Language maintenance
Projects relating to language maintenance are listed below. Links to further information are given where available. Please note that links to external sites open in a new window.
ASEDA
Researcher: Kazuko Obata
ASEDA stands for the Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archives. ASEDA holds computer-based (digital) materials including dictionaries, grammars, teaching materials, and represents about 300 languages. ASEDA offers a free service of secure storage, maintenance, and distribution of electronic texts relating to these languages.
The Archive is available to language community members and to researchers in the field of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Availability of items is subject to depositors' access conditions.
Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project
Researcher: Patrick McConvell
An ARC project with University Of Melbourne and University of Sydney 2004-7, involving four indigeous communities in Central Australia with four Ph.D students and Indigenous research assistants. The aim is to see how children are learning languages in a sitiation where there are several languages spoken and the traditional languages are endangered.
AUSTKIN Kinship Mapping
Researcher: Patrick McConvell
Web mapping of kinship terms and systems and social features on Australian base maps. In partnership with Laurent Dousset of the Centre for the documentation of Oceania, Paris. Linked to another project 'Australian Society in the last 10,000 years'
Austlang
Researchers: Patrick McConvell and Kazuko Obata
AUSTLANG is a web-based Indigenous languages database. It assembles information about indigenous languages from a number of different sources such as Norman Tindale’s Catalogue of Australian Aboriginal Tribes, OZBIB: A linguistic bibliography of Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait Islands, the AIATSIS library’s catalogue, and various surveys/research papers on Indigenous languages. It provides easy access to comprehensive information about each Indigenous language to language project workers, researchers, and anyone interested in Australian Indigenous languages.
EthnoER Ethnographic E-Research
Researcher: Patrick McConvell
A one-year ARC special initiative project with a number of Australian and overseas partners developing web tools for video and audio annotation of indigenous cultural materials (stories, conversation, music) for distributed use by different repositories.
Loanword Typology Project
Researcher: Patrick McConvell
Gurindji. Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.
With a team looking at languages around the world, this project is investigating which words have been borrowed into Gurindji language of the Victoria River District from which sources and when.
Victoria River District Languages and Cultures Documentation project of DoBeS
Researcher: Patrick McConvell
Victoria River District Languages and Cultures Documentation project 2005-8 of DoBeS, the Documentation of Endangered Languages project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, focussing on five engangered languages both Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan, and associated indigenous knowledge. On the website linked to above, it is listed as Jaminjung.)