Summer of Languages at the ANU

The ANU has bid a fond farewell to its 2015-16 group of Summer Scholars. They came from all over Australia and across the Ditch to spend eight weeks getting a hands-on experience of studying for a graduate research degree.

 

The School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language hosted four scholars, who each worked on projects involving the preservation of Australian Aboriginal languages. 

 

One scholar, Alexandra Grant, is an ANU student who has just completed her second year of a Bachelor of Philosophy (Science). She worked closely with Lizzie Ellis, a Ngaanyatjarrra woman, ANU academic, translator and linguist, and ANU research fellow Inge Kral, to create a dictionary of a western desert auxiliary language in Western Australia. 

 

Alex and Lizzie describe this auxiliary language as the ‘respect register’, spoken during the ceremony that commemorates a young man’s rite of passage into adulthood. 

 

“And when the ceremony is finished, they switch back into everyday speech, which is Ngaatjatjarra and Ngaanyatjarra, and other dialects of the western desert languages,” Lizzie says.

 

Lizzie hopes that the dictionary will become a resource that can be given back to the western desert community so the people can continue to learn and use the register. 

 

While Alex’s stint as a summer scholar may be over, her work with the Linguistics department is not. She is continuing to collaborate with Lizzie and Inge on an app that could help invigorate use of Ngaanyatjarra among young people in the western desert. 

 

The ambition, Alex says, is to create a “fun and addictive game” with text such as the instructions, ‘congratulations’, and ‘go on to the next level’ written in Ngaanyatjarra. 

 

“We want to create the app to be generic so it can be used by other languages,” Alex adds.

 

In taking the app from an idea to reality, Alex is exploring how they could make use of the breadth of resources the university has to offer and involve different Colleges, such as Engineering and Computer Science, in the project. 

 

Alex is perhaps better placed than many to achieve this, given her twin interests of mathematics and linguistics. On whether she thinks there are any crossovers between the two, she says: “I think it’s a way of thinking and problem-solving. I really enjoy both of them for different reasons.”

 

She adds that she has always taken linguistics courses every semester. 

 

“And every linguistics course I’ve taken, I’ve always had very passionate lecturers and I definitely wanted to use this summer to explore the discipline more and meet everyone in the department.”

 

“I feel really privileged to have been exposed to and been learning Indigenous languages. Lizzie’s been a great teacher and mentor in helping me learn some of the language and I hope to learn more from her,” Alex says.