that munanga linguist

The high rate of language loss and endangerment across the world is becoming more widely known. In the sociolinguistics course I am teaching, we discuss this as a follow on from topics such as multilingualism and looking at what happens when languages come into contact with each other. Sometimes you get stable multilingual societies. Sometimes pidgins and creoles arise. Sometimes you see code-switching phenomena. And sometimes, languages become weaker, become threatened, endangered and may cease to be spoken and known at all. (None of these are mutually exclusive, by the way). When we consider language loss, we talk about why we should care (and whether we should care it all). When I asked students to think of reasons to care, the more immediate responses seem to relate to knowledge systems: that each language represents something valuable to humanity in terms of knowledge systems encoded in that language, and that that knowledge is of great value to the speech community too.  ...

Spoonerisms are awesome linguistic anomalies. It's a speech error you make when you accidentally swap two sounds around in words that are next to or near each other and end up saying words that make zero sense (or maybe the sound-swap results in words that actually still make sense but far from the intended meaning). Some examples? When I searched online for examples of spoonerisms, they were mostly examples where the sound-swap resulted in a sentence that still made sense but resulted in an unintended meaning or examples that were curated artificially . Not much looked like spoonerisms that were genuine speech errors. We'd all be familiar with spoonerisms and can probably remember hearing them or recall one slipping out of our own mouths. But, in my experience at least, they're rare. Maybe once I year I'd remember hearing one... maybe every couple of years I'd remember doing one accidentally? Would it be about the same for you? The apparent rarity of genuine...

If a government body wants to tell a community of 1000 people to boil water before drinking it because of health concerns, and pretty much everyone in the community speaks the same Language Other Than English (LOTE), why would you issue the alert only in bureaucratic/dense/formal English? The community being alerted here is chock full of Kriol speakers. If you want to communicate with them, doing it only in formal English is only going to get you so far. While NT Health and Power and Water are serving the community well in terms of their warning, the language it is communicated in is lacking. It's kinda like a cinema screening a movie onto the curtains, instead of projecting it onto a flat screen. To be fair, translation services for Indigenous languages are really lacking in the NT. There is no government agency to go to. Getting a quick turn around on translations is probably near-impossible. (See also last year's Kriol signage debacle I discussed here ). But governmen...

Part three of my examples linking sociolinguistics to popular culture kinda follows up on Part 1 which showed (via drag queens) how no two speakers are identical . (Part 2 skipped over to communities of practice in Mean Girls ). I have to confess, this episode is less about my own creativity and more about finding a pretty perfect video on YouTube that did the job of linking sociolinguistics to the real world for me. Worth sharing all the same... Key concept : Variability in language (which exists everywhere) is caused by geographic and social factors. Concept in more detail: The subfield of sociolinguistics makes no bones about the fact that language varies everywhere, all the time. No two individuals speak exactly the same way and no individual speaks the same way all the time either. Many sociolinguists are concerned with not just describing this ubiquitous variability but figuring out the causes of variation. For a long time, where someone is from (i.e. geography) was in...

"...Council is part of the Katherine community..." "... we have a social responsibility to contribute to the growth of the town..." Positive rhetoric like the above is par for the course for any Australian local government. The above quotes come from Roper Gulf Regional Council's CEO Michael Berto. Great messages? Definitely. One major problem though: the town they refer to - Katherine - isn't part of the council's area. Roper Gulf Regional Council covers a massive, sparsely populated area reaching from east of Katherine right out to the Gulf of Carpentaria coast. It came into being 10 years ago when the NT Government oversaw the establishment of 'Super Shires' - amalgamations that subsumed a stack of community government councils which were often local government areas with only a few hundred constituents. The creation of 11 'Super Shires' a decade ago was an unpopular move . Poorly consulted and hastily done, some say it ca...

As mentioned in my last post , in my lecturing this semester I've been trying to exemplify key concepts in sociolinguistics via popular culture. I have a stock of these snippets and hope to find time to share a few more. As I said previously, it's an effort to engage students and adhere to the philosophy that "when all is said and done, we study sociolinguistics because it is fun" (Meyerhoff 2011: 4) In part two, we jump to this week's lecture where we looked at various of definitions of 'speech community' and then how concepts of social networks and community of practice have built upon notions of speech community. Key concept : Social networks, unlike macro-social categories such as class, group people according to interactions (and can then tell us more about linguistic variation) Concept in more detail:  Some sociolinguistic studies have shown how important social networks are in explaining language variation and change (or lack of change). Accor...

I am currently teaching sociolinguistics. Most lectures, I have found ways to illustrate key points and concepts with short online videos - usually stuff from TV shows, YouTube and other things. It's an effort to co-opt things I already enjoy and am familiar with to make sociolinguistics and lectures fun. After all, "when all is said and done, we study sociolinguistics because it is fun" (Meyerhoff 2011: 4) So, in the name of fun, I'd like to share the videos and corresponding sociolinguistic concepts I've been using in my lectures. Others might enjoy and learn from them too. Here's part one. Key concept : Sociolinguistics is about individuals. No two speakers have the same language. Concept in more detail: Societies consist of individuals, none of whom are exactly the same. We shouldn't forget this when we study sociolinguistics. In Hudson's introductory textbook, he says: "The individual speaker is important in sociolinguistics in much ...