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Archive for September, 2007

Australia tops list for vanishing languages

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 by admin

I found this article posted on ABC’s news site this morning…

Australia has topped a list of “hot spots” for the extinction of Indigenous languages.

The list was put together by linguists from the Enduring Voices project, which seeks to document and revitalise languages slipping toward oblivion.

David Harrison of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, the project’s co-director, says there are 6,992 recognised distinct languages worldwide.

He says on average, one language vanishes every two weeks, often as its last elderly speakers perish.

The project, backed by National Geographic magazine, named a region of northern Australia including parts of Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia as the place where local languages are most threatened.

The linguists say Aboriginal Australia harbours some of the most endangered languages, with 153 different ones spoken in this region…

Read more at ABC or you can download the article here in PDF

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The Language Archiving Technology Portal

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 by admin

I got an interesting email this morning from the Resource Network Linguistic List which has lead me on the following Internet path.  The first stop was over to National Geographic website “Enduring VoicesSaving Disappearing Languages”, it was interesting to see an organistion as big as NatGeo be involved with saving languages, there is a pretty map of the world and then some links off elsewhere.  The one that I clicked on was the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages link, they seem to be the organisation working with NatGeo in the Enduring Voices project.

It is well worth looking around these sites and seeing what others are up to, the next site which I visited was the the “Language Archiving Technology portal”, once again another Language Technology site that is aimed at the academics, but it has the very interesting software tool, Elan,  I have heard about the program heaps so I think I will now install it and find out what it is all about.  I will also add the links to the RESOURCE page.

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Languages given fighting chance

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 by admin

Today we have had another story published in a local newspaper in Newcastle, The Star, the story was written by Andrew McLeod from The Star.  What was good about this story is that Andrew actually came in and done a proper face to face interview with Dianna and myself.  The story talks about how we developed Miromaa and where it is being used and why we did it etc.

Once again the only problem was that he referred to Awabakal language and people using our organisation spelling “arwarbukarl”, we apologise for this and am again sorry that we spell our org’ differently.  Anyway I have attached a PDF of the story here - Languages given fighting chance

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Posted in Awabakal Language, Information Technology, Miromaa | 1 Comment »

Tragedy of nation’s dying languages lost in translation

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 by admin

This interesting article was forwarded to me this morning from Paul at VACL, it appeared in todays SMH, here is an excerpt:

How many American first nations can you name? Sioux; Apache; Chippewa; Cherokee; Cheyenne; Mohegan; Navaho. Most people would recognise a few of these at least.

Now how many Aboriginal Australian nations or languages? Most non-Aboriginal Australians would be lucky to be able to name more than one or two.

Most Australians know more about the frontier battles of the US than they do about the frontier battles in Australia… read full article at SMH

It is an excellent story written by a Federal Labor MP, Tanya Plibesek, I think it would be even more interesting to speak with Tanya some more, here’s hoping.

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Upcoming Conferences

17th Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Conference and
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June 17th - 20th, 2010
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Miromaa is developed from funding received by the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.

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