Language diversity is under threat. While each language is subject to specific social, demographic and political pressures, there may also be common threatening processes. We use an analysis of 6,511 ...spoken languages with 51 predictor variables spanning aspects of population, documentation, legal recognition, education policy, socioeconomic indicators and environmental features to show that, counter to common perception, contact with other languages per se is not a driver of language loss. However, greater road density, which may encourage population movement, is associated with increased endangerment. Higher average years of schooling is also associated with greater endangerment, evidence that formal education can contribute to loss of language diversity. Without intervention, language loss could triple within 40 years, with at least one language lost per month. To avoid the loss of over 1,500 languages by the end of the century, urgent investment is needed in language documentation, bilingual education programmes and other community-based programmes.
Understanding Linguistic Fieldwork offers a diverse and practical introduction to research methods used in field linguistics. Designed to teach students how to collect quality linguistic data in an ...ethical and responsible manner, the key features include: A focus on fieldwork in countries and continents that have undergone colonial expansion, including Australia, the United States of America, Canada, South America and Africa; A description of specialist methods used to conduct research on phonological, grammatical and lexical description, but also including methods for research on gesture and sign, language acquisition, language contact and the verbal arts; Examples of resources that have resulted from collaborations with language communities and which both advance linguistic understanding and support language revitalisation work; Annotated guidance on sources for further reading. This book is essential reading for students studying modules relating to linguistic fieldwork or those looking to embark upon field research.
Gurindji Kriol is a mixed language spoken by Gurindji people at Kalkaringi in northern Australia. It has retained many of the features of Gurindji including case-marking, many other nominal suffixes ...(inflectional and derivational) and significant portions of vocabulary (including nouns and coverbs). It has also lost many features of Gurindji including inflecting verbs and bound pronouns. Other systems have also been significantly affected by language contact. For example, although the Gurindji cardinal direction system is in evidence, it is greatly reduced both inflectionally and functionally. Where the paradigm of Gurindji cardinals contains 28 inflected forms for each cardinal direction and these are used pervasively to describe large and small-scale space, Gurindji Kriol contains at most four inflected forms for each cardinal direction and they are only used for descriptions of large-scale space. Despite this reduction in the use of Gurindji cardinal directions, Gurindji Kriol has not replaced or supplemented this system with Kriol cardinal terms or with the English left/right system. Instead Gurindji Kriol favours deictic terms and gesture to express spatial relations. Yet deixis and gesture are only useful in so far as the speaker and hearer can see each other. The final part of this paper presents the results of a 'Man and tree' task which was conducted at Kalkaringi with 11 Gurindji Kriol participants and six Gurindji participants. The task was designed specifically to reveal strategies of spatial description in small-scale space where the speaker's and hearer's view of each other is obscured. What emerges from this test is the pervasive use of cardinal directions and the suggestion that the mental map of younger Gurindji people is still based on fixed bearings despite the paucity of cardinal directions in natural discourse.
Meakins' second column in this series addressed the issue of arboreal idealism in language evolution, attempting to reconcile the tree and wave approaches by drawing on a different environmental ...metaphor – the mycelial network where both vertical and horizontal transmission play a role in transmitting nutrients and water between trees and mycorrhizae, a type of symbiotic fungi which is the source of the complex underground mycelial network. There is modelling work underway which combines the vertical and horizontal transmission of language features, though contact languages, for example Pidgins and Creoles, which have both inheritance and borrowing at the heart of their development, remain absent from most of this work.
What have we missed? Meakins, Felicity
Journal of Pidgin and Creole languages,
05/2023, Letnik:
38, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Melanesian and Australian Creoles were originally brought to the attention of linguistics by Hugo Schuchardt (1979 1883), whose work postulated a connection between Bislama (spoken in Vanuatu) and ...Queensland Pidgin English (spoken in north-eastern Australia). Schuchardt's proposal was later elaborated on in Philip Baker's (1993) detailed comparative study of Melanesian and Australian Creoles, which found that the ultimate origin of these languages was in New South Wales (NSW) Pidgin which developed in the late 1790s in the early Sydney colony.In this column, Meakins suggests that Melanesian and Australian Creoles have valuable contributions to make to some of the debates which have preoccupied Creolists over the last two decades, including whether Pidgins are possible precursors of Creoles, the relative contribution of substrate and superstrate languages to the development of Creoles, and the issue of morphological complexity in Creoles. This article mostly focuses on the languages of north Australian Kriol, Bislama, Solomons Pijin, and Tok Pisin.
The word wide web Meakins, Felicity
Journal of Pidgin and Creole languages,
11/2022, Letnik:
37, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Although botanical metaphors pervade the study of language relationships in both historical and contact linguistics, this use of arborescent imagery for explaining language evolution has acted to ...exclude contact languages. So-called 'normal' languages are modelled as evolving from a single parent language through a process creating a tree-like structure. On the other hand, contact languages have convergence processes at their heart rather than tree-like divergence models.
Empiricism or imperialism Meakins, Felicity
Journal of Pidgin and Creole languages,
03/2022, Letnik:
37, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article reflects on the 17 years since the publishing of Michel DeGraff's seminal paper "Linguists' most dangerous myth: The fallacy of Creole Exceptionalism" (Language in Society, 2005), in ...which DeGraff called out the field of linguistics for continuing the "postulation of exceptional and abnormal characteristics in the diachrony and/or synchrony of Creole languages as a class" and argued that this approach was rooted in racial essentialism and perpetuated the marginalisation of Creole languages and their speakers.
An automated method is presented for the commensurable, reproducible measurement of duration and lenition of segment types ranging from fully occluded stops to highly lenited variants, in acoustic ...data. The method is motivated with respect to the relationship between acoustic and articulatory phonetics and, through subsequent evaluation, is argued to correspond well to articulation. It is then applied to the phonemic stops of casual speech in Gurindji (Pama-Nyungan, Australia) to investigate the nature of their articulatory targets. The degree of stop lenition is found to vary widely. Contrary to expectations, no evidence is found of a positive effect on lenition due to word-medial (relative to word-initial) position, beyond that attributable to duration; nor do non-coronals lenite more than their apical counterparts, which freely lenite along a continuum towards taps. No significant effect is found of preceding or following vocalic environment. Taken together, the observed lenition, duration, and peak intensity velocities are argued to be inconsistent with a single, fully-occluded articulatory ‘stop’ target which is undershot at short durations, rather targets can be understood to span a range or ‘window’ of values in the sense of Keating (1990), from fully-occluded stop-like targets to more approximant-like targets. It is an open question to what degree the patterns found in Gurindji are language particular, or can be related to the organization of obstruent systems in Australian languages more broadly. Precisely comparable studies of additional languages will be especially valuable in addressing these questions and others, and are possible using the method we introduce.
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