CoEDL Summer School Workshop Dec 2019
The Living Languages team were very proud to be invited to train at the CoEDL Summer School in December, 2019, delivering a course “Making linguistics accessible to those who need it”, together with friends and co-trainers Sharon Edgar Jones (Wonnarua and Gringai) and Harley Dunolly-Lee (Dja Dja Wurrung). Living Languages trainer Andrew Tanner and Harley kicked off day 1 with an overview of Indigenous languages in Australia, with Harley and Sharon generously sharing their own language revitalisation stories. We then moved into a panel discussion featuring academic and non-academic, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous, perspectives on language work.
Day 2 was all about building words in Aboriginal languages, and Sharon and Amy gave the group a crash course in morphology, while also attempting to demonstrate how we teach linguistics in an accessible way. We then split into groups to look at problem sets generously compiled by speakers of Aboriginal languages in our class. The groups had to figure out what all the words, prefixes and suffixes were in their example sentences, and then have a go at explaining some of that morphology in plain English. We packed a lot in, but we had a fantastic group of engaged students in our class who made it very enjoyable.
CoEDL (the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Languages) hosts the Summer School every year, attracting linguistic scholars and community language workers from across the country to participate in intensive courses on languages and linguistics. It was a pleasure to be involved, and we also had the opportunity to participate in some of the other amazing courses on offer: from learning about sign languages, to seeing CoEDL’s ELPIS transcription software in action, to discussing the ins and outs of providing expert linguistic evidence in the courtroom. Thanks CoEDL for inviting us!!