Skip to main content

four day weeks aren't that great

You’d think I’d be happy to have two short weeks in a row, but really it just means I’ve got four days to do all our work in instead of five.

Tuesday was interesting and lot of things happened. I had a run-in with the woman from Batchelor, talked to someone from Education Department about all the good work we’re doing at no cost to the Education Department, digitised some audio, helped Baba G start to transcribe some Marra, drew six large women on cardboard for tomorrow’s body parts lesson, a new worker started at the language centre, talked to Baba A about working on Nunggubuyu and started sorting out the Ngandi course being run here next week. And I finally got some printer ink cartridges after having no ink for two weeks!! hurrah.

I won’t go into more detail. The only other thing I did was go on a bike ride to the airstrip and come back all sweaty.

Today (Wednesday) is language classes at Ngukurr school. We’re still doing stinking body parts. Actually, it’s not a bad thing because it means we don’t have too much preparation to do but it also means the kids are learning very slowly which is a bummer. Anyway, classes went well today. We had four out of five languages being taught. Only the Nunggubuyu kids missed out. I don’t know what’s wrong with all the Nunggubuyu people… we’ll have to put a sign up at the shop to try and shame them into action. hehe.

I sat with my mari T today, who is the only Ritharrngu teacher. Poor thing, he’s there on his own. But he’s doing fine and luckily there aren’t too many Ritharrngu kids so he’s got a manageable group.

Actually, I noticed an interesting thing today when we doing lesson preparation. Most of the people doing language work here are men! It’s just about always been the case that language work is more a women’s thing, but not here. I know that people here are more comfortable working with someone of the same sex so obviously I’m gonna tend to work with the men. But there’s so many more women linguists than there are men linguists so that means historically it’s usually women doing language work. But today there was only my two mami, R and N and the other were all men: Baba G, mari T, wawa A, uncle E and JBJ was helping out too. I’m glad that were spoiling the myth that language work is typically women’s work.

Well back to my mari T’s Ritharrngu lesson. This is what he was teaching the kids today: liya (head), buthuru (ear), ngurru (nose), miil (eye), dhaa (mouth), jarrwalk (shoulder), gurrpala (knee), lukku (foot) and guung (hand). Nice work mari.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I dunno if women did language work *because* of female linguists... might be a longish bow to draw. Glad you're getting some of the blokes involved. I worked with a few men, though predominently women. Are you working with any women? I think you mention older women at Minyerri?
Greg Dickson said…
hello bulanjan!

yeah, i am still working with women, although at minyerri i'm working mostly with two men. a lot of women seem to be involved in a lot of fighting at the moment.

and i don't wanna start drawing any kinds of bows but just that i got a shock when we were giving language worker training to a bunch of people the other day and they were all men. i don't reckon that's the norm.
Anonymous said…
hi yutubala!

yeah i have to agree with bulanjan. i also don't think that it is the case that there have been more female linguists around. maybe at language centre but not in academic institutions. i imagine a few of the men you are working with have worked a bit with heath and baker and many others. not sure who has written the grammars in those areas.

were there the same no. of men working in the classroom with the previous female linguists?
Greg Dickson said…
oh dear, i should've known better than to mention anything about gender roles n stuff with you two around!

Popular posts from this blog

A conference, language policy and Aboriginal languages in Federal Parliament

The other day, I was priveleged in attending a TESOL symposium about 'Keeping Language Diversity Alive'. One of the speakers, Joseph Lo Bianco was excellent and discussed Language Policy. He gave a handout at one of his sessions that I'm going to type out in full here, because it was a real eye-opener. It's from the Official Hansard of the Federal Parliament from a debate that happened on 10/12/98. Here's how it went: Mr SNOWDON: My question is to the Prime Minister. Is the Prime Minister aware of the decision by the Northern Territory government to phase out bilingual education in Aboriginal schools? Is the Prime Minister also aware that his government funds bilingual education programs in Papua New Guinea and Vietnam? Prime Minister, given that article 26(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children, will you take a direct approach to the Norther

The pitiful state of Recommendation 11.6 of the NT Fracking (Pepper) Inquiry

Today the NT Government announced that it's ok to start fracking the Beetaloo Basin, claiming that all 135 recommendations from the 2018 Pepper Inquiry report have been met and, therefore, fracking can proceed.  Most of the recommendations - and you can go through them all here:  Action items | Hydraulic Fracturing in the Northern Territory  - are outside my field of expertise as a linguist. There's a lot of regulatory stuff, things about the mining industry, stuff about land and water management that others know much more about than me.  However, as a linguist working in the Katherine Region for 20 years, there is one recommendation that sits in my wheelhouse so, after today's announcement, I wanted to take a look at it. It's Recommendation 11.6, which says: That in collaboration with the Government, Land Councils and AAPA, an independent, third-party designs and implements an information program to ensure that reliable, accessible, trusted and accurate information ab

Subtle features of Aboriginal English that I love: agreeing or confirming by copying

Linguists aren't supposed to play favourites, but I love Aboriginal English. Maybe because it's what the love of my life speaks and separating language from people and society isn't a realistic prospect. I'm lucky to regularly be around Aboriginal people speaking English in all sorts of ways and privileged to have insights into some of the more subtle ways in which Aboriginal ways of using English differ from the suburban white English I grew up speaking.  I want to share some of these more subtle features. Not just because I am fond of them but also because they seem to be features that escape the attention of most academic discussions of Aboriginal English / Aboriginal ways of using English. I'm going to skip over the complexities of what Aboriginal English is (and isn't) and also if/why that label is worth using at all (a chapter I wrote on Aboriginal English(es) dips into some of that discussion - email me if you want a copy). For brevity's sake, let