Signs of change?

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London is about to experience Olympic fever again with the Opening Ceremony of the Paralympic Games taking place tonight. Already disabled athletes have started appearing in the city and interacting with locals and other visitors. The Paralympics provide a great occasion to focus attention on the issues and difficulties faced by disabled people across the … Read more

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Bursting through Dawes

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‘Aspects of the Sydney Language are a perennial fascination’, as I observed in a 2008 post, and the best record we have of the language is in the two notebooks of Lt William Dawes. Dawes himself has become a fascination and a new book pursues him to imaginary lengths. I have so far only read … Read more

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New blog about endangered languages

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Readers may like to check out and subscribe to a new blog that went live today: EL Blog from the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS, University of London. This new blog: “will add to [ELAR’s] support of collaboration between collection depositors and users by providing an additional platform for sharing information and advice. EL … Read more

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Distinguishing language documentation and language description, revisited: LIP discussion

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The distinction between language documentation and language description: a LIP discussion, Ruth Singer recaps last night’s Linguistics in the Pub, a monthly informal gathering of linguists in Melbourne to discuss topical areas in our field.

Last Monday’s debate about the distinction between language documentation and language description inspired by a recent article on the topic by Nikolaus Himmelmann in Language documentation & Conservation:
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2012. Linguistic Data Types and the Interface between Language Documentation and Description. Language Documentation & Conservation 6. 187-207

The discussion was led by Rachel Nordlinger and Nick Thieberger from the University of Melbourne. Also commenting on the debate was Eva Schultze-Berndt, visiting Melbourne Uni from the University of Manchester, via Kununurra and Cairns.

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Summer research scholarships!

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AIATSIS/ANU Summer Research Scholarship Program 2012/13 CLOSING DATE 31 AUGUST The ANU School of Language Studies (SLS) and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Studies (AIATSIS) are pleased to announce they will co-host two Summer Research Scholars in the 2012/13 round. Outstanding undergraduate and honours students working on Australian languages are encouraged … Read more

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New book and launch

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Talk, Text and Technology: Literacy and social practice in a remote Indigenous community by Inge Kral (The Australian National University) has just been published by Multilingual Matters in Britain. It is an ethnography of language, learning and literacy in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands communities of south-east Western Australia. This study traces the Ngaanyatjarra from the introduction … Read more

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Languages and language policy of Timor Leste

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Kirsty Sword Gusmão gave a terrific public lecture Language, language policies and education in Timor-Leste on 20th July at ANU. You can watch the talk here. Key points for me were: her passionate commitment to expanding opportunity for Timor-Leste’s children through education her belief that mother tongue medium instruction in the early years is a … Read more

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Kim Scott and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project

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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.

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More new tools and methods

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I’ve been attending the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) Digital Humanities (DH) workshops and conference in Hamburg (which has 510 registrants) and have learned about a number of new tools and methods for working with text, images, and media, often with large collections of primary sources that can only be analysed computationally. On the way here I called in at the MPI in Nijmegen and heard a presentation (pdf is here) by Peter Withers about the new tool they have produced called KinOath (http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/tools/kinoath), software for mapping kinship relations.

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Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures

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A two-day conference titled ‘Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures’ ran on June 29/30 in Cambridge, UK. Organised by the World Oral Literature Project, the conference brought together a range of ‘scholars, digital archivists and international organisations to share experiences of mapping ethno-linguistic diversity using interactive digital technologies.’ A discussion … Read more

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