Endangered languages conference: call for papers

the next foundation for endangered languages conference is going to be held in Tajikistan. Here is the call for papers. I must admit I was a little more enthusiastic about this conference before it found that exactly where in the country it is; I can’t help feeling that being that close to the border with [...]

LSA Bloggers report

LanguageLog unfortunately seem to have been too busy basking in the glory of their award to hang out with the rest of the linguabloggers, but we had a fun lunch as usual despite their absence. Featured topics included the Word of the Year (and the fact that a fair number of the nominations were phrasal, [...]

5th European Australianists’ workshop (2)

Day two kicked off in fine North England drizzly style. I gave a talk on hunter-gatherer linguistics and things we might want to think about when considering hunter-gatherer language change. Continuing the  historical theme, my student Natalie Weber gave a nice report on her Marrngu reconstruction work. After coffee, Robert Mailhammer did a great study of [...]

5th European Australianists’ Workshop (1)

Many of the Northern Hemisphere based Australianists met in Manchester last week for a two-day conference.
Bill McGregor kicked off the proceedings with a talk on spatial frames of reference in Gooniyandi* and a critique of Levinson’s (2003) typology of spatial categorisation. The Gooniyandi system appears to have something a bit different going on, and it’s hard [...]

NWAV take 2: constructional identity

I’m not a sociolinguist, although some of the work I do overlaps quite a bit with what some sociolinguists do (and that was what I was talking about there). A few things jumped out, and one was on how ‘identity’ is used.
I was surprised by the way in which the concept of ‘identity’ was used [...]

NWAV take 1: socio fieldwork

iThere was some discussion in the panel I was on about fieldwork and endangered languages and the type of data that sociolinguists want. We didn’t have much time for it but let me put down some points that got made more or less in the session.

Language documentation these days does not (and/or should not) involve [...]

NWAV 0: my paper

I went to NWAV this weekend and had a fabulous time. I have a few posts in progress so you’ll get the serialised highlights over the next few days.
Here are the slides from my paper on Arnhem Land clan variation. It’s a 3.8mb file with some embedded sound files.
Comments are welcome as always.