 First up, I'd like to introduce Tina Greger. Tina is from the ANU College of Asia in the Pacific, and the title of her three-minute thesis tonight is Capturing Language. Ni ga ga ima ni ki maim ka na. These are words in a language that would be all but forgotten in just a few decades. Now, imagine the language you speak today would not be understood by your grandchildren. And what if your language was never even written down? What would happen to the songs and stories your mother told you at bedtime, which maybe her mother told her and her mother's mothers before her? And what about the jokes your dad used to make? What if your own children don't understand them because they just don't speak the language anymore? Of the 6,000 languages spoken today, it is estimated that half will have died in 100 years' time. Many languages have never been written down or studied in any amount of detail. Once the last speaker dies, we will never know what the language was like or what it could have taught us about how people saw the world and how that influenced the way they spoke. My research is on two endangered languages, called Yelmek and Maclau. They're spoken in the south of New Guinea on the Indonesian side of the island. Why those two? Well, for a linguist like me, language that is a terrifying thing. Because to know about language as a system, we need to look at data from as many languages as we possibly can. And funnily enough, the most striking and groundbreaking insights are often hidden in small languages in really remote places. Yelmek and Maclau are today spoken by a couple of hundred people only, and children don't really learn it anymore. Indonesian is spoken in all public domains, like school and media. Especially older people are very concerned about the decline of language and the loss of cultural knowledge and ethnic identity that goes with it. But they didn't have the skills or the resources to do much about it. So that's where I come in, because I can help them with a crucial step along the way. My thesis is the first elaborate description of the languages. But a big part of the project is also to record as much as I can of their songs and stories and their cultural practices. In the picture behind me, you can see what a recording session looks like. The next step then is to get it transcribed, to have it translated, and to analyze it for the description. In doing so, I'm creating a resource for future research on the one hand, but also a resource for the people themselves. So their linguistic and cultural knowledge is preserved for their children and their children's children. And so nobody loses their dad's jokes, no matter how bad they are.