Prof. Dr. Peter K. Austin (Melbourne/Australien)
Australian Aboriginal Languages -
past, present and future
Donnerstag, 27. Januar 2000, 19.15 Uhr
Hörsaal P 4 (Philosophicum)
 

When Europeans first settled in Australia in 1788 there were some 600 different groups speaking approximately 250 different languages. Today most of these are extinct or highly endangered, and only about 20 languages remain in full use in Aboriginal communities. Over the past 30 years linguistic research has documented many of the languages and revealed them to be highly complex structurally and sociolinguistically. The languages of the south of the continent have complex systems of case marking that show ergativity (treating subjects of intransitive verbs and objects of transitive verbs the same, but subjects of transitive verbs differently), rich verb conjugations, and completely free word order. Northern languages are polysynthetic in character and incorporate whole sentence meanings into a single word. Sociolinguistically, the languages show special speech used with certain relatives, and highly complex kinship systems. I will illustrate some of these features and look at their use in a story in one of the languages.
 

In the second part of the talk I will explore the reasons why languages have been lost and become endangered. Over the past ten years Aboriginal people have been concerned with recovering much of the lost knowledge and have been engaged in language and cultural revival, often in collaboration with linguistic researchers. I will illustrate this with a demonstration of some of the multimedia materials for the Gamilaraay community that I have been involved in producing.
 

Prof. Dr. Peter K. Austin, born in Tamworth, northern New South Wales, studied Japanese and Linguistics at Australian National University with PhD "A Grammar of the Diyari Language, South Australia" in 1978. He has taught at University of Western Australia, Harvard, Stanford, La Trobe University, and is currently Foundation Professor in Linguistics at University of Melbourne. He has been a visiting researcher at University of Hong Kong, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tsukuba University, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre. He is visiting the J.W. Goethe Universität, Frankfurt/M. from November 1999 - February 2000 on a DAAD Academic Exchange Fellowship.
 

Relevant publications of the referent:

• A Grammar of Diyari, South Australia Cambridge University Press 1981;

• "Non-configurationality in Australian Aboriginal languages" (with Joan Bresnan) Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1996;
• Texts in the Mantharta Languages, Western Australia Tokyo University of Foreign Studies;
• "Australia" in B. Comrie, S. Matthews and M. Polinsky (eds) Atlas of the World's Languages;