Pama-Nyungan Languages and Australian Prehistory

Dr. Claire Bowern has moved to Yale University although she is still associated with Rice as an Adjunct faculty member and continues to supervise her students. She has an NSF-sponsored project entitled "Pama-Nyungan Languages and Australian Prehistory". Project description: The earliest detailed records of Australia's indigenous languages date from approximately two hundred years ago, and therefore our only access to the prehistory of Australia's indigenous past is through reconstruction in archeology and linguistics. While we know that humans have lived in Australia for more than 40,000 years, we do not know how speakers of the 250 currently attested languages came to live where they do today. This project uses linguistic evidence to trace the history of Aboriginal people in prehistoric times. Systematic similarities between words in these languages can be used to reconstruct various properties of prehistoric languages. These techniques will be used to determine the structure of the Pama-Nyungan language family, which will shed light on prehistoric population movements.

Australia's linguistic prehistory is important for several reasons. It has been claimed that methods developed for Europe and the Americas do not work in Australia. If true, such a finding would be highly important, since these methods are based on properties of language change which until now have been assumed to be universal. However, preliminary work indicates that Australian languages show the same characteristics that we find elsewhere. Small speech community size, widespread multilingualism, and other factors have obscured relationships between these languages. These languages are an excellent laboratory for modeling what language change might have been like before the spread of agricultural communities. If we are ever going to be able to model accurately what prehistoric global language spread might have looked like, we need to understand how it operated in Australia. (For more information, visit the project's web site at http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~ppny/.)

The Language of Bardi (BCJ) Precontact Narratives

Claire Bowern had also received funding from the NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program for her project entitled "The Language of Bardi (BCJ) Precontact Narratives". Detailed linguistic fieldwork on the Indigenous languages of Australia did not begin in earnest until the 1960s. One of the few earlier sources is the manuscript collection of Gerhardt Laves, an American who went to Australia in 1928 and spent approximately 18 months doing linguistic research. He worked intensively on six languages, one of which was Bardi. Bardi is now spoken by approximately 25 elderly people in northwestern Australia. Laves' Bardi records are extraordinary. They were written at a time before the full impact of European settlement had caused extensive language loss in Australia's North-West and record a language and culture which has since changed significantly. Although the texts are legible and the language accurately represented, the materials are very difficult to read without excellent eyesight and a good knowledge of Bardi. This NSF/NEH-funded project brings together a team of linguists and Bardi community members to work on the texts to produce an annotated edition, under the direction of Dr. Bowern at Yale. The linguists will digitize the texts, word process them, and provide rough translations on the basis of Laves' notes and the Dr Bowern's knowledge of the language. They will then work with Bardi speakers to refine the translations, discuss the grammar of the Bardi language, and work out the context of the stories. The result will be a book of the texts, with translations, annotations, and discussion.

This is an important project, linguistically and culturally, for Bardi people, linguists, and for science more generally. Linguistically, the Laves texts represent the earliest accurately recorded materials for Bardi, and preliminary work indicates that there have been subtle but numerous changes in the language over the last hundred years. We know little about variation and change in small linguistic communities like this, and within Australia the Bardi materials provide a rare opportunity to get accurate longitudinal information about language change. This in turn allows the study of change in languages with very complex inflection, which is both understudied and of wide relevance in linguistics. Culturally, the texts are very important. They provide information about pre-contact traditional law, mythology and everyday social interaction, and are a very detailed record of a way of life no longer practiced. Most of this knowledge is still held by the oldest people in the Bardi community but has not been written down, and work on describing and explicating the events in the Laves materials is a wonderful opportunity to study pre-contact culture. Finally, the texts themselves are an important language learning and cultural resource for Bardi people themselves, and repatriation of these materials is very important. The materials will likely figure prominently in future language revitalization programs. With so much of the world's linguistic heritage in danger, this project provides a model of how early materials may be used to benefit both local communities and science. (For more information, visit the project's web site at http://www.ruf.rice.edu/%7Ebowern/laves/laves.htm.)

Austronesian Voice Systems

Masayoshi Shibatani has received a research grant from the National Science Foundation for his project entitled "Austronesian Voice Systems: An Eastern Indonesian Perspective" (NSF award no. BCS-0617198). The three-year project explores the empirical and theoretical issues of the Austronesian voice system from a unique perspective of the gradual attrition pattern of the voice morphology seen among the languages of eastern Indonesia. The fieldwork will be carried out in the archipelago stretching between Bali and Timor with the concentration on Flores Island. Please visit the East Indonesian Voice Systems web page for more details.