The art of recognition: Visualising contact languages with community vernacular language posters

• Main Authors: Angelo, Denise, Fraser, Henry, Yeatman, Bernadine
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations Inc.
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/204025; https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/204025/4/01_Angelo_The_art_of_recognition%253A_2019.pdf.jpg

Across Australia, language contact has shpaed the languages that many Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander people speak today. While in some communities Traditional Languages have been spoken continuously from pre-invasion through to the present day, the language use of many First Nations Australians has shifted to "New Languages", which are contact languages such as creoles and mixed languages, or otherwise to a variety of English. Despite the extent of language contact and its effects on the day-to-day language experiences of many Indigenous Australians, there is little discourse in the public domain or in educational settings about language contact or contact languages. In public data sets they are not reliably differentials from Traditional Languages on the one hand, nor from English(es) on the other (Angelo et al., 2019). This has profound implications for Indigenous Australians who speak these New Languages, some of which constitute the largest languages that are spoken almost exclusively by First Nations people today. There is no systematic policy effot underway to work with communities to describe, recognise and name these New Languages, and consequently little tailoring of services to speakers on account of these languages. This paper presents a grounded translational research methodology, Community Vernacular Language Posters (Department of Education [Qld], 2018), that has been developed or working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members to raise awareness about their local contact language and about the ramifications for education and other service provision. The outcome of this linguistically-informed process is an accessible poster depicting local everyday ways of talking. Underpinning this document is the shared body of knowledge amongst community participants that has been generated by the many consultations and inclusive discussions that have taken place due to collaborative language research process. Often, a Community Vernacular Language Poster project has resulted in a ...