Cirrus@Austlit

'The first large dictionary of the Warlpiri language began in 1959 in Alice Springs, when Yuendumu man †Kenny Wayne Jungarrayi and others started teaching their language to a young American linguist, Ken Hale.' (Publication summary)

'Few resources exist to assist the learner of Kaurna, the language of the Adelaide Plains, South Australia. This Kaurna Learners' Guide, Kulurdu Marni Ngathaitya!, has been developed as a step-by-step guide for learning to speak the language and to assist teachers of Kaurna language. It assumes no previous knowledge though, of course, many Kaurna people will know some of the language already.

'Organised into two main sections, Part One (Chapters 1-16) introduces common words and expressions for use in a range of contexts on topics that are often spoken about, allowing the learner to dive straight into the language. Part Two (Chapters 17-25) guides the learner through various aspects of Kaurna grammar and sentence construction and provides detailed explanation.

'Language learning is rewarding. Learning Kaurna can provide insights into Kaurna culture and the way of thinking of Kaurna people as they lived in the nineteenth century.'  (Publication summary)

'Indigenous languages have been in the news this week. For the first time, an Indigenous language, Ngunnawal, was used for the acknowledgment of country at the opening of the ACT Legislative Assembly.' 

'In 1788 there were between 300 and 700 Indigenous languages spoken across Australia by millions of people, as shown in anthropologist Norman Tindale’s 1974 map. However in the Australian 2016 Census, only around 160 of these languages were reported as being spoken at home.' (Introduction)

'From the first encounters with outsiders, Indigenous Australians developed words for expressing the new things, animals and concepts that came with the outsiders. This paper shows how the distribution of a single loanword ‘work’ and its variants across Australia sheds light on early contact between outsiders and Indigenous Australians, as well as between Indigenous Australians themselves. I propose that widespread multilingualism has led to diffusion both of forms and of strategies for integrating them morphologically into the grammars of individual languages. The geographical distribution of a surprising pronunciation of ‘work’ involving a flap or trill and possibly a final /m/ suggests diffusion areas of borrowing from neighbouring languages and chain borrowing, rather than separate independent borrowings from English. Diffusion through traditional Indigenous languages, rather than through a contact language, provides a partial explanation for the surprising absence of particular variants in the English-lexifier contact languages that developed in Australia.'  (Introduction)

'This collection honours the work of Luise Hercus. Luise Hercus has been a leading figure in the documentation of Australian Indigenous languages for more than 50 years. Her work ranges from salvage studies to detailed descriptions, all richly contextualised by documentation of songs, stories, land and biographies.' (Introduction)

'The contributors to this book highlight current practice in language documentation, drawing on insights from anthropology, digital humanities, education, ethnography, history, linguistics and musicology. The book shows how the value of this multi-faceted documentation has become clear over the last 50 years.' (Publication summary)

This booklet introduces the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages project, explains the background and context of the project, and includes a history of pedagogical practices in the Northern Territory and the production of picture books and readers in language.

'Warumungu the language spoken in and around Tennant Creek has lent its name (in other spellings) to a suburb of Canberra and a battleship.

'The Warumungu language belongs to 700 or so people living in Tennant Creek and areas to the north, east and south in Central Australia. This learner's guide gives clear and extensive instruction in pronunciation grammar and recent spelling conventions and extra information on skin and kinship systems.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.