that munanga linguist

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...

Early in 2022, while doing my daily doomscroll on Twitter, I noticed Kriol becoming a topic of conversation. Excuse me, what? When part of my day job is trying to get non-Kriol speakers to pay attention to the fact that Kriol exists, I never expected Kriol to organically go viral! But it happened. And it wasn't cute. Kriol goes viral The story starts with Covid. In late 2021, the Aboriginal Health Council of WA  (AHCWA) created a few short Covid vaccination videos in some of WA's main Indigenous languages, nobly wanting to make sure remote Aboriginal residents were as safe from Covid as urban Westralians.  Made in collaboration with AIWA (Aboriginal Interpreting WA), five short videos appear on AHCWA's website - one with Mark McGowan on his own where he says: Hello, my name is Mark McGowan. I am the Premier of Western Australia. This is an important message to keep Aboriginal people safe. You can die from the Corona, or get really sick. It's time to get the Corona nee...

Bible translators translated the bible into Kriol because they thought it would be the best way for Kriol speakers to learn about Christianity. When Barunga School started a Kriol literacy program, it was because people thought Kriol speakers would learn to read and write faster if they learned literacy in their first language. When Kriol interpreters interpret in court, it's so Kriol speakers can get (marginally more) equal access to the justice system. I could go on... All the reasons I could cite for choosing Kriol over English tend to have foundations of social justice, communicative efficiency, or other social/cultural reasons related to education, spirituality and more. One domain that is absent is economy and business. English remains the language of wealth and business; Kriol is for 'not-for-profit' purposes. Well so I thought until I saw these work vehicles around Ngukurr recently. A plumbing and gas fitting company in Ngukurr helping with the new housing developme...

My recollection of being first taught the Kriol word wangulu was that it means 'orphan'. It's an interesting word in that it is a very common word (in Ngukurr at least) but part of the relatively smaller set of Kriol words that come from Indigenous languages rather than English. But it's the semantics of it that I find more interesting, particularly when faced with trying to translate it into English. The basic definition I learned - orphan - is a quick, shorthand definition. What linguists call a gloss. But, like all words, there's a fuller and more subtle range of English translations if you delve deeper... I started thinking about the word wangulu again recently because of fortnightly 'advanced beginner' Kriol lessons I've started running for munanga in Ngukurr. At each session, I ask students for a 'word of the week' - a Kriol word they like or want to know more about. One of the words was wangulu but the person who 'brought' ...

Note and Disclaimer Dijan Saikloun Stori im “unofficial translation” burru Greg Dickson (Wamut). If yu lugunat dijan en im afta 8pm Sadadei, im olwan na. Gu la http://www.bom.gov.au/nt/warnings/ bla det nyuwan Saikloun Stori. Dijan im laswan trensleishin ai garra duwum, dumaji det saikloun im guweiguwei na. This is an unofficial translation of Tropical Cyclone Advice 50 (5:00pm Saturday March 23). It was written by an accredited Kriol-English interpreter and second-language Kriol speaker who is most proficient in the dialect of Kriol spoken in Ngukurr. It was done quickly and will likely contain some errors. Please do not use in lieu of the official Tropical Cyclone Advice from the Bureau of Meteorology. *If you are reading this after 8pm Saturday, it is out of date. Please go to http://www.bom.gov.au/nt/warnings/ for the latest Cyclone Advice. This is the last Kriol translation that will be done because the cyclone is weakening and moving away from Kriol-speaking areas. ...

Ai bin digimat dis woning dumaji im olwan na. Det nyuwan yu gin faindim iya:  https://munanga.blogspot.com/2019/03/unofficial-kriol-translation-of_26.html This warning has been removed as it is no longer current. You can find the latest unofficial translation (of Cyclone Advice 50) here: https://munanga.blogspot.com/2019/03/unofficial-kriol-translation-of_26.html

Ai bin digimat dis woning dumaji im olwan na. Det nyuwan yu gin faindim iya:  https://munanga.blogspot.com/2019/03/unofficial-kriol-translation-of_26.html This warning has been removed as it is no longer current. You can find the latest unofficial translation (of Cyclone Advice 50) here: https://munanga.blogspot.com/2019/03/unofficial-kriol-translation-of_26.html

Ai bin digimat dis woning dumaji im olwan na. Det nyuwan yu gin faindim iya:  https://munanga.blogspot.com/2019/03/unofficial-kriol-translation-of_26.html This warning has been removed as it is no longer current. You can find the latest unofficial translation (of Cyclone Advice 50) here: https://munanga.blogspot.com/2019/03/unofficial-kriol-translation-of_26.html

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...

I'm knee-deep in transcribing Kriol interviews that I did last year for this Kriol Proujek , being ably assisted by some Summer Research Scholars from UQ and, before Christmas, some Kriol-speaking language workers from Ngukurr. (See here for a neat little story about their work). Pretty regularly, while transcribing, I smile, laugh and really enjoy some of the chat I hear. The lovely examples are endless really. The recordings are just wonderful (in my humble opinion). I won't go into a lot of detail (or share any examples that might be a bit too personal or identifiable), but here's one that made me giggle this afternoon, when I transcribed the part of the interview where I asked two young guys if they use a regionalised term for 'scavenge': gubarl : Q: Yu sabi det 'gubarl'? A: Yuwai! Ai oldei gubarlgubarl grawun faibsen burru eberriwe la grawun! Q: Do you know (the word) gubarl? A: Yeah! I'm always 'gubarl'-ing the ground (for) five ...

2016 sign at Rapid Creek (Source: Facebook) When I shared th is Kriol sign on Facebook as an example of a bad Kriol translation, a first language Kriol speaker commented: Im nomo Kriol garjinga, bambai aibina sabi.   Which means:   It’s not Kriol for goodness sake, otherwise I would’ve understood it. My thoughts exactly. And also the thoughts of every other Kriol speaker I know who has s e en it. Poorly translated signage isn’t uncommon. Everyone is familiar with the hilarity of Engrish . But when translation is just a commercial novelty, it doesn’t matter too much. However, when government departments seek out translation services, you can assume that it is for an important reason. And when that goes wrong, it is more serious and more embarrassing. My favourite example of this is an English sign emailed off to be translated into Welsh. The resultant sign features an ‘Out Of Office’ auto-reply message in Welsh! Out of office messa...

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...

If anyone's on Twitter and interested in learning something about Kriol, you're welcome to follow me there ( https://twitter.com/KriolKantri ), as I trial Kriol Kwiz. I'm trialling #KriolKwiz - regular Kriol Qs to help Twitterers learn more about the NT's 2nd most widely spoken language. Keep an eye out! — Kriol Kantri (@KriolKantri) December 22, 2015 After Twitter added a poll function, I realised it could be a neat way to instantly transmit some little Qs about Kriol to a few hundred people. For a language like Kriol, this can be especially useful because there really are very few avenues for non-Kriol speaking people to learn (or learn about) Kriol. Yet there are hundreds of such people living and working with and around Kriol speakers across a large part of Northern Australia. I regularly get requests or hear concerns about the lack of opportunities out there for people to learn Kriol. The Twitter questions are, of course, not going to fill that gap but he...

Fun fact: In Kriol, dinggal is a verb meaning 'limp' or 'walk unevenly'. In Marra and Warndarrang, dinggarl-dinggarl refers to a weed that produces fruit like this: Notice a connection? I only just noticed it yesterday when I was trying to suss out where the verb dinggal comes from (obviously not English). You can see the verb dinggal described (at 1:10) in this video (courtesy of the ever helpful and brilliant Kamahl and Dwayne): As for those spiky little spurs? They're found across a lot of Australia, not only on on the ground, but embedded in thongs, feet and tyres, all over remote Australia. According to Heath's Warndarrang and Marra dictionaries, the species name is Tribulus cistoides . I'm not sure but it might be the nasty weed known as caltrop (can anyone confirm this?). Obviously, treading on those awful bindi-eyes will make you limp and walk strangely. The link between the plant name in Marra and Wandarrang and the verb shown on the...