Peter K Austin

Applicative constructions are found in a number of the Indigenous languages spoken in Australia, though they do not exist in the majority of languages for which reliable morphosyntactic data is available. 1 Several typological patterns can be found, suggesting a basic division between comitative-locative constructions, and benefactive-malefactive constructions. These are encoded morphologically by prefixation in some languages, and by suffixation in others. In a large number of languages with applicatives, there is a relationship with causative constructions; in some a single affix serves as both applicative and causative depending on the semantic nature of the verb to which it is affixed. In some languages, applicatives only occur with intransitive base verbs. For languages where applicatives occur to transitive base verbs there are two types: (a) in those with ditransitive base verbs, applicative constructions show the applied element as a direct argument of the applied verb; (b) in those without ditransitive base verbs, anti-passive constructions must be applied to the base verb before applicatives can be added, with an argument of the base transitive verb appearing in a non-argument role in the resulting applicative. Applicative lookalike constructions are found in a few languages.

The Diyari language, spoken in northern South Australia, is unusual for an Australian Aboriginal language in having an extensive range of written sources dating from the mid-19 th to the mid-20 th century, many created by Lutheran missionaries. Outstanding among the missionary materials is a 14 volume manuscript in German by the Rev. J.G. Reuther, four volumes of which comprise a Diyari to German dictionary. Reuther (1981) is a translation into English of Reuther's manuscript; the dictionary part consists of 2,180 printed pages, but is only available as a microfiche. There is a high level of interest in this dictionary from the descendants of the people Reuther studied with, especially members of the Dieri Aboriginal Corporation (DAC), who are keen to revitalise the language and develop practical teaching materials. In their current forms, both Reuther's original and Scherer's translation present many difficulties for use, both by community members and researchers. This paper reports on current research and development by David Nathan and myself to add value to and increase the utility of the Reuther-Scherer dictionary, and to provide access to its contents in various ways.

Across the world, minority languages have been under pressure from regional, national or global languages as these larger tongues became associated with greater social, cultural, economic and political opportunities compared to local languages. This was particularly true during the period of European colonisation and has accelerated in the last 70 years with the rise of independent nations from the colonies and the spread of national and global languages through government, education, workplaces, service contexts, media and the internet. As a consequence, and because of negative attitudes towards them, minority languages have become endangered as they are no longer learned by children.
One response by linguistic researchers to these threats to minority languages has been the development of a way of researching languages and their use that has come to be called ‘language documentation’. In this chapter I explore what documentation is, whether and how the outcomes of documentation can be used for revitalisation (which aims to increase the domains and numbers of speakers of threatened languages), and some of the limitations and challenges of working with language documentation materials. I end by discussing some possible opportunities for documentation to be more creatively used both for and with revitalisation.

This paper explores the relationship between language documentation and revitalization, highlighting some methodological issues that emerge. We argue that work on both documentation and revitalization have much to gain from working together more closely, in order to produce documentary corpora that are more relevant to communities and useful for language revitalization. We argue that documentation should pay more attention to local histories, ethnographies, goals and management of language use, as well as the crucially important but poorly researched beliefs and ideologies about language and language use held by both speech communities and researchers.

The Diyari language was traditionally spoken in the far north of South Australia and has an interesting and complex recorded history since it was first encountered by non-Aboriginal people in the 1860s. The language was the vehicle of Lutheran missionary activities from 1867 to 1914, resulting in the establishment of literacy and writings by native speakers. However its vitality was severely affected by the closure of the mission in 1914. Linguistic research beginning in 1960 means that the language is relatively well documented in text and audio recordings, and since 1990 community social and cultural developments have resulted in an increasing interest in the language and a series of revitalisation activities have been undertaken from 2008. Contrary to published reports of its extinction, Diyari today has a number of speakers of various levels of fluency and keen interest in its maintenance and revival by an active group of community members.

© 2009 The Authors No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, on any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author(s) of that part of the publication, except as permitted by UK copyright law. ISBN: 978-0-7286-0392-9 Printed in the United Kingdom Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project

It is widely agreed that at least half of the world’s 7000 languages are endangered and no longer being learnt as first languages by children, and that if nothing is done they will disappear within the coming century as the older generations who now speak them pass away (Krauss 1992; Grenoble 2011). The reasons for language endangerment are complex but typically involve a process of language shift as communities abandon their minority heritage languages in favour of larger more economically, politically and socially powerful tongues, most often those spoken by their neighbours and/or supported by local, regional or national governments and economic systems. In some cases, communities are actively engaged in language revitalisation in an attempt to stem or reverse the tide of language shift. Attitudes to language are of key importance in assessing the chances of endangered language survival, a factor recognised in Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor’s (1977) ethnolinguistic vitality framework, Bourhis, Giles, and Rosenthal’s (1981) and Bourhis and Sachdev’s (1984) subjective vitality questionnaire and UNESCO’s (2003) language vitality scales. Negative attitudes towards minority and endangered languages by both the speaker communities themselves and by speakers of the larger languages within which they are embedded are well documented and are both an outcome and a cause of shift to dominant languages. Such attitudes may reflect long histories of marginalisation, racism, stigmatisation and disadvantage. They can lead to ‘linguistic insecurity’, which is related to Gramsci’s (1971) notion of hegemony, whereby subordinate groups come to accept the inferiority of their own ways of speaking as ‘common sense’ and ‘natural’. Labov (1966, 489) claimed that in such cases ‘the term ‘‘linguistic self-hatred’’ may not be too extreme’. Fishman (1991, 340) asserts that ‘such self-views are reflections of the destruction of Xish self-esteem, due to decades of negative comparisons with Yish political power, economic advantage and modern sophistication’ (where Xish stands for the threatened language and Yish is the replacing language). Use of the minority language thus comes to be stigmatised, and members of minority groups may come to believe that if they acculturate to majority society by shifting language, their social and economic standing will improve. This can lead to a self-perpetuating spiral of declining use: ‘When the children object to speaking a language, gradually forget it or pretend to have forgotten it because they are ashamed of it, its future is much less assured’ (Calvet 1998, 75). Economic necessity or pragmatism are often cited as reasons for abandoning a minority language, since there may be little instrumental motivation for learning it. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2013 Vol. 34, No. 4, 313 316, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2013.794806

Jiwarli is an Australian Aboriginal language, from the north-west of Western Australia. On the death of Mr Jack Butler, the last speaker, in May 1985 it is now extinct. A range of recorded materials and publications exist, and a reference grammar is in preparation. The language has become known in the linguistic literature for its non-configurational syntax (Austin and Bresnan 1996, Baker 2000), and it also shows switch-reference and a complex system of case-marking that reflects clause type (Austin 2004).

Since 2003 the Endangered Languages Project at SOAS has been involved in various types of training for documentation of endangered languages, ranging from one-day workshops through to MA and PhD post-graduate degree programs. The training events have been attended by specialists, research grantees, students, and members of the general public, and have covered a wide range of topics and involved delivery in a range of contexts and delivery modes, including hands-on practical sessions and e-learning in the Blackboard framework. We have covered both theory and practice of language documentation and endangered language support, including the development of multimedia and curriculum materials for language teaching, some of it experimental and, we think, quite innovative. In this paper I discuss some of our experiences in developing and running these training workshops and courses, reporting on the models, and successes (and failures) over the past three and a half years. My goal is to sh...

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... Trends in Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Jaffe, Alexandra. 2007. Discourses of endangerment: Contexts and consequences of essentializing discourses. In Duchêne and Heller (eds) 2007, pp 57-75. Heller, Monica and Duchêne, Alexandre. 2007b. ...

... In Ngeno-Ngene dialect the third person genitive clitic is -ne so it is possible to distinguish the structures in that dialect. 11 See ft. ... Stanford: CSLI Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky (1992): Optimality theory: constraint inter-action in generative grammar. ...

... Thus, adjuncts whose scope includes a transitive subject will take ergative case following their adjunct case marker (ablative, allative), as in: (7) Juma-ngku ngatha-nha nhanya-nyja maya-ngka-nguru-lu. ... Kumpa-ja juru-ngka nhaa-la ngulha jarrku-ngka juru-ngka. ...

OLAC (Open Language Archives Community) (Simons and Bird 2003) and IMDI (ISLE Meta Data Initiative), metadata within language documentation is now coming to be understood as information that is attached to a file or document for cataloguing purposes (see Johnson, this volume). We call this focus on cataloguing metadata 'thin metadata'. It runs the risk of not only being a

... Bayungu -0 -nha -ngku -ru •ru -tu -rtu -thu -u -ku same as ergative except -•karta* -kurrunu Dhargari -0 -nha -ku •lu •ru -tu -rtu •thu -u -ku -wu Preceding environment ... yulu ngulu Dative +parnti; ngali ngaliya nganhurru nganarna nyinta nhupalu nhurra nhaa ngunha Accusative ...

... nma, thinka-ma-nma killer thinka-ma-lpaja" kin, pair of kurntal-karra kin, pair of (father and son) papu-yarra kin, pair of (mother and son) pipi-yarra kiss, to punyja-nma*1, wuparni-nmayi kiss one another, to wuparni-lpanri-ma kite, black kirrkinyja kite, grey pujurra ... (5) puni-ma vi a ...

... Note that [Id] NEVER occurs in any Ngamini words: kandi ngathanda nhandu nyindiya thandipila thindithindi wandaka windi yinda yindi ... Root Participle mani-'to get' manda wani-'to search' wanda The verb ngana-'to be' is irregular and follows a similar pattern; its 227 Page 10. ...

This is the first part of what is intended to be a comprehensive reference grammar of the Mantharta languages (Jiwarli, Thiin, Warriyangka, Tharrkari) traditionally spoken in the Gascoyne-Ashburton region in the north-west of Western Australia. This version dates from July 2015.

In the last decade of the 20th century a new sub-field of linguistics emerged that has come to be known as ‘language documentation’ or ‘documentary linguistics’ (Himmelmann 1998, 2002, 2006, Lehmann 2001, Austin 2010a, Grenoble 2010, Woodbury 2003, 2011). In this paper we explore how it was defined in the seminal work of Himmelmann (1998) and others, including what were presented as significant characteristics that distinguished language documentation from language description, and how the field has changed and evolved over the past 20 years. A focus on best practices, standards, tools and models for documentary corpora appeared in the early years, which led later to more critical discussions of the goals and methods of language documentation. The paper examines some current developments, including new approaches to language archiving, and suggests that there are opportunities for language documentation to adopt a more socially-engaged approach to languages to and linguistic research, including better engagement with language revitalisation. There are also opportunities to work towards addressing what is currently a language documentation output gap through experimentation new genres and innovations in writing and publication.

This paper is a description of the language situation in the region between the Gascoyne and Ashburton Rivers in the north-west of Western Australia. At the time of first white settlement in the region, there were eleven languages spoken between the two rivers, several of them in a number of dialect forms. Research on languages of the locality has taken place mainly in the past thirty years, after a long period of neglect, but details of the past and present linguistic situation have been emerging as a result of that research. The paper includes an annotated bibliography of the Aboriginal languages traditionally spoken in the area.

The history of indigenous Aboriginal languages in eastern Australia for the 200 years following first European settlement in 1788 has been one of loss and extinction. By 1988 it appears that none of the approximately 70 languages originally spoken in what is now New South Wales and Victoria had fully fluent speakers who had acquired them as a first language as children. However, the last 25 years have seen the development of language revitalisation
projects in a number of communities across this region that have achieved remarkable outcomes, and have introduced Aboriginal languages into schools and other domains. This chapter is an exploration of the social, cultural, political, and attitudinal factors that relate to these developments, drawing on a case study of Gamilaraay-Yuwaalaraay from north-west New South Wales. The importance of local, regional and national politics is also explored.

Language  documentation  emerged  as  a  new  sub-field  of linguistics  in  1995  and  has developed and expanded over the past 20 years. In this paper we outline the defining characteristics of language documentation as presented in the late 1990s and discuss some  of the changes in the field that have occurred since. These include a move away from  concern  for  best  practices,  standards  and  tools  to  a  more  critical  and  reflexive approach that highlights diversity and flexibility of individual documentation projects in their social, cultural and political contexts, as well as the need for greater attention to goals and outcomes. There have also been developments in archiving that build upon social  networking  models  linking  people  to  each  other,  rather  than  seeing documentation as being primarily about ‘data’ and ‘resources’.