Northern Institute event
Creating a World that Sustains its Languages
| Presenter | Steven Bird, Professor, Northern Institute | |
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| Location | Northern Institute's Savanna Room (CDU Casuarina Campus, Yellow 1.2.48) | |
| Open to | CDU staff and students, Public | |
This seminar is part of the People.Policy.Place Seminar Program 2024.
About
To many in academia, myself included, the world’s language crisis has been an opportunity for three decades of initiatives to ‘save languages’. Common activities are to record, transcribe and translate large quantities of primary linguistic data, to engage communities in formal language revitalisation programs, and to supply the languages with basic speech recognition and machine translation technologies.
In this presentation, I ask: how do these various initiatives work when viewed from the standpoint of participants? How do these initiatives take local understandings of ‘language’ and ‘vitality’ seriously and play into the local linguistic ecology with its vehicular and vernacular languages? I report on new initiatives with my colleagues to rethink the dynamics of language use, leading to creative new ways for locals and newcomers to work together to keep minoritised languages strong, such as ‘Language Parties’.
Presenter
Steven Bird has spent over 30 years working with minoritised people groups and developing ways to keep oral languages and cultures strong, including fieldwork in Africa, Melanesia, Amazonia, and Australia. He has held academic appointments at U Edinburgh, U Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, and U Melbourne. Since 2017, Steven has been a research professor at Northern Institute, CDU, where he directs the Top End Language Lab. He pursues other language-related projects at aikuma.org.
Registration
This event has already happened - find the recording in the "Past seminars and recordings" section on the Seminars page.
Getting there
Northern Institute's Savanna Room
CDU Casuarina Campus, Yellow 1, Level 2, Room 48
Google Maps Location or How to get to Savanna Room.
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