that munanga linguist

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...

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...