Languages of Australias First Peoples in Narrative: Australian Stories

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Description

Celebrating the diverse languages of Australias First Peoples, this book presents stories told by elders in eighteen languages from around the continent, and explores their patterns of meaning.

The stories recount the experiences of the tellers and histories of their communities, from tales of anti-colonial resistance to origin stories of the Dreaming. The book aims to make the languages accessible and engaging through the voices of the elders, while building readers knowledge about language and language learning. It opens with some basic language knowledge for reading the stories. Each chapter then begins with the cultural and historical contexts of the stories, which are first previewed in English translation, then presented sentence-by-sentence, setting out the original sounds and wordings, glossed with plain English. Extracts are selected to illustrate patterns of meanings that are characteristic of each language. The final chapter sums up the various meaning patterns the stories use, and interprets their evolution in the light of First Peoples deep histories, as recorded by archaeology and traditional knowledge.
The book will be useful for language learning programs in communities and schools, for researchers of language and language teaching, and for any reader with an interest in the languages and cultures of Australias First Peoples.

Reviews

This book presents the historical background of different Australian Aboriginal languages followed by very detailed analyses of traditional narrative texts in those languages using relatively non-technical terms. This makes it useful for the descendants of the story tellers and also for linguists, anthropologists, and historians. - Randy J. LaPolla, Professor of Linguistics, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
First Nations language educators and activists are increasingly calling upon linguists to work in ways that are rooted in the demands of developing language revitalisation pedagogies. This book makes a significant contribution to answering that call by enriching and deepening our collective understanding of these complex and important stories. - Anna Crane, Independent Scholar, Australia.

Author Bio

David Rose is an Honorary Associate of the University of Sydney, Australia, and Director of Reading to Learn, an international literacy program.