the USA and another on Acadian French in Nova Scotia).
And now we are five
As I pointed out in a previous post, there have been a lot of new developments in the field of endangered languages research in the past five years. One of those has been the publication series Language Documentation and Description which we produce annually at SOAS. We started the series in 2003 with the launch of HRELP, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (in fact, the first volume contains papers from our launch event and the workshop that followed). Hot off the presses this week is the fifth volume of papers, containing six papers on three topics: data and language documentation, digital video and archiving in language documentation, and training and activism in documentary linguistics. Here is the table of contents (for more details including a downloadable PDF of my Editor’s Preface and an order form go here):
All the news that’s fit to print
The May Newsletter of the Australian Linguistic Society has just come out and can be viewed here. As usual it includes information about conferences, workshops, research grants awarded to members, recent publications, and the odd flashback to ALS doings of the last century. Then there is the “News from …” section where stories submitted by Linguistics Departments around Australia are presented; the May edition includes Macquarie University, University of New England, Australian National University, and the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University.