that munanga linguist

I don't mention it much here, but I've been doing occasional bits of writing elsewhere on the net. Mostly, for the language blog on Crikey, Fully (sic) . (You can see my contributions here ). Last week I got a piece published by another website, New Matilda , which is quite a well-regarded independent news and analysis website. I was very pleased that New Matilda published my article. It's a reflection on Marion Scrymgour's time in politics, in particular with the role she played in canning bilingual education after a 34 year history in the NT. You can read my piece here . I was inspired to write it because ABC News in Darwin ran a story about Marion leaving politics and discussed her legacy. Except they didn't mention a thing about her introducing one of the most ridiculous policies I've ever seen - the "Compulsory Teaching In English For The First Four Hours" policy. I'm glad my article was published to counter the glossier stories that came...

I haven't posted about this much but I've been keenly keeping up with the House of Reps inquiry into Language Learning in Indigenous Communities. They're now well into the public hearings and the dates for NT have been set which I'll be very interested in. I just discovered the most recent transcript from the inquiry's public hearings which was with DEEWR - the federal department responsible for education. I found it quite riveting! Go here and it's the hearing from March 1. In particular, my jaw dropped at the bit where Dr. Amanda Day, Acting Branch Manager, National Curriculum Branch, demonstrates that she adheres to the myth that good English outcomes and bilingual education are incompatible. Clearly, she doesn't get that bilingual education can and does produce excellent outcomes for English language learning: CHAIR : All right. You mentioned in your report about the tension that exists between bilingual language learning and of course being fluent....

I'm in the middle of another quick trip to Ngukurr and this afternoon, as I had some quiet time to work on my own, it started to rain. Immediately, a relevant Marra phrase sprang to mind: Gubijiji jil-ajurlu! It is another nice little example of what a lovely language it is. While boring old English has the noun 'rain' and lazily uses that to make the verb 'to rain'/'raining', Marra is cleverer. There is the noun, gubijiji , and a special verb, jil-ajurlu , which means 'it's raining'. So if I wanted to translate gubijiji jil-ajurlu into English in a literal way, I'd end up with: Rain is raining. What a primitive language English is! :-P  The rain is lovely though...

Ever since I became addicted to Facebook 6 or 7 years ago, I've wanted to have the interface available in Kriol. (You can have it in French, Pirate, Upside Down English and Icelandic, but all the small languages like Kriol missed out). Well, now you can! A very clever fellow wrote some code that lets you translate some of the most common words and phrases on the Facebook interface into whatever language you like. So I whipped up a Kriol version and hey presto - here's what my Facebook looks like now: It's really easy and fun, and it actually does make me more inclined to write stuff in Kriol. It's available for anyone to install on their own computer and absolutely free. So, if you want to have FB in Kriol too, here's what to do: Installing Facebook in Kriol on your computer: So far this only works on computers where you can download and install a little file. It won't work on mobiles etc. 1. Make sure your Facebook account's language is set to ...

You couldn't make this stuff up. Calling the police in the NT now goes to a centralised call centre in Darwin where the people who answer the calls have zero local knowledge. Elders in Lajamanu want to contact local community police but instead get a nitwit in Darwin asking ridiculous questions. (And would the police have Aboriginal language-speaking interpreters on stand-by? Don’t think so!). Nobody outside of Darwin wants this new centralised police call centre. School starts today. Thousands of kids who speak Aboriginal languages are denied receiving an education in their own language. Attendance in remote schools is worse than ever and the Federal Government is rolling out the “No School, No Food” policy which has been shown to *not* work. The Ed. Dept is now recruiting teachers with no teaching qualifications , bringing in more outsiders who are clueless about working in remote Aboriginal Australia, even if their heart is in the right place. The Australian Human Ri...

Hi everyone! So I'm in Canberra at the moment trying to be a studious linguist and get this PhD done. I have my mid-term review coming up where I'll be giving a seminar about words you use in Marra and Kriol to talk about family (kinterms). Can I just say, unequivocally, that Marra people have an amazingly complex way of talking about their family. I mean, I'm not surprised by this as Marra people, like all Aboriginal people, place so much importance on family and maintaining family relationships. But still, I'm slightly blown away by the kin terminology Marra people use. To demonstrate this, I'll try and explain how Marra people would talk about people who in English, we'd call mum or aunty : So, if I was speaking Marra and wanted to call out to my mum or talk about my mum, I'd use the word gajirri . I'd also use this word if I was calling out to or talking about any of my mum's younger sisters. If I was calling out to or talking about my mum...

After sweating it out in Katherine and Ngukurr over the past few months and doing lotsa really enjoyable and good work with the Ngukurr mob (which I haven't shared nearly enough of on this blog), I've now landed back in cold country (Canberra) just as the rain starts in the north and makes travel difficult again for a few months. I timed my return to Canberra for Langfest - a series of linguistics conferences held by various national language and linguistics associations - and I'm sitting here tired and fatigued from five long days of stimulating linguistics presentations and the endless socialising that happens throughout these events. Despite my fatigue, it's all been really great and I'm going to attempt a bit of a recap here. I could write a minor thesis on all the talks I went to and the ideas they threw up, but I'm just going to start writing and see how I go. Maybe a reader or two will stay with me! The first two days were for the Applied Linguistics...