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.
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.
Loss and Renewal Felicity Meakins, Carmel O'Shannessy / Felicity Meakins, Carmel O'Shannessy
2016
eBook
Felicity Meakins was awarded the Kenneth L. Hale Award 2021 by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) for outstanding work on the documentation of endangered languages Australia is known for its ...linguistic diversity and extensive contact between languages. This edited volume is the first dedicated to language contact in Australia since colonisation, marking a new era of linguistic work, and contributing new data to theoretical discussions on contact languages and language contact processes. It provides explanations for contemporary contact processes in Australia and much-needed descriptions of contact languages, including pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, contact varieties of English, and restructured Indigenous languages. Analyses of complex and dynamic processes are informed by rich sociolinguistic description.
Across Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal songs are often attributed to the spirit world rather than as compositions by the living. Deceased ancestors give songs to people and such a recipient is ...described as the finder of a song. This is particularly evident in 'Puranguwana' ('Perishing in the Sun'), a song of the public ceremonial genre known by older men and women at Balgo and Bililuna communities in the south-east Kimberley in Western Australia. The protagonist in the song is a Pintupi man called Yawalyurru Tjapangarti, who dies of thirst on Sturt Creek Station on Jaru country. The first-person perspective in the lyrics is common in Aboriginal song, rendering the singers active participants in the event. The words of the song are relatively easy to identify, which is consistent with the song's purported recent origin. Yawalyurru is both the subject matter of the song and the song-maker. According to oral history, Yawalyurru's spirit gave the song to the Jaru people before returning to its Pintupi country. 'Puranguwana' also resembles a song that was recorded at Balgo in 1981 by ethnomusicologist Richard Moyle. In 2019, Balgo residents were unfamiliar with the earlier recording and, on listening, regarded this as a different song to 'Puranguwana'. While not identical, an analysis and comparison of both their text and music suggests that the songs are cut from the same cloth. This cloth reflects the region's multicultural history where both desert and Kimberley linguistic groups have co-resided since the 1930s. The article aims to increase appreciation of the artistry of Aboriginal song, the complexity of its creation, and its value to Aboriginal history.
Loss and Renewal Meakins, Felicity; O'Shannessy, Carmel
2016, 2016-04-11, Letnik:
13
eBook
This series offers a wide forum for work on contact linguistics, using an integrated approach to both diachronic and synchronic manifestations of contact, ranging from social and individual aspects ...to structural-typological issues. Topics covered by the series include child and adult bilingualism and multilingualism, contact languages, borrowing and contact-induced typological change, code switching in conversation, societal multilingualism, bilingual language processing, and various other topics related to language contact. The series does not have a fixed theoretical orientation, and includes contributions from a variety of approaches.
This volume is a grammatical description of Bilinarra, an endangered Australian language. This work draws on materials collected over a 20-year period from the last first-language speakers of the ...language, most of whom have since passed away. Detailed attention is paid to all aspects of the grammar, with all examples provided with associated sound files.
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