that munanga linguist

hehehe... I was at the Katherine Markets yesterday drinking yummy coffee and socialising. I was chatting to a couple I've known for ages - one speaks Kriol as a first language, the other speaks English as a first language and both speak the other language well. Because I'd just spent a couple of weeks out bush, my Kriol was well-oiled so I was switching between Kriol and English as I was talking to them. After speaking Kriol a bit, their son (all of 4) goes to me, "Are you speaking French?". Now, this kid can understand Kriol pretty well and hangs around Kriol speakers quite a lot, so I was surprised he thought I was speaking French. I laughed and told him "ai nomo sabi tok Frentj" (I don't know how to speak French) but he still kept asking if I was speaking French... too funny. I realised that for him, the majority of non-English speaking white people he's met in his short life are probably French speakers and I'm guessing he'd be lucky ...

Well, today was looking like a quiet Sunday in Ngukurr, working on my own processing some of the Marra recordings. Well, that's what I did in the morning, but after lunch, I thought I better go visit one of the old Marra ladies who I haven't had much of a chance to sit down with yet. Unfortunately, I couldn't find her, so instead I went to JJ's house and suggested I show the young women hanging around with not much to do (it's Sunday) a bit about processing language recordings using the ELAN program. It was a bit of a stab in the dark, but much to my surprise, the exercise caught on! So, I've just spent about 3 hours teaching two young women, with JJ there for support and supervision, how to transcribe recordings using ELAN. How fun! And they enjoyed it too! This isn't the first time I've shown community language workers how to use ELAN (you can read a blogpost about a previous time here ). Each time I've trained people on ELAN, it's been ...

I suppose I should start posting again now that I'm back in Ngukurr and experiencing lots of neat things again and feeling removed from mainstream Australia (hence the need to write about my experiences to process them and share with others so to feel a little less alone). I'm now into the 'fieldwork' phase of my PhD studies which is the bit that I'm most excited about. I have to be honest and say that after spending so many years working so closely with Aboriginal (and a few Islander) people on their languages, I find University environments quite strange in that there you talk/hear about small, Indigenous languages a lot but in an environment that is removed from context. Even though I adjusted to that during my 3 months in Canberra, now that I'm back in Ngukurr, I can feel that disjunct unsettling me again. Or maybe it's just that I'm really enjoying being back here and feeling so satisfied to be involved in exciting on-the-ground work again. This...