 And it's my great pleasure to introduce Ruth Singer, who is going to talk today about small-scale multilingualism in a community in Northern Anhamland in Australia. Ruth has an amazingly broad research spectrum and also an amazing array of affiliations, which I hope I will get right. So she is affiliated with the University of Melbourne and also the Australian National University in Canberra, where she collaborates with Nick Evans on his project, Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity. And there was another project on information structure with... What's that? Is it? No? Okay. Good. Okay. That's it for now. And she works, among other things, on the social linguistic and social sides of small-scale multilingualism, but also on structural properties of Warui, and some of the now-in-class system. And there will be more occasions to talk to Ruth, if you're interested in her research, because she's currently visiting SOAS until December this year. So don't miss the opportunity if you want to hear more. And she will also give another talk on the 2nd of December in a pre-conference session of the upcoming Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory conference at SOAS on Friday the 2nd of December in the workshop on small-scale multilingualism. So now I'm handing over to Ruth. Thank you. Yeah, so I'm going to talk a bit about the work I've been doing at Warui Community in northern Australia over the last five years. I'm going to look at it from two perspectives. One is the intergenerational view, because basically I started working with older people who are now grandparents, great-grandparents, and then more recently been working with some of their grandchildren, so young women between 13 and 20. So the other sort of perspective is through the three phases of how I see it now, three phases of the work in terms of what I initially was doing in my research, then the second phase, which is still haven't analyzed it that much. And then the third phase where I've sort of shifted my thinking a little bit and my approach. So firstly why I started looking at multilingualism at Warui is it's because quite unusual. From the perspective of Australian Indigenous communities and also I think increasingly worldwide, it's becoming unusual to have communities where people are multilingual in a lot of small languages. So from working with children as well, which is something I won't be focusing on in this talk, it seems they grew up speaking at least two Indigenous languages in the home and then usually become proficient in more Indigenous languages when they get to adulthood. And then people continue to learn languages over their lifespan as well. So some of the questions that I've been asking about multilingualism at Warui is how do so many small languages coexist? So there's so many scenarios where people have documented language shift due to influence, particularly of larger languages on smaller languages or more politically powerful languages on smaller ones. So how is it that all these small languages manage to coexist and have done so, it seems, for many millennia? So one of the questions is, is there particular ideologies or practices there that seem different to elsewhere that might be supporting this intensive linguistic diversity? And the other thing we'll be looking at is their change across the generations. So a lot of people I've talked to work in Australian Indigenous communities have said, yes, it is different, but maybe it's still going headed in the same direction as everywhere else. And it's just for some reason this multilingual situation has survived a bit longer than in other communities. So just to orient yourselves a bit, here's the map of Australia and this little section here is a part of what is called the top end colloquially. And this is the regional capital Darwin. And this is Warui community on South Melbourne Island. And some of the main languages spoken in this area and where the areas associated traditionally with these languages. Maung associated here with a section of the coast and also the islands. Gunbalang to the east, Iwaja to the west and Gunungu inland. And just Manangrida over here is another community that's a lot bigger, which is the only other place left in Australia where people have talked about these high levels of multilingualism. So just to give you a bit of an idea about the languages spoken, I'm going to be talking about three languages mainly, which are quite widely spoken. And then there's a lot of other languages which are spoken by smaller groups of people. So one of the main languages I've worked with in the past is Maung because Warui is sort of seen as the homeland of Maung. And so most Maung speakers are actually on the island. So what I'm indicating with this paler circle is a total number of speakers else everywhere and then with the inner circle, the number of speakers at Warui. So most of the Maung speakers are at Warui and there's only a few hundred of them. Whereas this other language, Gunwingu, which is a variety of Bin and Gunwok, there's more Bin and Gunwok speakers elsewhere. Similarly, with Yungmata from the east, it's quite a big language of a few thousand speakers. And then there's a small number of speakers at Warui, which I've put here too well, but there's speakers of other varieties as well. That's just the labels I'll be using for them in this talk. And then some other languages in English, of course, which is spoken by a lot of people off the island. And just to give you an idea of the genetic diversity, there's basically five language families represented. So four indigenous language families. Maung is in the Awajian language family, and there's still a few speakers left of Awajia, which is also in the same family. And then these two languages are in the Gunwingu family. Manningguridin family, there's people who speak these languages. Yungmata is in the Pamanyungan family, which is the largest family that covers most of the Australian continent. It's quite different to these other language families, which are referred to as the non-Pamanyungan languages, not that they form any kind of grouping. And then English, Germanic, and then also there is a Korean spoken from the northeast tip of Australia. There's just a few families who've settled at Warui. So Warui is a little island, and it's been settled now for 100 years. So I'll talk later about the centenary of the establishment of the mission, which is something they celebrated recently. We think Maung or a related variety was spoken there before. People talk about this language, Manangari, but we don't have any records, so we're not quite sure if it was a variety or a different language. And it seems to have been a centre for people to stay there for a few months of the year, even before the missionary came. And he was attracted there because there was people camping there and working with the Cassin fishermen who came every year from Indonesia. So in terms of the three phases of the project that I'm going to talk about, one of the ideas I've been thinking about is different perspectives. Obviously, multilingualism, language use is a very slippery topic. What people are actually doing with language? Do they even know what they're doing? Mostly not. I mean, there's a lot going on and it's hard to get, it's sort of impossible to get a complete picture or something like that. So I started to think about it in terms of the cross-section of a cell. For example, if you take cross-section of a cell, it doesn't really tell you that much about what the shapes are in there. So for example, what they've done here is take multiple cross-sections and sort of reconstruct this complex three-dimensional shape of a mitochondria. Which, if you just looked at one section, you'd just see these little circles and think there was a couple of little spheres in there or something. But to get this three-dimensional picture, you have to get all these different perspectives. As it says in this textbook of cell biology, single-thin sections sometimes give misleading impressions. So I guess that's what happened with the three phases. I get different perspectives on what was going on, especially working with different generations as well. And then I'd sort of think, well, it was everything that I got from the other perspective wrong. But actually, you're just sort of continually shifting your perspective. Because you're not setting something as concrete as a cell, though, unfortunately, possibly more like the surface of the planet Jupiter, where you have all these gases moving around. And it's constantly dynamic, it's changing. And so the idea of getting some accurate picture like you might get of a cell is obviously imaginary. So the first phase, I basically took some ideas from the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, looking at how to explore language ideologies and language practices. So although I'd already been working out what are we for about 10 years, mainly at the Malang language, looking at structural aspects of the Malang language, it was interesting how much I learned just starting with these techniques and starting to think about language use a bit more. So one method I used was the linguistic biography interview, where you basically start the interview with, tell me about the languages you speak, how you learn them. So it's sort of like a biography, but from the perspective of languages. And I also used this language portrait task, which was popularised by Austrian linguist Brigitte Bush, where you ask people to colour in an outline of the body with using different colours for different languages. And so my focus in this section was repertoire. So I wanted to look at, you know, how predictable were repertoires, you know, did people who identified in certain ways, you know, all have similar repertoires. And I also got interested in receptive multilingualism, which is a practice I'm going to talk about a bit, which seems to be very widespread. So to do that, I'm going to look at a couple, Nancy and Richard, who I've worked with quite a bit over the years. Initially actually we used to go hunting together, because they had a boat and one time I went up there, I had a car with a towbar. So we used to collaborate on hunting. And then eventually start to work with them more. So these are their language portraits. As you can see, they're quite different. Basically Nancy grew up at Waterwy, whereas Richard moved there 30 years ago from eastern Arnhem Land, where they have quite a different, I guess, language ecology, as well as speaking different languages. So in hers, Nancy coloured in her head and chest with maung. She identified strongly with the maung language as a maung speaker. And often with these language portraits, what they've found all around the world is, you know, languages are just more important to someone there, more likely to put on the head and the chest, that kind of thing. So then she's put Gunwingu on one arm, which she speaks very fluently and which she learned from her mother. Although she said she only started to speak it really as a teenager. And then do well, her husband's language on the other arm. And then English, she does a lot of work with English, doing translating work and that kind of thing. Some people don't put English on their portraits, but she did, and she's very proud of her English as well. Then on the legs, she's got some of these smaller languages, which aren't as widely spoken, but which she understands quite a lot. I'm not sure how much. Gunbalang, Japana, Nakara from Manangrida area, and then Iwaja. Then her husband's put on his head, Jambapungu, which is what we were using to talk about Yolngemata varieties at one point. He's put that on his head, and then he's put this... Sorry, I don't speak these. So I've trouble pronouncing the name of his language. He's put that on his chest, and he actually, because he was brought up by people who were in his birth parents, he's put his father's language on his head, although he says he doesn't really speak it, and then he's put the language he grew up with on his chest, the orange one. So one of the other things that came out from this work, which people found all around Australia, is this identification with the father's language, and this concept of language ownership, that you own the language of your father and your father's father, and this is connected to your land ownership and your clan membership. So this came through quite strongly as well in the interviews and that kind of thing. And at Waterway, as opposed to a lot of other communities, people usually do speak their father's language because they're so multilingual, whereas in a lot of communities nowadays, people actually don't speak their father's language, so it's an important aspect of their identity. And then he's also put a lot of other Eastern Ireland varieties here, which are all what linguists would call Yilngmata dialect group. So most of the ones he's put here would be relatively similar. And then he's also put Gunwingu on his chest and Maung. So although he doesn't really speak Maung or Gunwingu, he understands Maung very well, as we'll see. And he said he's starting to get quite good at Gunwingu too, which he also would have heard at Waterway a lot since he moved there. So what is receptive multilingualism? It's described generally as people having receptive competence in a language without being able to speak it. And at Waterway, we find a lot of people like this, like Richard, understands Maung perfectly, people speak it to him all the time, but he doesn't really speak it. He'll use a phrase or a word. He's quite comfortable with that, but I've never heard him speak an entire sentence. And he's quite similar to a lot of people who've moved from Eastern Ireland in this way. We can also talk about the receptive multilingual mode, which is a way of having a conversation where each person speaks a different language. So they understand each other, but they choose to use a different language to the other person. And interestingly, a lot of this, a lot of work on this receptive multilingualism has ignored social factors up till now and focused on the idea that it's a practical strategy. But obviously, as you can see, these languages are from completely different families. And it's not really a practical strategy because if you've been living together for 30 years, you could easily just start speaking one language. But there has been some work on social factors recently. So interestingly, Nancy does speak Yolngmata quite fluently. But usually she chooses not to speak it to Richard. I have occasionally heard her switch into Yolngmata when she was just talking to him about something. I don't understand Yolngmata. So I don't know what they've been talking about. And in this 25-minute conversation, which was recorded by Slaymi Harris, another linguist I've been working with, there was, I think, six examples of Richard using a word in Mal. And then I think there was 11 examples of Nancy using a word or a phrase in Yolngmata in Richard's language. So basically, in a way, they're resisting code-switching because Richard could have put a lot more words of Maung in. Nancy could have switched between Yolngmata and Maung quite freely. But she doesn't. So in a sense, it sort of also goes against the idea of accommodation that if we have a common language, we will use it. Which in this situation, and in most pairs of this kind that I've observed around Warui, not just married couples, but also like two people working together and staying around the town. This is how they seem to actually, it seems to be the usual way for this kind of combination of people to talk together. One of the things that maybe it has going for it is that it's symmetrical. With accommodation, someone has to shift to use the other person's preferred language. Whereas this, there's something symmetrical about it. Obviously, Richard did have to learn to understand Maung. And Nancy maybe would have learned to speak Yolngmata anyway, to speak to his family and stuff. But there is a sense that there's a balance in the conversation. I think at Warui, it may actually support the maintenance of smaller languages. This type of receptive multilingual mode is often associated with actual language loss. So we get the younger generation shifting to another language. When the older generation talks to them in the heritage language, they'll talk back in the language they're shifting to. But I think it could also be used to maintain smaller languages because people who speak Maung at Warui who want to keep speaking Maung and feel like if you're going to speak Maung anyway, it should be happening at Warui because it's sort of the home line of the language. They can continue to do so and newcomers can speak in their own languages as well as much as they're understood. Also, I guess the benefits for newcomers like Richard is it's much quicker to learn to understand Maung and to learn to speak it. And also, it may be in some sense avoiding some political contention such as some people sometimes complain about all these people from Eastern Arnhem Land moving in. And then the scene is a bit of a threat because the scene is a much more powerful group at the level of Arnhem Land and even politically in Australia there's a lot of political leaders coming from Eastern Arnhem Land. And they're also seen to have greater spiritual power and they lead a lot of ceremonies. So in a sense, there may be avoiding some politically loaded issues around with speaking Maung, which might be seen as part of claiming status there or political power on the island. So possibly these Eastern Arnhem Landers avoiding speaking Maung may also help with some local politics. So basically with the phase when I interviewed around 20 adults and I also did some work with children and I continued to interview people sporadically but it's not so much the focus of my work anymore. And I guess I learned a lot about repertoire and it turned out to be quite different and not that as predictable as I expected. Although obviously people from Eastern Arnhem Land more likely speak Eastern Arnhem Land language, Western Arnhem, that kind of thing but even just looking across siblings who've grown up together often quite different. Language ideologies and attitudes and language learning and use across the lifespan. Also the idea of receptive multilingualism emerged as maybe something important that's going on there. But obviously in terms of the literature around the world I think the idea needs a bit of development and I think that is happening because people have also been looking at social factors in its use for example in post-Soviet Ukraine and other places. And also I guess what became apparent is parallels to other sites of small scale multilingualism such as for example Friedrich is doing in Senegal and also other people are doing in Cameroon and other areas of the world. So phase two came about partly by accident because of some other stuff I was doing but it sort of created a way to work with young people a bit which I hadn't so far. I'd interviewed a few people high school age but not that many and I had found a lot of them actually didn't really want to chat. But some of them did want to make films. So it was a good way to do some work with them and it was part of development of this website we were doing anyway to try and put some resources online in Mao and make them accessible to people. So basically there was four girls involved with this Nowhere Girls web series which they developed with a community filmmaker who went up to make them with them. And the brief for the filmmaker was basically make the films in indigenous languages. So it was interesting sort of what came out of that idea. And then just this year I've been working with two girls who came down to Melbourne where I live to do high school just working with them after school to make some short videos. So two of the videos that I made were the girls who were at high school in Melbourne, Audrey and Tamia. And just from spending time with them in Melbourne it's clear that the receptive multilingualism is something they're using as well. Basically Audrey comes from a family where they identify very strongly with the gunwingu language even though her family's been leaving for a couple of generations on Warui. They still identify as coming from the mainland and certainly her grandmother and her grandfather before that were very strong in trying to make the children just speak gunwingu even though they were playing with a lot of kids who were speaking Maung and other languages. So that's Audrey's language portrait here. She coloured it mostly in yellow for gunwingu and then put on her hand here Maung although she does understand it perfectly and she does speak it a little bit as well but not that much. And then this is Tamia's, she's coloured in all in blue for Maung and then just put a little bit on the hand for gunwingu and so she probably understands gunwingu perfectly too and she probably will speak it when she's older because most of her family, the adults are bilingual in Maung and gunwingu. So basically the first video we did it was like a little interview where they interviewed each other about what had happened in the first week at school to put on a blog so the audience was actually in a way the community back home. That's how I sort of posed it to them that people want to know what you're doing and stuff. So in this first video, Audrey spoke gunwingu and Tamia spoke Maung which is how they seem to be talking to each other mostly at that point. And then interestingly in the second video Tamia said she wanted to speak English and she identifies quite strongly with English because her mother speaks English mainly and I think she felt a bit funny about speaking Maung on the video because they were starting to settle into Melbourne and started to feel like they didn't want to stand out perhaps. Although people kept commenting on her English all the time so how much that helped. And saying her English was very good and she was like I was speaking English and I was born. But anyway. So interestingly in both the videos there's this receptive multilingualism going on although Tamia changed languages, Audrey didn't and so in the first video they're speaking gunwingu and Maung and in the second one they're speaking gunwingu and English and there's still the receptive multilingualism going on. The other thing I noticed is that I'm hanging out with them Oh sorry there, I just decided to show the stills because I've got just too many videos. Sorry. I know they're so cute. You can see the two videos on the blog there if you would like to see them later. Anyway. The other thing is that it was interesting just looking at that attitude to the use of English. I mean one of the things I sort of claimed in phase one was English is basically a last resort. Although English is a common language for everyone at Waterway they tend not to use it and instead use for example receptive multilingualism or even have someone interpret although of course sometimes people do speak English to one another. And among the young people there definitely seemed to be a different attitude to the use of English. So they wouldn't necessarily use more English all the time but they certainly enjoyed playing with English and some of the younger generation does have an English speaking parent whereas the older generation it's pretty rare. I can't really think of anyone off the top of my head. But the younger generation there's indigenous people who come from other parts of northern Australia who've grown up speaking English or perhaps a Creole and who are using English with them at the home and so they feel like, people like to me, I feel like it's their language and even though they're often told not to use it we'll use it and identify with a lot more. So on to phase three. How am I going full time? Ah, pretty well. So then in phase three I started to get interested in some different things for a number of reasons. One was the sort of I guess performative attitude to identity among young people. That they seem to be not only the people in Melbourne but when I spent time with some of the young people up at Waterway they were sort of playing with different identities in different languages and sort of trying them out. For example, one young woman I've worked with a lot who works as a research assistant for me would sort of use an American accent when she was speaking English like she was trying out a different character and then last time I went up although she usually speaks good Wingo she started trying out Maung and she started using bits of Maung and saying to me what do you think of my Maung and I heard her asking other people too like she was trying out a different sort of adult persona where she would be able to speak Maung as well. The other thing I guess that really got me interested in was this centenary of the mission event which was held in June and I'll show you a bit of this sort of like an eight day long event but the sort of key event it seemed to me anyway was this re-enactment of the arrival of the first missionary where people acted out the different indigenous groups who were there. Also there's been two PhDs published just within the last few months by musicologists well one's a linguist musicologist looking at musical diversity and sort of connecting that with languages and social groups and that kind of thing which really made me think about all the labels people had been using for names and different social groups and things like that in the interviews. So I guess the main question I was looking at is how do people interpret sameness and difference at what are we? So how do they sort of create the diversity that we see there and why is it that language names and group names seem to be used in sometimes contradictory ways? One of the things that I guess I was really stuck on was this earlier work on the connection between language and identity in indigenous Australia there was a lot of work showing that traditionally people didn't identify with the language exactly but indirectly so basically they'd identify with a clan and the clan owned certain land and that land was associated with a particular language which they then owned through that clan membership but it wasn't so much that they identified with a particular language directly but then there was also work looking more recently at groups for example which don't speak their language anymore which had made land claims under the umbrella term of a language name so actually shifting to seeing that as identifying a social group so I assume because the whole clan identity and stuff is very alive at what are we and people still own land and own it under the name of clans that there would be the first kind of connection with language but then I was often tripped up by the fact that people seem to be referring to languages as sort of social group labels saying like he's a good winger I'm maung that kind of stuff but then at other times not doing quite different things so this is just a photo of the people waiting actually just for the start of the re-enactment on the beach which the missionary first arrived at he actually carved his name in a tree which only fell over a couple of years ago he carved his initials into a tree and so these people waiting there's a little dinghy coming in with the missionary in it with the local minister playing a missionary and so as you can see people wearing two colours of t-shirts and this is what sort of got me thinking is that I've been talking to people in interviews with all these different identities and all these different languages that they identified with and then suddenly it seemed like everyone had divided into two groups I mean not everybody at Wadawi was in the performance but most people were and so I was sort of intrigued in how people had sort of reorganised themselves into these two groups which had written on the back Maningburu people or Magikudu people and these terms refer to actually groups of clans and the Maningburu people the people who claim to have found the missionary wandering around the mainland and taking them over brought them over to Wadawi on dugout canoes so they basically claim responsibility for that event in way for the establishment of the whole mission and then the Magikudu people that's a name for a group of clans which owns Wadawi itself who were there supposedly when the Maningburu people brought the missionary over so that sort of intrigued me because I saw people lots of people wearing t-shirts who came from much further afield and that kind of thing who hadn't previously mentioned to me that they identified with this group or that group and also when I talked to people about the t-shirts and which one they wore a lot of people actually referred to them using the language names so that also interested me that they were using these language names for these groups of people so basically what they re-enacted was that when the Maningburu people came with the missionary that the people that were there all ran off into the bush because they were a bit scared of the strangers the strange man anyway and then what the Maningburu people was they all called and said come back, come back he's alright and that kind of thing and so this is the missionary story which had actually been told to me many times and when I first went to Waterway I really wanted to record traditional stories and that kind of thing and everyone just wanted me to record the missionary story I used to get a bit annoyed about it but I can see now what they were trying to get across a bit is just to understand how everybody came to the island what they're doing there now because otherwise you go there and think why are all these people living on this little island anyway and just to sort of understand the different backgrounds as well so I guess Sir, can I ask a question about that? Yes, you don't want to ask have you? It's positive Sure, sure, sure, ask It's a strong ceremonial tradition for owners and managers in every community I'm wondering if there's a replication of some of that Yeah, well actually that's what I got I guess particularly from these two musicology PhDs is seeing the link with traditional ceremonies so traditionally actually they don't wear T-shirts of different colours but traditionally at Waterway they do wear cloth of different colours not like some areas where they have their own colour like Eastern Arnhem Land but actually they buy a different colour cloth each time and it's just important that each group has the same colour whichever colour it is and yes I guess you could see Majakutu as the sort of owners and then Maningburu as visiting but it's interesting in a sense because you see Bunung who's directing the performance and they actually rehearsed it a couple of times as well in the days before he actually identifies with the Maningburu with the mainland with the people who brought the missionary but he's directing the whole event and that's often his role he's a sort of politician but a sort of diplomat type not the sort of hatchet man type who sort of works with all the different groups and brings them all together there's actually a hatchet woman at Waterway but anyway who just goes out and makes people do things whether they want to or not yes and even in terms of language it's not very direct to the things that have happened because actually most people would trace their identity patrilineally with the mainland but because of that I think other people have sort of shifted to be male otherwise there wouldn't maybe be any male left just because a lot of men came from inland I think so I guess one of the things I sort of took from this is that people would take a particular position in terms of what the context is and in this context there's two clearly defined groups because of the missionary story and because of how it worked and so people choose which one to take we're not exactly choose obviously other people have to find that convincing but basically I talked to different families about which t-shirt color t-shirt their family wore and why and a lot of it had to do with these sort of broader polarities in terms of identifying more with the mainland or identifying with the island and obviously not everyone was in this Maningburu tribe or the Majukudu tribe who wore the t-shirts so that's what was interesting is that they could still represent them in some way and most people explained that as oh you know that's through this line in my family or that line but people also did see the languages as representing these polarities and I think that sort of accounts for some of the use of language names to refer to what seem to be just social groups is this idea that aligns with this sort of mainland island thing so this is just a Facebook post from one young woman Delilah who's in the middle here that she put up which I thought was quite interesting because she talked about representing Maningburu Arabi so she's got the yellow Maningburu t-shirt on so does her mother who's on her left the white ones just ignore that's because they ran out of blue ones they just made they just had some white ones but most people said that the white ones were blue ones then some people said maybe they were Gunbalang so they brought in another group but the people who were wearing them said they were blue and so she's talking about representing and then she mentions her mother so not exactly a patrilineal line but so she's sort of tracing this Maningburu connection through her family and sort of talking about that which I thought was interesting is that I guess I hadn't really thought about the idea that you represent you have all these different options available to you you represent one in the particular context so I actually I talked about this already but yeah I just mentioned earlier on this traditional analysis of the connection between social identity and language in Indigenous in the Indigenous world which anthropologists spent a long time arguing it because basically all the early anthropologists assumed that everyone who spoke the same language was the same social group and it took a long time for the controversy to resolve that actually that was just a projection of some European nation-state idea and actually language didn't define social groups at all and so in a sense the anthropologists work along put a lot of effort into getting here but in a sense at the same time as they were doing that people were moving I think to also at least at what are we it's two alternatives whereas in other areas it has shifted to actually people identifying directly with language and saying where this is certainly around Melbourne where I live people will say you know I'm your to your to whatever and that's a language name and in a sense I guess the projections of these early colonialists became a reality and partly that is because the same reasons happen at what are we is because they have actually administered and controlled people according to this belief that the people who spoke the same language or not necessarily spoke it because they didn't even know but they'd ask people what's your language and they'd talk about their language ownership own the same language are the same group and this is something that was going on at what are we actually when I first got there there was I guess it was still the end of the self-determination era where the community had its own council which basically ran things and on the council they had seats for Gunwingul Maung and Gunbalang and they were basically groups that the missionaries set up as a way to sort of negotiate with people politically and people who identified as one could then vote in their representatives and so if you wanted to have any say you had to claim to be part of one of those you know language groups and so I think this has had an influence now and possibly there was always you know that alternative connection with the language as well but it wasn't very important so there seem to be multiple options for how people connect language with their identity at what are we now the idea that identities are multifaceted performative contextual is not new but it still leaves you with the question of how to analyse apparently conflicting ways of using language names and this is something that the Crossroads people have also found I've just got some quotes from Friederike here about you know taking a similar journey in a sense between asking people about their language identity and then looking at what they're doing and then also finding that they're talking about the language identity in different ways down the track so just read out for us as researchers working in the multilingual ecologies of lower casimants first important step was to recognise the symbolic nature of essentialist language ideologies and look beyond them so I guess this is when you talk to someone say what's your language and they'll say I'm a such and such and this is interestingly something that had come out of earlier language surveys at what are we I found one the school had done in their files and they'd said to people what's your language and these highly multilingual people had just named one language because if that's what you're looking for they can give it to you so obviously that wasn't very informing for the school and the second quote about how the I guess perspective developed and understanding of this crucial difference to western language ideologies made it possible to see the coexistence of indexical and essentialist ideologies as a dialectic strategy rather than a contradiction so I guess in a sense yes I didn't want to sort of say well people contradicting each other that doesn't seem to make for a very interesting account but to see how people use different I guess ways of talking about their connection with language and how to I guess create a coherent story about that so I guess from phase three my main finding was that language names are often used to refer to social groups not linguistic practices and when I was interviewing people I guess I sort of fell for local language ideologies and that when people talked about languages and I'd say what languages do you think should be spoken at what are we and they'd say and I think yeah or what language are you even spoken at what are we they'd say that I'm thinking well that's weird because there's a lot of other languages as well and you know and you know that people were talking about who should be politically important you know because that was their groups basically so also each performative context such as this reenactment of the missionary video or an interview even creates a symbolic field and in that symbolic field there's different configurations of language identity that people might choose and there's different ways of presenting themselves so in a way come into this sort of approach which is more linguistic anthropology than social linguistics of multilingualism it's given me some explanatory power I feel although obviously it's still developing a bit and also has made me made it more easier for me to make comparisons with other sites I felt because before I felt like I was saying oh it's so different at what are we everything's so different and people and that's not doesn't make a very interesting talk I felt in a way you know and so now I feel like I'm find parallels in terms of other work on for example social and linguistic polarities like this polarity that was set up between the yellow and the blue t-shirts the place of language ideologies and also this idea of ethnicized localities these clan groupings which they used in the reenactment are sort of in a way projections of localities of where people's ancestors owned land and that kind of thing projecting it on to I guess the current in a way a diaspora at what are we even though they're still on indigenous owned land most of them are not you know even sometimes visiting you know their ancestral lands which a few hundred kilometers away so I guess that's that I think maybe it is necessary to reinvent the wheel even though I feel like I haven't discovered anything new except rediscovered what other people have already concluded in their research so that language ideologies are fictions interviews and performances identities are multifaceted and any perspective is is partial I think maybe it's necessary to rediscover that in every field site and I did move from a simpler to a more complex analysis but I feel like in a way the complexities I have to continually reinvent them because even myself continually falling in the trap of sort of simplifying things and I think this is partly because as researchers and even as subjects who being interviewed in that kind of thing we're trying to create a coherent story and so we do fall into traps for example like linguistic nationalism like seeing the language as identifying a group and that kind of thing and you know we create these you know for example with this reenactment with the women being associated with the t-shirt so I think in a sense it's not just like you have to discover these things once but you have to keep on I guess discovering them and that's the end sorry I went a little bit long just thanks to some of the people I've collaborated with did they speak two languages or the children the children yeah most of the children already speaking two languages and what mum's language or dad's language or it's mostly mum and dad mum and dad most of the children I interviewed were speaking either maung and gunwingu or maung and yung mata the maung and yung mata was mainly from mum and dad language the gunwingu can come in from different ways often the parents are bilingual although there will be one grandparent who wants them to speak gunwingu or something like that so it's a bit more complex but maung and yung mata is recently Nancy and Richard were kind of a little bit rebellious in marrying across that border between east and west Arnhem Land and just in the last 10 years probably it's a lot more people have got married with the western Arnhem Landers from Rower we have got married with eastern Arnhem Landers so with the children it was more mum and dad yeah I think there's a lot of this political I mean there's local politics but there's also national politics going on and and this whole thing about language and identity so on it's all part of land rights and legislation in Australia that's been going on for 40 years apps that circulate the tinware map the the map I skipped past as well is the one like that they're later one by they're language names based yeah and to some extent I think Aboriginal communities have adopted those those rhetorical stances that have been taken by the broader politics and the land councils as well as the white man thing and I wondered if there isn't also a rhetoric, a story with that particular performance you showed us because there's the official church filming and stuff that's going on at the same time so it's reproducing that rhetoric that that story, that political understanding and the lovely thing here is that it actually coincides with the traditional bifurcation that we were talking about before and the ceremony has to have the people who own it so here's a wonderful example where they've actually correlated the broader political sets of agendas with their own traditional cultural organisation of ceremonial activities yeah I mean one of the interesting things is the whole story of the first missionary had it come about was it a purely indigenous thing or did church people collaborate on it and enjoy telling this story or whatever I'm not sure but certainly the stuff with the t-shirts I talked to Rosemary, everybody who organised the production of the t-shirts and I also talked to Lindsay who's performing there as the missionary and the t-shirts came from Rosemary from local people that was her idea she said and what was written on them was her idea as well so that was quite interesting. I mean a lot of the stuff was sort of church run in terms of setting up the stage and stuff and flying people in but the reenactment seemed to be pretty much locally produced although Lindsay enjoyed playing the missionary the receptive point of view is in my word if I understand correctly what you're saying is that it may be in fact a way or a tool to lead to retardation of language there's a language shift hmm well there's well nothing really what are we but just from around Australia there's a lot of reports of her being a long standing practice so even one of the reports from an early settler who was just travelling from Sydney and he had an indigenous guide with him and when they got 40 miles from Sydney the indigenous guide met another indigenous person and he said oh that's interesting because he seems to understand the other guy's language but he talks to him in his language in the Sydney language so that's sort of like a very early post contact I guess documentation but I guess other work in other indigenous communities around northern Australia also talks about talk about this practice but to what extent does it maintain I think it's a fascinating thing that I think there is something in it that you know data in a particular group that young people for example don't in the end move over to a formal Aboriginal language and in fact use that other one so I just wondered whether you had any data on that yeah well it'll be interesting to see I think with the young people but yeah just you know from participant observation it doesn't seem to me like they're moving towards speaking English all the time but yeah I guess we'll see it has been similarly being said about multilingualism leading to language shift and very often it can lead to language shift so that's an interesting parallel to receptive multilingualism which is often observed in situations of language shift where you are you can actually cluster and similar observations for multilingual contexts that are often seen actually as instances of language shift but when you look closer are actually remnants of multilingual situations so multilingualism is getting lost you know the important seems to be a particular socialization pattern that makes that a normal pattern of interaction for people into which they are socialized and so my question is to what extent is this based on particular language I mean you know it's related to your question or to what extent is that actually more like an abstract template so yeah you can use that with any sort of repertoire because I'm asking because this is something that we find in the lower cousin houses that it seems more important to have this idea that you can speak several small languages and in several small languages it's not a luxury at a pointless indulgence that these several small languages if you're used to that then you're used to being multilingual and that's your normal situation yeah no I think that's certainly the case because you know if you compare what are we to other indigenous communities it's not the case that languages haven't been lost so for example gumbalang is only spoken by older people iwaja also only very few older people so languages have been lost but also languages have come in like yulunmato which they never would have spoken before in English and so I think yes it is sort of habit of multilingualism and it seems to be something which particularly speakers of small languages seem to have because obviously they would have always had to have it whereas perhaps some of these speakers of big languages that's another reason perhaps why these yulunmato speakers don't speak maong is because although they were very multivariate at all they had this large area of eastern and they actually wouldn't have come into contact with speakers of completely different languages traditionally any other questions kind of answered this one when you were talking to Peter but during the ceremony the gumbalang speakers were very young just a coincidence that when they were doing their language profiles the girl who identified as mostly gumbalang colored her personally did I say gumbalang there did I no that would have been gunwingu yeah no that's why I talked to them about that because we did their language profiles in Melbourne then it was school holidays and we all went up to warui at the same time and they had the reenactment and then they came back to Melbourne and I'm like what's with these colors and then I talked to Rosemary about why I had to choose blue and yellow it seems to be a complete coincidence I mean Rosemary said she chose Rosemary said she chose yellow because that represents the mainland and blue because it represents the island because it's in the sea so possibly there was something going on there but you don't see that color symbolism a lot up there I don't know anyway they said it's a complete coincidence that's what they told me yeah was that well the question was did I miss a bit of it yeah it was just me waiting no no no I was exactly going down the same path yeah another question regarding the colorings so I mean they are intriguingly complex and personal I was wondering because you said that you can generalize and that it has often been found that people draw or close to them close to the chest or the head if it's actually possible based on these portraits to draw generalizations on repertoire shapes of repertoire yeah probably probably although there is often strange omissions as well you know a lot of it I think is to do with what languages people feel are directly connected to them so that's why they often won't put English in because they feel it's a language that's out there that they speak and also one of the people I interviewed didn't put Jungermutter in that but it turns out he speaks fluently but because he's from western Arnhem land just to see that it's part of his repertoire I guess part of him it just came out in the interview that he him and his wife were re-enacting this story where he was playing the nephew okay so yeah well it's interesting because in terms of the other linguists who've used this language portrait method which people are using quite a few different places although it started I think for people working in bilingual schools is they sort of say what kind of object is it in terms of analysis and there is this whole visual sociology now which is a bit beyond me but I think in a way you have to sort of I think for myself I'm not taking it too seriously I think it's really interesting part of the interview process not everyone wanted to do it particularly adults under the same I don't want to cover something in but it's a good part of the interview process because people start off with a non-verbal task so they don't feel like they're sort of under the hammer straight away and they're forced to talk and also it's useful for presentations I think it's a nice depiction and it's interesting for me but I think in terms of analyzing them I'm not quite sure how far you can take it that might be it then what do you think well thanks for coming we're calling it ambient lighting but it shouldn't still be fine it should be fine by the time we get there we will still be able to talk and have a drink or some trips in the pub regardless of whether there's life we have six of the Malbra arms I will be at the IOE I will happily lead a walking train at the best of the Malbra arms