that munanga linguist

So many weeks, so many communities, so many interviews but no updates on this blog since I got all excited about the start of my Kriol Proujek ! Oops! In case you're new here, I'm working on a research project trying to figure out dialects of Kriol. The plan is to visit all the communities east of Katherine where Kriol is spoken, interview people (asking the same questions each time) and work out what differs linguistically (and what doesn't) between communities. It's old fashioned dialectology  basically - not very different from what people in England or America did when they went from state to state or village to village to lookout for different dialects. Except it's with Kriol. Well, two and a half months in and the project is going really well. I've visited seven communities: Bulman, Beswick, Barunga, Jilkminggan, Minyerri, Urapunga and Borroloola and done twenty interviews involving 42 people. That means I now have about 40 hours of Kriol recordings to...

I don't often blog about what I get up to anymore. Too busy ranting about what other people are doing it seems! I never even blogged about finishing my thesis or getting a new job at the University of Queensland (as a Postdoc with the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language ). That was all last year though and I'm not going to go into that now. Instead, why not just pick up from where I am today, which is in Beswick community, listening to a raging wet season storm going on outside. It's night-time now but here's the view from my awesome accommodation  this afternoon: Today was the first day in which I started my new research project proper (that is, actually getting out and about and making recordings, rather than doing preliminary office-based stuff). My current project (which I'm just calling Kriol Proujek for now, for simplicity's sake) is an attempt to find out how Kriol is different in all the communities it is spoken in, east of Katherine...