Birri Gubba Online Training

Living Languages Trainer, Mandy Davis started online training sessions with Birri Gubba woman Marie Dennis in February last year. Marie grew up knowing only single words in Birri Gubba and had limited resources; a Birri Gubba word list and a handful of other resources passed on to her, from family members. Her ambition was to learn the pronunciation of words and understand the grammar to make sentences, so she could be able to teach her family members, and use more Birri Gubba language in song, dance, and ceremonies.

Mandy has been in awe of Marie, and her son Hakeem’s strength and passion in their responsibility and motivation to rebirth their cultural practices and language. Their online training sessions have involved unpacking the resources, explaining morphology, suffixes, and the use of suffixes to create grammatical sentences. At each training session we could see Marie’s growth with her language, and she wrote a beautiful speech in Birri Gubba for a significant ceremony.

We encouraged her to apply for Paper & Talk 2023, both her and her son Hakeem were successful in their application and attended the 2-week program, it was so lovely to meet them both in person!  Marie said Paper & Talk was an amazing experience for her and Hakeem, they found lots of information to bring back to community. Her aim is to hold small language workshops, develop more resources and continue with Living Languages online training sessions.

It’s difficult to capture Marie’s passion for her language journey in a few paragraphs, but we are honored to meet with her during our training sessions, and to witness her growth over that time. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for Marie and Birri Gubba in the coming years!

Marie Dennis & Penelope Schmidt at Paper and Talk 2023