#Murrinhpatha

[colonellickburger]

Adam Ferguson. Sisters Shauna and Bridget Perdjert from Kardu Thithay Diminin clan and Murrinhpatha language group sit on Air Force Hill after practising cultural burning on Kardu Yek Diminin Country, Wadeye, Australia

[superlinguo]

All of the languages discussed and mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics

The list below outlines the languages that feature in Crash Course Linguistics (Nielsen 2020). For each episode we list both illustrative examples and other languages mentioned. We created a running list of languages used in the videos while writing, to help us actively move towards a greater diversity of language examples. This table might be of interest to you if you want to jump to a particular episode, or if you want to do some critical reflection on your own teaching or lingcomm work.

Looking at the episodes in a single table, I can see the ebb and flow of our focus. It’s much easier to talk about phonetics using a range of examples from different languages than it is to talk about semantics, where you’re focused on the nuance of meaning. I can also see the interests of various members of the production team show through in some example choices, which is why I appreciated working with a team on this project.

The introduction of every video also included an opening animation that had facts about language in English, but also some facts in French, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, German, Korean, Vietnamese and Klingon, reflecting the linguistic diversity and interests of the animation team.

We’ve made this table available as a document on FigShare as well:

Grieser, Jessi; Gawne, Lauren; McCulloch, Gretchen (2021): Languages mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics. La Trobe. Figure. https://doi.org/10.26181/61031a232e96e

See also:

Crash Course Linguistics full playlist on youtube

Crash Course Linguistics Mutual Intelligibility Resources

Crash Course Linguistics

Episode 00 - Preview On screen: Japanese, Auslan, Welsh, Swahili, Proto-Indo-European, Tzeltal, Basque, Xhosa, Arabic, English, Nicaraguan Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Inuktitut, Nahuatl

Episode 01 - Introduction Examples in: Spanish, Indonesian, ASL, Auslan, Swahili, English

Episode 02 - Morphology Examples in: English, Mandarin, Murrinhpatha, ASL, German, Malay, Old English, French, Arabic Mentioned: Hebrew

Episode 03 - Morphosyntax Examples in: English, Hindi, Irish, Latin, ASL Mentioned: Nahuatl, Portuguese, Malagasy, Czech, Tibetan, Korean, Hawaiian, Māori, Chatino, Turkish, Modern Greek, Yupik, South African Sign Language

Episode 04 - Syntax Examples in: English, Japanese

Episode 05 - Semantics Examples in: English, Polish, Portuguese, Norwegian

Episode 06 - Pragmatics Examples in: English, Malay, Mandarin, French, BSL, Mentioned: Tzeltal, Japanese, Lao, Danish

Episode 07 - Sociolinguistics Examples in: English (Appalachian English, African American English, Standardized American English) Mentioned: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, BSL, Auslan, NZSL, South African Sign Language, Spanish, ASL, French Sign Language, Irish Sign Language

Episode 08 - Phonetics, Consonants Examples in: ALS, English, Scottish, Spanish, Welsh Mentioned: Arabic, Basque, Navajo, Zulu, Xhosa Language families mentioned: Khoesan

Episode 09 - Phonetics, Vowels Examples in: French, English (General, Californian, Australian), Spanish, Italian, Mandarin Mentioned: German, Turkish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Tamil, Arabic, Arabic, Japanese, Finnish Language families mentioned: Germanic languages, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afro-Asiatic, Kam–Sui

Episode 10 - Phonology Examples in: English, Hindi, Spanish, Nepali, Taiwainese Sign Language, Auslan, Old English, ASL Mentioned: BSL, ASL

Episode 11 - Psycholinguistics Mentioned: English, Mandarin

Episode 12 - Language acquisition Examples in: English, Italian Mentioned: Malay, Russian, Spanish, Japanese

Episode 13 - Historical linguistics & language change Examples in: Old English, Middle English, Modern English, Iberian Spanish, South American Spanish, Dutch, Icelandic, German, Proto-Germanic, Latin, Sanskrit, Mentioned: Nicaraguan Sign Language, Hatian Creole, Kriol, Tok Pisin, French, Tibetan, English, Hindi, Nepali, Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Semitic, Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew, Proto-Algonquian, Cree, Ojibwe, Massachusett, Proto-Austronesian, Javanese, Tagalog, Malagasy, Proto-Pama-Nyungan, Pama-Nyungan, Yolŋu, Kaurna, Dharug, Proto-Bantu, Swahili, Zulu, Shona, Basque, Ainu, Korean Language families mentioned: Khoesan, Bantu, Oceanic 

Episode 14 - Languages around the world Mentioned: Spanish, Latin, French, Italian, Greenlandic, Inuktitut, Tibetan, Nicaraguan Sign Language, French Sign Language, Kata Kolok, Central Taurus Sign Language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, Adamorobe Sign Language, ASL, Old French Sign Language, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, Hindi, Urdu, English (US, British), Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, Turung, Karbi and Runglo, Hebrew, Wampanoag, Maori, Hawaiian

Episode 15 - Computational linguistics Examples in: English, Turkish Mentioned: ASL, Greek

Episode 16 - Writing system Examples in: English, Middle English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Inuktitut, Cherokee, Korean Mentioned: English, Finnish, Vietnamese, Swahili, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Sumerian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Olmec, Zapotec, Aztec, Mayan, Turkish

[localorganicrpmemes]

Untranslatable Starters

Send the word for a starter based around it~

[ Að redda ] (Icelandic) - To save someone or fix something in a time sensitive manner. [ Beau geste ] (French) - A graceful, noble or beautiful gesture (especially if it is futile or meaningless). [ Curglaff ] (Scottish) - The bracing, shocking and/or invigorating feeling of suddenly entering (e.g., diving into) cold water. [ Duende ] (Spanish) - A heightened state of emotion, spirit and passion, caused by experiencing a work of art. [ Elmosolyodni ] (Hungarian) - A micro-smile; the beginning of a full smile. [ Fernweh ] (German) - The ‘call of faraway places,’ homesickness for the unknown. [ Gigil ] (Tagalog) - The irresistible urge to pinch/squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished. [ Hrepenenje ] (Slovenian) - Nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened yet. [ Iktsuarpok ] (Inuktitut) - Anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, and keeps checking if they’re arriving. [ Jayus ] (Indonesian) - A joke so poor and unfunny that one cannot help but laugh. [ Koi no yokan ] (Japanese) - The feeling of knowing that you will soon fall in love with the person you have just met. [ Lè jí sheng bēi ] (Chinese) - Lit. joy’s zenith generates sadness; intense joy begets sorrow; after a peak of happiness, unhappiness inevitably follows. [ Mamihlapinatapai ] (Yagán) - A wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start. [ Mampemurruwurlmurruwurl ] (Murrinhpatha) - To make someone’s hair beautiful [ Nepakartojama ] (Lithuanian) - ‘Unable to repeat’; a perfect situation which will never happen again. [ Otkhodchivyi ] (Russian) - The quality of being quickly appeased after a surge or outburst of negativity, and/or not bearing grudges. [ Pretoogjes ] (Dutch) - Lit. ‘fun eyes’; the twinkling eyes of someone engaging in benign mischief or fun. [ Qarrtsiluni ] (Inuktitut) - Sitting together in the darkness, perhaps expectantly (e.g., waiting for something to happen or to ‘burst forth’); the strange quiet before a momentous event. [ Ryvok ] (Russian) - A final dash or acceleration; a fast movement or change (that is often associated with progress, but can also tear/disrupt things. [ Shěnměi píláo ] (Chinese) - Seeing so much beauty that one does not  appreciate it anymore, especially if that beauty happens to be one’s lover. [ Tizita ] (Amharic) - A bittersweet remembrance and longing for a time, person, thing gone by. [ Utepils ] (Norwegian) - To sit outside on a sunny day enjoying a beer. [ Verschlimmbessern ] (German) - A combination of the verbs ‘to make things worse’ and ‘to improve’; to make something worse in the attempt to improve it. [ Womba ] (Bakweri) - The smile of a sleeping child. [ Xenia ] (Greek) - Guest-friendship; the importance of offering hospitality and respect to strangers.

* nothing is truly untranslatable, but “rather specific words from other languages starters” just isn’t as pithy ** source: The Positive Lexicography

[must-hate-dogs]

Untranslatable Starters

Send the word for a starter based around it~

[ Að redda ] (Icelandic) - To save someone or fix something in a time sensitive manner. [ Beau geste ] (French) - A graceful, noble or beautiful gesture (especially if it is futile or meaningless). [ Curglaff ] (Scottish) - The bracing, shocking and/or invigorating feeling of suddenly entering (e.g., diving into) cold water. [ Duende ] (Spanish) - A heightened state of emotion, spirit and passion, caused by experiencing a work of art. [ Elmosolyodni ] (Hungarian) - A micro-smile; the beginning of a full smile. [ Fernweh ] (German) - The ‘call of faraway places,’ homesickness for the unknown. [ Gigil ] (Tagalog) - The irresistible urge to pinch/squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished. [ Hrepenenje ] (Slovenian) - Nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened yet. [ Iktsuarpok ] (Inuktitut) - Anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, and keeps checking if they're arriving. [ Jayus ] (Indonesian) - A joke so poor and unfunny that one cannot help but laugh. [ Koi no yokan ] (Japanese) - The feeling of knowing that you will soon fall in love with the person you have just met. [ Lè jí sheng bēi ] (Chinese) - Lit. joy’s zenith generates sadness; intense joy begets sorrow; after a peak of happiness, unhappiness inevitably follows.  [ Mamihlapinatapai ] (Yagán) - A wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start.  [ Mampemurruwurlmurruwurl ] (Murrinhpatha) - To make someone’s hair beautiful [ Nepakartojama ] (Lithuanian) - ‘Unable to repeat’; a perfect situation which will never happen again. [ Otkhodchivyi ] (Russian) - The quality of being quickly appeased after a surge or outburst of negativity, and/or not bearing grudges. [ Pretoogjes ] (Dutch) - Lit. 'fun eyes'; the twinkling eyes of someone engaging in benign mischief or fun.  [ Qarrtsiluni ] (Inuktitut) - Sitting together in the darkness, perhaps expectantly (e.g., waiting for something to happen or to ‘burst forth’); the strange quiet before a momentous event. [ Ryvok ] (Russian) - A final dash or acceleration; a fast movement or change (that is often associated with progress, but can also tear/disrupt things. [ Shěnměi píláo ] (Chinese) - Seeing so much beauty that one does not  appreciate it anymore, especially if that beauty happens to be one’s lover. [ Tizita ] (Amharic) - A bittersweet remembrance and longing for a time, person, thing gone by. [ Utepils ] (Norwegian) - To sit outside on a sunny day enjoying a beer. [ Verschlimmbessern ] (German) - A combination of the verbs ‘to make things worse’ and ‘to improve’; to make something worse in the attempt to improve it. [ Womba ] (Bakweri) - The smile of a sleeping child. [ Xenia ] (Greek) - Guest-friendship; the importance of offering hospitality and respect to strangers.

* nothing is truly untranslatable, but “rather specific words from other languages starters” just isn’t as pithy ** source: The Positive Lexicography

[artificiallyimplantedmemories]

@sevenbulletsavior asked: [ Mampemurruwurlmurruwurl ] (Murrinhpatha) - To make someone’s hair beautiful

meme: Untranslatable Starters (continuable)

     These days, Natasha stays out of the public eye. That doesn’t mean that she doesn’t occasionally need to blend in to public events to get information she requires, though. It’s one such gala (to which she has forcefully procured an invitation) that she invites Karen to come along. Not only will it help her to have someone to listen in and get information, but it’ll be good practice for the other woman as well. Nat has the art of being somewhere in plain sight and going unnoticed down to an art. She’s sure Karen will soon, as well. 

     She is, after all, a delightfully capable protègè. 

     She stands behind Karen at the vanity, carefully pulling the hair up into an intricate braided design. While beautiful, it also keeps the long hair out of reach of attackers, in case they try to grab something, and sits tight enough to the head that it’s not much of a handhold there either. The hair is wispy and straight, so it requires more than a few pins and a touch of hairspray to hold it in place, but when it’s done, it’s elegant and functional. 

     Natasha smiles at the result, and holds up a mirror so Karen can see it too. 

     “What do you think? Glam enough for tonight?”

[scentedbygunpowder]

[ Mampemurruwurlmurruwurl ] (Murrinhpatha) - To make someone’s hair beautiful //BeckyWithTheGoodAim

@beckywiththegoodaim

“You know you don’t have to do this, don’t you, Becca?” Riza said, although she obediently sat on the stool in front of the mirrored table. “I can go somewhere and get it done.”

She honestly didn’t think that her words would change the mind of her best friend and maid of honor, but she had to offer. While Riza didn’t mind Rebecca doing her hair for her, for her wedding, she also didn’t want Rebecca to feel like she had to.

Still, she had to admit that having her best friend here with her today was calming, which was something that Riza was surprised to find that she needed on her wedding day. She wanted to marry Roy, there was no doubt about that. But she was finding her nerves increasing as the day went on. She wasn’t sure if it was the idea of being in front of so many people now that Roy was such a public figure, or if it was her own fears and hang ups circling in her mind, but she was definitely growing more nervous.

Having Becca here, however was calming, or at least stabilizing, and the familiar feeling of Becca’s hands in her hair was reassuring. Her friend had insisted on dong her hair many times before, and Riza had given in and enjoyed a bit of “girl time” with her, something foreign to her before this friendship. It was a throwback to simpler times, and Riza enjoyed that.

“You have yourself to get ready too, you know. As much as I’ll be happy for you to do my hair today, you don’t have to.”

[datasoong47]

So, this is an interesting phenomenon.  The Aboriginal Australian language Murrinhpatha is agglutinative in its verbs.  Most verbs consist of two parts, a “classifier stem” and a “lexical stem”.  There are 38 classifier stems, some with clear meanings, such as “say” or “handle”, but some with no clear meaning which are simply referred to with numbers, since the verbs they are part of are, synchronically at least, seemingly arbitrary.  The classifier stems inflect for person and number of subject and for tense, in a single portmanteau form.  The full verb has several inflectional slots:

classifier-object pronoun/subject number-reciprocal/reflexive-incorporated body part/applicative-lexical stem-tense-argument number, adverbial-imperfective

Thus, the classifier stem and the lexical stem may be separated by other grammatical affixes.  Several of the classifier stems may be used on their own, without a lexical stem.  Also interesting to note is how tense and subject number are doubly-marked on both the classifier stem itself and in other suffixes

There is good reason to believe that this agglutinative structure is relatively recent, having evolved from a light verb construction, with univerbation having occurred possibly as recently as the early 20th century, with the classifier stem having originally been a small set of inflected verbs, with the lexical stems being nominal forms used with those verbs, with various clitics added to the verb phrase.  They’ve since merged into a single complex verb form

In the modern language, loan words cannot be incorporated into this structure (there’s a single known partial exception, tjigan “shake hands” is sometimes used as a lexical stem with a classifier meaning “handle” and the incorporated body part be “arm”; this appears to have been a very early loan, and thus may have preceded the univerbation).  Instead, a new light verb construction has developed, using one of four verbs (”do”, “sit”, “be”, “go”, all of which are classifier stems used without lexical stems) with a borrowed form, usually, but not always, placed immediately before the light verb.  The borrowed form is most commonly the base form of an English verb, but there are some cases of the -ing form or past tense form being borrowed, and a few cases of nouns being borrowed from English in this construction.  There are also some borrowings from Kriol which include the Kriol suffix -im/-it indicating transitivity, but which in these borrowings is a fossilized ending

There are a small number of inherited words with a similar pattern, but those are rare.  However, this construction with borrowed verbs has become very common in the modern language, especially as spoken by the younger generation (Murrinhpatha is one of the small number of Australian languages which remains in frequent use and continues to be learned by children)

Thus, in a relatively brief period of time, an old light verb construction has become an agglutinative verb complex, and then a new light verb construction has developed

[priest-iuput]

Nym Bandak, Ngakumarl painting (Murrinhpatha totemic landscape) c.1959–1960

[linguainfo]

Books: Murrinhpatha Morphology and Phonology

http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-1756.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[fla-news]

For the 2019 Federal Election, Australian Electoral Commission has developed videos in the 12 Aboriginal languages listed below. Follow these links to find the information in your language. Why it is important to enrol to vote - http://bit.ly/2Grcuxa The voting process - http://bit.ly/2IA0cUI Working at an election - http://bit.ly/2Gusu1z #Alyawarra #Anindilyakwa #Arrernte #Burarra #English #MurrinhPatha #Ndjebanna #PintupiLuritja #Pitjanjatjarra #Tiwi #Walpiri #YolnguMatha #firstlanguages #IYIL2019

[superlinguo]

Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a School Linguist

I was fortunate enough to undertake my PhD in a fabulous research lab. Bill was one of the excellent people who I overlapped with in my time there. Bill is one of the people who made a deliberate choice to not stay in academia, and instead took on a role that has allowed him to use his skills to advocate for the community and language he worked with for his PhD. Bill is on Twitter (@BillForshaw), and you can find out more about the bilingual program at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Thamarrurr Catholic College on the school’s website.

What did you study at university?

I completed a BA in German and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne before going on to complete an honours year and PhD in Linguistics also at the University of Melbourne. When I began at Uni I didn’t know much about the study of Linguistics. I initially had planned to study Politics but I wasn’t very good at it. Consequently, I had to pick a different area of study and my Mum suggested linguistics and I loved it.

My PhD was a longitudinal acquisition study of Murrinhpatha a language of Northern Australia spoken primarily by people in Wadeye, NT. Specifically, I examined children’s acquisition of bipartite stem verbs (verbs with two stem elements) and large verbal paradigms. As part of my PhD I helped to record a collection of Murrinhpatha child language.

What is your job?

I currently work at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Thamarrurr Catholic College in Wadeye as the school Linguist (I picked my own title). The school has a bilingual program with biliteracy instruction in Murrinhpatha and English. Almost all our students speak Murrinhpatha as a first language.

I primarily work to support the Murrinhpatha language and literacy programs across the school. This includes developing new Murrinhpatha books and teaching resources at the school’s literature production centre (an on-site publishing house), supporting Murrinhpatha speaking teachers to plan and deliver classes and further developing the Murrinhpatha curriculum.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

Yes it certainly helps, but my job is a long way from the fine-grained analysis of morphological structure that I undertook in my thesis. What helps most is my awareness of language in situations. English dominates and forces out smaller languages, it is a language of colonisation. My Linguistics training allows me to see and articulate the privileged position of English in Australia and the impact that this can have on the education of Aboriginal children in a remote context. It helps me to be a language activist and to work towards providing a better education for children in Wadeye.

My previous study of Murrinhpatha of course also helped greatly as I continue to work with and through this language every day.

Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I’d like to repeat some great advice that I was given. When I made the decision to move to Wadeye and was considering working at the school I wanted to know how I could best apply my training to this context. I received great advice from Denise Angelo. Her advice was to ‘get on the mat’. To be able to apply my linguistic training in a school context I needed to better understand the job of a teacher in Wadeye and to build mutual respect. A teacher doesn’t want an academic linguist to lob some ‘linguistic awareness’ at them and then walk away. I’d like to thank all the teachers that have helped and continue to help me understand how I can better do my job to support them in educating children.

Any other thoughts or comments?

To students studying linguistics, working at language centres and schools alongside speakers towards common goals is a fabulous way to be a linguist.

Photo Credit: Bilingual Education in the Northern Territory Facebook page

Previously:

Interview with a Journalist

Interview with a PR Consultant

Interview with an Agency Owner & Executive Editor

Interview with a Freelance Editor, Writer and Trainer

Interview with a Language Creator

Check out the Linguist Jobs tag for even more interviews  

[superlinguo]

How We Talk, N.J. Enfield (Review)

It’s really astonishing that human conversation happens at all. People respond to questions more quickly than they should be able to think of their answers, and our decisions about whether someone is being helpful or not can be based on millisecond differences in their responses.

Nick Enfield’s 2017 book How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation summarises some of the key work he has undertaken on how conversation works, with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. The book situates this work in some of the key research from the field of Conversation Analysis in the last 50 years. Topics covered include looking at how silences of different lengths gets interpreted, how people repair their speech as they go along, and how ‘um’ in English has correlations in enough other languages that Enfield refers to it as a ‘universal’ word. All of this is framed throughout the book with the metaphor of the ‘conversation machine’, which is a delightful commercial model of the ‘interaction engine’ in Nick’s 2006 book with Stephen Levinson (which I found tremendously helpful back when I was conceptualising my PhD research).

There’s lots to like about this book, and the presentation of research. I particularly like the commitment to ensuring that it is not only the ol’ regulars like English that are included in analysis. You’ll get to learn about the differences in conversational features in languages like Lao (Laos), Murrinhpatha (Australia) and Siwu (Ghana) too - or perhaps more astoundingly, the similarities between them.

This book is a great example of how research can be presented in a clear way that is engaging for a non-expert reader. It’s for the quick-minded non-expert, who is ok with acquiring (or ignoring) a bit of jargon along the way, but if you want an exercise in good pop-science writing, sit down with one of these chapters and the original research on which it is based. I did hope the larger question of ‘why this work?’ would be answered; Enfield is diligent about making sure all of the researchers are given a research-area title, but it is intriguing to ponder why conversation intrigues psychologists, linguists and sociologists alike. 

If you did linguistics but never got to study Conversation Analysis, or you want a whistlestop tour of some of the most interesting work to come out of the field in the last couple of decades, this book is certainly worth a visit.

Buy: Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link

[Thanks to Basic Books for the review copy. I also purchased a copy when Nick launched the book during the ALS conference in December because I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy.]

[superlinguo]

Linguistics jobs -  Interview with a Linguistic Project Manager at a Language Tech Company

This month’s interview highlights the increasingly central role of human language in tech, and the important role that linguists can play in the current tech landscape. It’s also been a delight for me to interview Sasha Wilmoth, who I last caught up with when she was taking one of her final undergraduate classes at Melbourne Uni. This interview is also something  slightly different, because Sasha is one of a growing number of ‘hybrid’ researchers - working across both the university and private sector. I’ll leave it to her to explain more!

What did you study at university?

I did a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Linguistics, and studied Mandarin and Swedish. I also squeezed in as many literature subjects as I could. Within linguistics, I became interested in the morphology and syntax of Australian Aboriginal languages – my honours thesis was on Murrinhpatha, which is a polysynthetic language spoken in the Northern Territory.

What is your job?

That’s a good question! I think most of my family and friends still don’t really understand what I do for a living.

My time has been split between two jobs this year: I’m a Linguistic Project Manager at a company called Appen, and a Research Assistant within the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL). I’ll just focus on my job at Appen, because it’s a bit further away from academia.

Basically, Appen provides all sorts of data for AI and machine learning, including for speech and language technology. In the Linguistic Services department, we make the specialised annotated data that’s used to train these systems, in whatever language our clients need (we’re up to something like 180 languages and dialects by now). This includes pronunciation lexicons, prosodic annotation, part-of-speech tagging, tokenisation, proofing tools, guidelines, and so on. There are also lots of linguists working in the Data Collection, Transcription, and Translation departments. My job encompasses the technical and linguistic bits, as well as the more typical project management things like planning, budgeting, and delegating tasks.

For example, for a pronunciation lexicon project, which is what I’ve largely been working on, I start by researching the grammar, phonology, orthography and dialects of the language. Based on this research, I figure out what our approach to phonemic transcription will be and come up with some technical tools to predict the pronunciation of the words based on the orthography. I manage a team of linguists around the world who are native speakers of that language, and they check that the pronunciations are correct. Then I do a bunch of quality checks according to what we know about the language and prepare the data for our clients. Recently, I’ve been working on Serbo-Croatian, Persian, and Mandarin projects – as you can imagine, each language presents completely different technical and linguistic challenges.

Appen is an industry partner with CoEDL, so another cool thing I get to do is collaborate with academic linguists and see if we can apply our own processes and problem-solving skills to their research projects.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

I’m happy to say that I apply my linguistics education at work every day: I solve linguistic puzzles and read grammars and write phonological rules and use ToBI (a way of transcribing intonation) and the International Phonetic Alphabet. I never managed to become a very fluent Mandarin speaker, but I use that knowledge for our Mandarin and Cantonese projects. I even do a bit of Swedish proof-reading here and there. I didn’t imagine this was possible when I chose this rather impractical combination of subjects.

Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I know some previous interviewees have said they wish they had been more aware of the (lack of) job prospects for linguists. I’m stubborn though, and I was determined to study what I was most interested in without taking into account career prospects. I’m really glad I made that choice (and had the privilege to do so), because there are actually more opportunities outside of academia than I thought. The future for linguists in industry is bright, as we’ll be using speech more and more to interface with our phones, cars, toasters, personal robot servants, etc.

Most linguistics students don’t end up working as linguists, so it’s wise to keep your options open. But if you’re motivated and can’t think of anything else you’d rather be doing, there are jobs out there – I wish I had known about them when I was at uni. It’s really important to seek out and take advantage of opportunities for students like summer research programs, internships, or volunteering with organisations like RNLD here in Melbourne. Get to know your lecturers and tutors and ask them what you can get involved in.

Any other thoughts or comments?

Just a note on working in tech: I don’t have a computer science background, and I’ve never been a big computer nerd. I’ve learned everything on the job, and it turns out I quite like computers after all. If you have the type of pattern-finding brain that linguists tend to have, chances are you might enjoy the technical side of things when it’s applied to something interesting. Developing some technical skills as a student can help you in many career paths, but it’s not an absolute necessity. If you’re looking for a place to start: regular expressions, bash, and Python are all very useful and relatively easy to learn.

Previously:

Interview with a Data Scientist

Interview with a Librarian

Interview with a Text Analyst

Interview with a User Experience (UX) Researcher

Interview with a Study Abroad Facilitator

Interview with The Career Linguist

Interview with a local radio Digital Managing Editor

Check out the Linguist Jobs tag for more interviews

[linguistlist-blog]

TOC: Linguistic Typology Vol. 23, No. 3 (2019)

Frontmatter Page i Introduction to Nordlinger’s and Rose’s papers Mithun, Marianne Page 399 From body part to applicative: Encoding ‘source’ in Murrinhpatha Nordlinger, Rachel Page 401 From classifiers to applicatives in Mojeño Trinitario: A new source for applicative markers Rose, Françoise Page 435 Topicality and the typology of predicative possession Chappell, Hilary / Creissels, Denis Page 467 Token-based typology and word order entropy: A study based on Universal http://dlvr.it/RLDhMD

[linguistlist-blog]

Books: Murrinhpatha Morphology and Phonology

Murrinhpatha is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in a region of tropical savannah and tidal inlets on the north coast of the continent. Some 3000 speakers live mostly in the towns of Wadeye and Nganmarriyanga, though they maintain close ties to their traditional lands, totems and spirit ancestors. Murrinhpatha word structure is highly complex, and quite distinct from the better-known Pama-Nyungan languages of central and southern Australia. Murrinhpatha is characterised by prolific co http://dlvr.it/R3Nxrk

[fla-news]

The Literature Production Centre in Wadeye has recently launched the Murrinhpatha Alphabet Animation It's the newest addition to the collection of alphabet resources to support the teaching of graphophonic knowledge through Murrinhpatha in the bilingual program at the school. #Murrinhpatha #InternationalYearofIndigneousLanguages2019 #BilingualEducation https://youtu.be/hArimUYAShk