I stopped blogging last time because I realised that between actually doing my thesis and everything, I couldn’t handle the next step of getting meta about my thesis in extended form on here. On the other hand (in hindsight) it was a great way to get some perspective on the bigger issues of what I was doing.

That was last year, though, and this is this year. So far, this year has been almost completely linguistics free. In part, that’s because I’ve moved to Townsville, and Townsville is a fairly linguistics free place. In part, it’s because I needed a break, so when I sit down to decide on a PhD topic some time in the coming months I’ll have a fresh mind.

In the meantime, I’m going to start blogging again. Like before, I’ll blog about any number of things, including but not limited to language, the media, politics, and the web (I’m doing web design now, did I tell you? I’m also part of Social Media Solutions!)

Where I can I’ll also try and draw them into some kind of lucid storyline.

Butternut pumpkin.

By and large, the quality of the photocopies themselves is fine, and I can get most if not all the typed and written notes on the page. Or at least, I can see the letters and diacritics and such to a level that means I can type the stuff out. The problem now is that since the records I’m working with in those sets of data are so old, they predate the standardization of Yanyuwa spelling and orthography. This wouldn’t be a problem if there were translations I could work with, but since I don’t speak the language I’m working on, I can’t read the stuff out to get a better sense of what’s being written, and nothing in the data matches the dictionary. In short, even though most of the data isn’t actually destroyed beyond recognition, it’s of very little interest without having a very good understanding of the language to be able to interpret just what is being done in the data.

Enter my new plan: As I’ve mentioned earlier, I intended to work with data spanning from the very beginning of study in Yanyuwa in the 60s, through to most recent data available. Since the data from the 60s through to the mid-80s is effectively useless to me, at least for the moment, I’m moving onto working with the newer data which is in the standard orthography.

At the moment, I’m working on the basis that this will be my only real source of data. Instead of looking at the data over time as was originally intended, this means that I’ll be looking at the data and comparing it to the complexity of kinship terminology found in the dictionary compiled based on all the extant data on the language. Although this is not ideal, it is a much more realistic goal than trying to learn the whole language to begin to understand the data in the early material. Either that or I have to ask John Bradley to translate large amounts of data for me, which isn’t fair on him and isn’t really moving my own research skills further in the process. If I continue working with Yanyuwa at some point in the future then as a matter of urgency I would endevour to have all of this data preserved in a standardised form, although this would involve a large amount of time and effort to do.

Until then, I’ll keep plugging away with what I’ve got.

On the positive side of the equation, I don’t have to jump through the hoops of ethics clearance to get access to my data: It’s all been collected and is sitting in a locker waiting for me to use it.

The negative side comes in two parts, the short version and the long version. The short version: Some of it is unreadable.

The long version I’ll leave you to figure out yourselves from this photo I took (I’ll replace it with a scan to better illustrate the problem when I have a scan):

As you can (probably) see, the page is a photocopy of a page of written text – which in itself isn’t great but it’s not the end of the world – what is definitely a problem is the fact that there should be a good deal more text on that page than is actually visible. Back behind the blurry smeared faded areas used to be what I can only assume was legible text, and therefore some of the original data for a language which is very quickly falling out of use is also fading from its written records.

This isn’t (by any means) the condition of the vast majority of the data I have at my disposal – only the earliest data is kept in solely written form, the following data in much better condition and easily decipherable in the form available to me. All the original materials are kept at AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies), who keep a fairly comprehensive archive of language and other cultural material to save it for later use. I must admit that, given the state of the photocopies taken a number of years ago, I seriously doubt the legibility of the original documents also which have had several more years to deteriorate. For me, this is a hurdle which will relatively easily be overcome – since I’m working on an honours thesis, I can exclude a large amount of the data which is illegible because I need to exclude a lot of data in any case.

The broader issue raised, I think, is about how data is stored, archived, and duplicated. All of the data I’ll be using for my honours thesis is in paper-form, with very little available in the way of digital records on the language. This is a relic of the time in which most of the data was collected, and for that reason isn’t something that could be easily helped.

Given that these records are some of the few true records of a moribund language remaining, however, it seems that preserving such records from loss purely because of the deterioration of the original written records would be a tragedy for anybody wanting to look at the language in any additonal detail and for the Yanyuwa people who may want to work with their language in the future.

I’m not at all saying that anybody has been negligent or lazy or anything else regarding this language data – for all I know, the original transcript pages are kept digitally as images in much better shape than I have access to them in – it’s more a general observation about what could happen and the value that should be placed on these vitally important cultural records before it’s too late.

Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us is a book about the supremely human creation of language, in all its forms and intricacies. It isn’t a book that stands back and proclaims the imminent death of languages, but rather looks down into the crevices of language and what it means to us, to societies, and to communities whose languages are hanging by a rapidly fraying thread. It also serves to describe (although only scratch the surface of) the diversity of thought, meaning and culture embedded within languages not as a eulogy to something passing but as a living, breathing entity.

A word about the author: Dying Words is written by Nicholas Evans, one of the preeminent linguists in Australian linguistics, and perhaps one of the most established living researchers of Australian languages and a great spokesperson for the cause of language endangerment around the globe. He also happens to be the head of the Department of Linguistics at the Australian National University. His commitment and sincere interest in the plight of endangered languages is perhaps seen most obviously in the cover of the book, Sweers Island 2008 by the Bentnick Island Artists – painted in 2008 by collectively by every remaining speaker of the Kayardild language, a language and community with which he has worked for well over 20 years, and whose population is now below 10.

The book is broken into five main thematic sections, each broken further into chapters:

The Library of Babel which draws on the image of a language library to describe numerically the diversity of languages of the world, and how the world has changed in the last several hundred years both in aid of and to the determent of language diversity.

A Great Feast of Languages looks at the ways in which languages differ – sounds, grammar and meaning, then looking at the social level of language; kinship, social relations and “[how] speakers keep track of their social universe” (47)

Faint Tracks in an Ancient Wordscape: Languages and Deep World History looks, as it suggests, looks into the history of language and what ancient languages have to tell us about language today, and describes some of the techniques employed by linguists in reconstructing long silent languages.

Ratchetting Each Other Up: The Coevolution of Language, Culture and Thought an amazing section on the relationship of language and thought, boiling one of the most complex ideas in linguistics down to a fascinating and enlightening look at “Trellises of the Mind” and a revealing look at the way art, language and the mind intersect.

Listening While We Can the final section of the book looks at what can and is being done to protect and revive endangered languages as well as looking at some of the complexities of field research of endangered languages.

Dying Words is a linguistics book for everyone, accessible yet deep, informative, and most of all is a good read. It sets out the variety and amazing insights on offer from the world’s endangered languages in a way which teaches you a lot about the languages, their speakers, and why the need to save such languages is becoming more pressing with each passing day – and you probably won’t notice, but you’ll be learning quite a lot of linguistic theory along the way!

Evans can take you away in the most complex linguistic theorem, and bring you back feeling like you went on a journey that wasn’t difficult as much as it was enchanting, and it’s through these encounters that the most interesting insights from languages around the world are found in this book. There is the expectation that you at least have some basic understanding of the workings of language – know what a noun, verb, or adjective is for example – but beyond that everything is spelled out pretty clearly. His experience with a critically endangered Australian language – Kayardild – shines through and his insights into the social and linguistic workings of the society lend great insight into his observations not only about the Kayardild people but of the plight of those experiencing language loss around the world.

This book is about the full gamut of what we lose when languages die, about why it matters, and about what questions and techniques best shape our response to this looming collapse of human ways of knowing…[B]ecause we can only meet this challenge through a concerted effort by linguists, the communities themselves, and the lay public, I have tried to writ this book in a way that speaks to all these types of reader.
Dying Words: xviii-xix.

Dying Words is not intended to be a linguistic reference manual, nor is it intended to be a guide to language endangerment (of which there are already many.) It is a book which is first and foremost a book to be read, and one which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. It is a reference book with a thread of story weaved through, bringing with it a sense of the enormity of language and what it means to mankind. If you have an interest in language, or are curious about what’s out there outside the languages you’re familiar with, I strongly recommend this book.

The book is published by Wiley and available now through them and a number of online bookstores such as Amazon.

There’s a lot to love about Twitter, and most of those good things are beyond the simple 140 characters, and all about community. Hashtags are one of those very community things about Twitter which grew out of nowhere to become one of the most useful things in the arsenal of a Twitter user in categorizing and sorting through the vast amounts of information on Twitter.

Combined with Twitter Search, hashtags create impromptu groups of people who aren’t necessarily following each other, and lets them keep track of events, happenings, topics and ideas without requiring Twitter to build a more complex and less flexible system of groups for tweets. The problem is, they’re beginning to show signs of becoming less useful than they have been, and very quickly indeed.

Perhaps the most successful hashtag phenomena in Twitter is #followfriday – the weekly ritual of nominating people you think other people reading your tweets should follow. The concept only began in January (without the hashtag) and since then it’s become one of the big viral hits of Twitter – all Friday, every Friday since late January, many tweeps have been tweeting their #followfriday recommendations. #followfriday is probably the most relevant canary to demonstrate the problem that hashtags have. There has been a marked decline in #followfriday recommendations, at least in my stream, for the past few Fridays. People are starting to get angry at the constant stream of username lists flying past, drowning out their own tweets, and for the same reason aren’t posting their own recommendations.

Another problem with hashtags, and probably more relevant than #followfriday, is the emerging hashtag memes. Hashtags themselves, for a time, became a meme, but they were mostly nonce creations (eg. #thereallylonghashtagsthatareentertaininginthemselves). What’s started happening, though, is that hashtags are starting to take over the Twitterstream all the time. A few examples from the last week are:  #3wordsbeforesex #3wordsduringsex #3wordsaftersex (noticing a pattern?) and as I write this, 6 of the 10 trends on Twitter are hashtag memes: #liesboystell #liesgirlstell #3wordsaftersex #twistory #thingsmummysaid #3breakupwords.

Now I’ve got nothing against memes, but I don’t think memes are what hashtags are all about. Maybe we need a new standard – %3breakupwords, then have a separate trending list on Twitter search, maybe? In any case, there is an increasing amount of noise in Twitter trends, and they go back to hashtags, and that’s a problem. It undermines, at a fundamental level, one of the important ways for Twitter to show what it’s thinking.

Of course, this is only part of the problem, and something else which has become a problem in recent days and weeks is the growing noise from bots trawling the trends list and spamming the stream with their products, ads and smutty rubbish. I don’t purport to have an easy solution to that though, other than tightening up the sign-up page of Twitter to stop these annoying bots signing up en mass.

Do you have an opinion on the future of hashtags? Tell me what you think in the comments!

So I’m not going to talk about the discussions or outcomes of the Future Summit, but rather focus on its use of Twitter as a broadcast and interaction medium and what I took from this. I’ll start by saying one very important thing: I wasn’t there. I was relying almost completely on the Twitter feed provided by a number of very dedicated and clued on Twitter personalities who did a great job.

The idea behind the Future Summit feed was (from what I’ve read) about trying to remove existing media hierarchies. This meant bypassing newspapers – too slow & bureaucratic; blogs – also too slow; television – not interactive. This left Twitter, the microblogging service taking the world by storm at the moment. What it also left us with was a 140 character limit.

As great a job as the Twitter correspondents were doing during the two day summit, though, I still don’t feel that I have a really well developed sense of what was said there. 140 characters, it must be said, doesn’t replace a full video feed. It also doesn’t replace blogs. It is, primarily, an interaction medium. There have been many events – really serious events – which have been covered by Twitter in very meaningful and constructive ways. I think in the vast majority of these cases, Twitter has been used as an interaction medium rather than a broadcast medium.

I think the tweet above demonstrates what I’m trying to say here – there’s a very broad brushstroke idea of what is being said, but it leaves more questions than it does answers. More often than not, the nuances of argument which were no doubt taking place at the Future Summit were lost in translation to 140 characters, and although it’s been noted that approximately half the questions asked of presenters at the summit came directly from Twitter, I suspect many of them digressed somewhat from the issue at hand due only to the fact that most people reading the Twitter stream would have had no idea what was actually being argued.

The best interaction I’ve seen with broadcasting, Twitter, and interaction is the interaction between tweeters during television shows (Stephen Conroy appearing on QandA a but over a month ago comes to mind). I think that with this in mind, the inclusion of a video stream of the Future Summit combined with the already established Twitter correspondents would be a great way to get people involved and interested in what’s happening. Rather than focusing on simply reporting the events of the summit, the Twitter contingent could then focus on being the mediators between the world of Twitter and the conference without needing to summarise very complex ideas into 140 characters for mass consumption.

That said, @futuresummit being reserved for some kind of coverage as was already present would also be good.

Overall, I get where the organizers of the Future Summit were coming from with this idea, and it is a good idea. I think the best (albiet old) idea here is that we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater – lets not throw out old media completely in place of new media, because new media in many ways has grown out of traditional media forms such as television and video, and doesn’t quite work 100% without it.

The header images have been fixed (on the main page – the actual document view has been overlooked so far, but I’m guessing that’s an accident, so a heads up here ) and the menu is much easier to see. The Flash form is still there, but I’ve been told that it too might be on its way out, or at least a viable HTML alternative will be added. These are all good changes, and thank you TwitDoc for implementing them!

I uploaded a document to the service, and it is a great service. Another example of the power of Twitter apps, and the fact that 140 characters can really be stretched to contain a lot – a whole document, book or presentation in this case.

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On the advice of @geehall1 (via his blog) , I decided to check out a new third-party Twitter service, TwitDoc.

Basically it’s a service that allows you to upload documents of various formats and share them on Twitter. In theory. But I haven’t used it yet. I didn’t get far enough without feeling compelled to write a blog post about my first impressions. So here’s a list for your viewing pleasure:

1. The Logo – My first impressions of the page “that bird looked a bit laggy…how big’s the file? Wait. Why is it so aliased? Oh god. Please do not tell me that it’s a big image. No… Please no.”Ok that’s probably a bit overstated, but honestly, why is the bird on the page a 1058x1226px, 120kb PNG file? I know most people are using broadband these days, but it’s unnecessary, unprofessional looking and wastes peoples’ bandwidth. The same goes for the header text image, which isn’t as big, but in my opinion, never make the browser resize an image because it’ll never do a job as good as you will.
2. The Menu – Ok, so maybe the logo and header image got a bit too much of my attention, but I almost missed the navigation menu directly under it. It’s not too bad, but a few shades darker on the colour wouldn’t hurt in my opinion.
3. Flash – Flash is great. It’s opened up the internet to lots of different ways of creating content, animations and other things. Flash has not, and will not for the forseeable future, replace HTML. If you put a form into a web page, make it a standards compliant, non-Flash form. If you want to then add a JS based Flash replacement to the upload box, by all means go ahead, but if I happen to want to upload a file from my phone (which I can’t – hypotheticals people!) which doesn’t support Flash, I’m screwed. I’ll get the bandwidth sucking images over the 3G network, and “Alternate HTML content should be placed here.” Not very useful.

These are all, clearly, my personal opinions. From an accessibility standpoint, I think the site is a trainwreck, and until I have confidence that people can access the site I’m not really interested in storing my documents with it — or giving it my Twitter credentials.

@mr_billiam How does one stop an endangered language like Yanyuwa from becoming extinct? What made u become interested in this particularly?

SInce 140 characters is never going to be enough to answer either of those questions sufficiently I decided that this was a good point to stop and look at a few of the things driving me this year on my little endangered languages trek with Yanyuwa, even though it hasn’t properly begun yet.

Endangered languages

Prominent linguist Michael Krauss and a number of other linguists predicted, rather ominously, in 1992 that in this century over 90% of the world’s approximately 7000 languages could become extinct¹. This obviously means that in 100 years time – in an extreme case – only 700 languages out of the current 7000 could still be with us in less than 100 years.

What it also means is that a huge amount of collective knowledge – cultural knowledge, human knowledge – and a huge number of communities are going to be destroyed in the process. At the moment, over 80% of the people in the world speak one of the 83 biggest languages, whereas just 0.2% of people in the world speak 3,586 of the smallest languages². That difference means that most of the smallest languages in the world are sustained only by a few speakers – usually elderly speakers – and once they are gone, nobody will speak the language any more.

These languages often contain within them ideas and thought structures dating back millenia, and many of the languages are also scarcely if at all documented. Languages such as Yanyuwa who have only a few (7, as of this moment) speakers left don’t have the huge amount of text, recordings and grammatical information available to comprehensively understand what made the language tick once it is gone. This is where linguists come in.

What to do about endangered languages?

From what I’ve said above, it should be fairly clear that most of the languages – especially those most endangered – are on a downward slope that can’t really be reversed. When a language, such as Yanyuwa, has only a few speakers left, it is beyond the point at which a realistic language revitalization program can take place. Some languages, in less serious states of endangerment, can be restored as a first and growing language through the active involvement of speakers and community members. A good example of this is the Hawaiian language³, which has historically been severely endangered but is now becoming spoken by more and more people, is a language which can now be used as a sole language for education from prep through to postgraduate university if wanted.

Hawaiian the exception to the rule, though. Ultimately, most languages – especially those which are severely endangered, will not have the same number of speakers, the same amount of support or the facilities to stage a comeback and will eventually no longer be spoken. Most linguistic work on endangered languages now focuses on the documentation of these endangered languages before they cease to be spoken without any record for future generations.

Australia, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific regions pose specific problems for linguists and governments tackling language endangerment. These are all areas of extremely high linguistic diversity – and also areas of extremely high language endangerment⁴. Australia, for example, has about 230 languages spoken, but many of them like Yanyuwa have less than 10 elderly speakers left, and many are only beginning to be documented. The case in South East Asia – areas of extremely high language density such as Papua New Guinea with about 820 languages – is even worse, with many languages not documented at all, or even known to science. 820 is an estimate, but we don’t know for sure.

So, obviously, there is no clear answer to the question of what can be done to stop languages from becoming extinct. It will be one of the great cultural questions to be addressed by mankind in the next 100 years, as more and more languages become extinct.

Why am I here?

I think it’s probably obvious from what I’ve said above that I’m very interested and concerned by the plight of languages around the world. It is a tragedy that languages and the cultures, communities and all the other things they entail are being lost at an alarming rate. While nothing can be done to stop the loss, per se, I think it’s important to do what can be done to try and record as much of these languages as possible and assist speakers and community members in any way possible to that end.

I’ll write more about endangered languages as the year goes on, and admittedly my thesis topic doesn’t directly address these issues – I’m analysing existing language data from Yanyuwa in the context of its endangerment – but I thought I’d do a very broad overview of what language endangerment is all about. To me, anyway.

1. Hale, K., Krauss, L., Watahomigie, L., Yamamoto, C., Craig, L., Nasayesva, J., et al. (1992). Endangered Languages. Language , 1 (68), 1-43.
2. Harrison, K. (2007). When Languages Die. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 14.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language
4. Harrison, K. (2007). When Languages Die. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 13-14.

Mostly this semester has been taken up with my two coursework subjects, ‘Linguistic Theory’ and ‘Language and Identity’. The former is the compulsary fourth year honours subject in linguistics, and mostly deals with the history of linguistic thought and theory. The latter is pretty much what its name suggests, dealing mainly with the ways in which we construct our identities using language, and how language helps define those identities. The latter is also very relevant to my honous thesis (which is why I’m doing it.)

What all that means, thus far, is that I haven’t done much work on my thesis at all. I’ve been doing some general background reading into Yanyuwa, and to a lesser extent into Kriol, and language endangerment in general, but I’ve mostly been trying to get assessment stuff done for my coursework subjects (which are, after all, worth 50% of my mark this year – so sacrificing them for the good of the thesis will only screw me up anyway.)

So, in essence, that’s why I haven’t been posting any insightful posts about lingiuistics or much else for that matter. However, I can say that as I work on my next assignment for Language and Identity I’ll probably have some interesting comment to make on the Nothern Territory Intervention and the language used to sell it to the people. So that’s something you can look forward to if you so wish.

So, now that I’ve explained my lack of blog posts, I should get back to all the other stuff I have to do!

Last Thursday, I went to a Twitter meet-up in Melbourne called @tweetupmellers. It was the first social-media-inspired meet-up I’ve been to, and I was pleasantly surprised. I won’t lie – there was a bit of the nervous anticipation that comes from meeting people that you know only through what on the face of things looks to be a limited protocol for interpersonal communication. So before I revisit the meet-up, I’m going to talk more about why those negative face impressions many people have of of Twitter are completely wrong!

I’m far from being the longest lived or most experienced user at Twitter – I’ve had an account since May 2008 and only really started using the site properly in mid-December. I guess that means I had an account before the real explosion, but only started using it when I could ride the shockwaves of Twitter’s success.

Since I started using the service in December I’ve built up roughly 1800 tweets, 250 followers and am following 170 people myself. In the ‘Twitterverse’ I would class myself as a fairly conservative number, but I’ve never been too aggressive about getting followers – I follow people whose tweets interest me and I tweet what interests me as well.

That, I think, goes to the root of what Twitter is about – and others have said this before me I know – but Twitter really is all about the people you follow and engaging with them in meaningful ways. This doesn’t by any stretch mean that you have to be interested in everything they say, agree with everything they say, or engage with them every time you’re on Twitter. It’s about tapping into the vast amount of interesting personalities, information and experiences of people all around the world, and trying to engage with them and work with what you get to yours and the community’s benefit. When this happens, which it almost always does, a vibrant network forms to which you can talk, read along with and end up knowing quite a lot about, both individually and collectively – and that’s all in 140 character bites.

So, to get back to where I started, the whole idea of a Twitter meetup is to take these relationships to the next level and meet up in the flesh. @tweetupmellers was a good opportunity to meet people that I’ve been talking to for a while on Twitter, and meet some new people who I’ve since followed on Twitter. My nervous anticipation was somewhat misplaced. The whole thing was a fantastic success, and it’s amazing how much of an icebreaker Twitter can be (there was a lot of “Hi! What’s your name on Twitter?” going around, especially with me being the resident palm frond and all). It was a great way to connect with the Twitter community and totally flies in the face of the idea that social networking is anti-social – the favourite catch-cry of a fairly significant portion of the popular media.

If you want to see with your own eyes what Twitter is capable of, visit the site, and visit http://tweetupmellers.wordpress.com/ and see for yourself.

I’m sure this is only the beginning, not just of @tweetupmellers, but of Twitter in general and my experience of it. There’s no conclusion to this post, and by now I’m probably only talking to the converted. If I’m not – http://twitter.com/signup. Go there, now. You won’t regret it.

Signing off for now,

@mr_billiam.

Comment if you have your own Twitter stories or want to comment on mine. Oh, and if you have any corrections, too, because I’m sure it’s riddled with typos and such!