former Senator Aden Ridgeway writing articles in English and Gumbaynggirr

When was the last time you saw a piece in major daily newspaper written in both English and an Indigenous language? This is from Aden Ridgeway, who was a Senator in the Australian Parliament a few years back - one of the few Indigenous politicians that ever made to Canberra. (Noel Pearson has never made it that far!) Aden adds his voice to those critical of the NT Govt. policies on English teaching and Indigenous teaching education. Good article!

Please read it by following the link. (Copyright dictates I'm not allowed to post the text here...)

Comments

Unknown said…

It sure is a great article! It reminded me of an incident that occurred in a class of First Nations Students I was training earlier this year. We were talking about the role of music in language revitalization and one student pointed me to the First Voices web site, which hosts all kind of material in Canadian languages. As we clicked around on various links, we came across a recording of the Dene language version of the Canadian national anthem, sung by one of the students in the class. It was a very moving moment as tears flowed in the class. I'd love Aden Ridgeway and Aboriginal people across Australia to experience that feeling.

7:59 am

The time Kriol went viral

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

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no-no

Occasionally, I get asked if there's any meaning behind the names of the languages we work with here, like, if a similar thing happens here that you get on the east coast where language names are sometimes derived for the word for 'no, nothing' in that language (e.g. Gooreng gooreng (from Bundaberg area) is the word for 'no' reduplicated). That doesn't happen here but I like to think what the languages would be called if that *did* happen here: Marluy marluy Mandi mandi Gatjja gatjja Waba waba Waari waari hehe... sounds funny. But then the other day I realised that it *does* happen for one of the languages here, although only informally and in casual speech... I realised that I've regularly ppl talking about Yolŋu or Ritharrŋu / Wägilak mob and referring to them as 'yaka bayaŋu mob'. Neat!

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that munanga linguist

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