At Warruwi Community around ten Indigenous languages from five different language families are used among only 450 people. Why are so many languages still spoken at Warruwi when linguistic diversity has sharply declined in the rest of Australia? Visiting scholar Dr. Ruth Singer from the University of Melbourne held last week’s Wednesday seminar where she presented her research on this topic.
The annual meeting with MultiLing's Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) was held last week, on October 27–28. In addition to the SAB members, two of our new Adjunct Professors attended the meeting.
To juggle multiple grammars at once is a complex task, and the effects of crosslinguistic influence might occur when the grammars are simultaneously active. Associate Professor and MultiLing affiliate Mike Putnam presented his research on how filler-gap dependencies can help us investigate multilingual grammars.
The linguistic situation in Singapore has undergone dramatic changes in its 50 years of history. The result is a language shift away from Chinese, Malay and Tamil, and an increasing use of English.
What does it mean to bridge the gap between psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches to multilingualism? Scholars who have been successful in doing interdisciplinary work were invited to the workshop Bridging gaps: Conceptual and epistemological approaches which was held at MultiLing last week.
More than half the world is bilingual — speaking at least two and sometimes more languages with some proficiency. Recent research suggests that bilingualism has protective benefits for the brain. The power of bilingualism is beyond language itself.
How do you reconstruct a language that is no longer spoken when there are few documentation records? Lenore Grenoble illustrates how mapping sociolinguistic context plays an important role in this kind of work.
How do immigrants position themselves by acquiring/not acquiring the local dialect? This was one of the questions raised at the workshop Dialect acquisition and migration.
Associate Professor Cecelia Cutler, the City University of New York, is visiting MultiLing in April to participate in the workshop Dialect acquisition and migration and in the SONE (Sociolinguistic Network in Norway) Conference. In her presentation at the workshop, “’People don’t see me as white’: how appearance plays in dialect acquisition among immigrants in the U.S.”, she addressed the topic of embodiment. She also explored people’s experience of being in a physical body, and how this experience shapes their language choices and their construction of identity. It’s not just about how it feels to be in your body, but also how others perceive you and how others frame you or attempt to construct you based on how you look.
Professor Gillian Wigglesworth from the University of Melbourne is a Chief Investigator on the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language and has been visiting MultiLing this week. Her major research focus is on the languages indigenous children living in remote communities learn, and how these languages interact with English once the children start school. How can we improve the children’s school results and reverse the increasing loss of indigenous languages?
