Linguistic prehistory of the Australian boab

Boabs, a close relation of the African baobabs, are found only in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and a region close by in the Northern Territory. Here several of the words for the boab tree and its parts are examined with special emphasis on loanwords which cross language family boundaries going in a west-east direction. It is proposed that this linguistic diffusion may reflect dispersal of the tree into new areas on the east, in relatively recent times. On the other hand another recent diffusion from the west of new salient functions of the boab fruit spread a new term to central Kimberley where boabs are known to have been present and used by humans for many thousands of years

Multilingual Multiperson Multimedia: Linking Audio-Visual with Text Material in Language Documentation

Language documentation for endangered and Indigenous languages has been rapidly moving towards a more holistic view of what is to be captured, including a range of genres, conversation as well as narrative. Most of the languages concerned also exist in a multilingual, multivariety language ecology, in which different age groups may speak, and switch between different varieties. This inevitably becomes part of what is being recorded and is crucial in the understanding of language shift and maintenance. Added to this is the growing realisation of the importance of paralinguistic elements such as gesture even to the basic interpretation of utterances. For proper documentation, what is required now is a system that can handle video, audio, transcription, translation and other annotation, synchronically linked. In this paper I will investigate the functionality of the CLAN system of a/v-transcript linking, widely used for child language and multilingual studies, and briefly compare this to other available alternatives. As for archival holdings of a/v and transcriptions, most of what already exists cannot be immediately moved into such a/v-text linking systems, because of the enormous amount of work involved. There is a need however for some standard system for preliminary digital linking of a/v with existing transcripts, translations and annotations, which may be separated from each other physically and institutionally. From this, more robust linking for analysis and multimedia presentation can be developed. This paper reviews some of the systems being used and the extent to which the metadata element Relation can be refined to carry out this task.Australian Academy of the Humanities; Australian E-Humanities Network; Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney; School of Society, Culture and Performance, Faculty of Arts, University of Sydne

34 Emergency language documentation teams: the Cape York Peninsula experience

Language revitalisation and endangered language documentation are complementary endeavours – they feed into each other and both benefit from the support of the other. This idea is at the heart of a community teams approach called Emergency Language Documentation Teams (McConvell et al. 2005). This paper will review the underpinnings of this idea and discuss the successes and difficulties encountered while applying it in the Cape York Peninsula region. The findings of the Cape York Peninsula Language Documentation project pilot discussed in this paper include that informal approaches to both language worker training and language learning were, across the board, far more successful than more formal approaches (including one-on-one versions of master-apprentice schemes). We also found that the project approach was more difficult in situations where there were more social and linguistic divisions and heterogeneity. There is some irony in this given that often in the Australian context linguistic homogeneity within a speech community can itself be a result of language shift and language loss

The development of asymmetrical serial verb constructions in an Australian mixed language

Gurindji Kriol is a mixed language spoken in northern Australia. It is derived from Gurindji, a Pama-Nyungan language, and Kriol, an English-lexifier creole language. Despite these clear sources, Gurindji Kriol contains grammatical systems which are not found in Gurindji or Kriol, for example asymmetrical serial verb constructions. The origin of these constructions is unclear given that Kriol only contains a very limited set of serial verb constructions and they are not found in Gurindji. The development of asymmetrical serial verb constructions is examined and it is suggested that they are a product of the more restricted Kriol serial verb construction developing and expanding under the influence of the Gurindji complex verb. The formation of this construction was a part of the more general genesis of the mixed language which was derived from code-switching

Kinship loanwords in Indigenous Australia, before and after colonization

This paper begins with a discussion of medieval kinship loanwords into English from French. As well as illustrating how these terms (uncle, aunt, cousin, nephew etc.) are drawn from outside the lineal core of the family, they also show how the takeover from earlier Anglo-Saxon terms was not immediate but went through a phase of plurality or overlay of some centuries in which there was kin-switching between the old and new systems, parallel to code-switching, a phenomenon also to be discussed in relation to Australian Indigenous languagesas they borrow kinship terms. As well as these collateral terms highlighted in English, affinal (in-law) terms are also commonly loanwords in many languages. Turning to Australia, examples are given of long-distance affinal Wanderwörter (travelling words), including ramparra word for ‘mother-in-law’ which turned into lamparr(a) ‘father-in-law’ as it travelled east and exploded across the Northern Territory in the last 150 years. In contrast, linguistic prehistory can show us examples of local borrowing of grandparent kinship terms to fill gapsas systems change, and rarer examples of more wholesale local borrowing. Moving on to the more recent era when English and Pidgin-Kriol have had impact on the situation, terms like uncle and aunt when used in Indigenous contexts tend at first to have the ‘Aboriginal’ meanings ‘mother’s brother’ and ‘father’s sister’ but with increasing kin-switching into the wider English mean-ings. Pre-existing features of some Aboriginal languages like Guugu Yimidhirrpre dispose them to move in this direction but this language and others add hybrid compounds like cousin-ngamu(mother’s brother’s daughter).‘Cousin’ is most often cross-cousin (mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’ child) in earlier stages of Pidgin-Kriol based on traditional kin-classification, but in an area in the Northern Territory it also intriguingly means ‘mother-in-law’, because this feature was adopted from a language around the Queensland border on the advancing eastward path of Pidgin-Kriol and the cattle industry in the late nineteenth century