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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 891

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

What makes a small language a survivor? language ideologies and multilingualism at Warruwi Community, Australia

Authors: Singer, Ruth Jennifer
Submitted by: Singer, Ruth Jennifer (University of Melbourne, Australia)

Mawng is a language spoken by 300 people on the northernmost coast of Australia. It is one of only a handful of Australian Indigenous languages that is still being learned by children. Mawng was probably always a small language and Mawng speakers use a number of other Indigenous languages as well as Aboriginal English on a daily basis. Although there have been detailed studies of language loss, there have been few studies of unexpected survivors. This talk looks at what role local language ideologies might have played in the survival of the Mawng language.

Multi-modal linguistic biographies (Busch 2010, Krumm and Jenkins 2001)  are used to explore language ideologies at Warruwi Community. The biographies take the form of informal interviews combined with a visual task. Interviewees are asked to reflect on the languages they have used throughout their lifetime as well as language use within the community. A number of language ideologies are apparent in the interviews. For example, it is often stated that there are three languages at Warruwi: Mawng, Kunwinjku and Kunbarlang. This ideology involves erasure (Irvine and Gal 2000) of a group of around 100 people whose land is over a  hundred kilometres to the east of Warruwi Community. Although initially considered temporary residents they are now well integrated into the community along with the Yolngu-matha dialects that they speak, which Mawng speakers had little contact with prior to the establishment of the Warruwi settlement.

As might be expected, it appears that language ideologies at Warruwi Community have favoured the survival of Mawng by motivating a range of practices by Indigenous community members. Equally important, however, is the role of dominant language ideologies in co-opting White support for Mawng as one of the 'official' languages of Warruwi Community. Multi-modal linguistic biography provides a multi-faceted perspective on how languages co-exist at Warruwi community, where conceptions of speakerhood make standard language surveys difficult to implement (Evans 2001).

References:

Busch, Brigitta. 2010. School language profiles: valorizing linguistic resources in heteroglossic situations in South Africa. Language and Education 24.283:294.

Evans, Nicholas. 2001. The last speaker is dead - long live the last speaker! Linguistic fieldwork, ed. by P. Newman & M. Ratliff, 250-281. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Irvine, Judith T & Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. Regimes of language: ideologies, polities, and identities, ed. by P.V. Kroskrity. Santa Fe/Oxford: School of American Research Press/James Currey.

Krumm, H.-J., and E.-M. Jenkins. 2001. Kinder und ihre sprachen – lebendige mehrsprachigkeit. Vienna, Austria: Eviva.