Brisbane workshops and Minjerribah Forum Jul 2019
Living Languages/RNLD trainer Amy kicked off the 2020 financial year in sunny QLD over 17-22 July, running separate training workshops with Aaron (Pitta Pitta) and Sandra (Jandai) in Brisbane, and presenting at the Minjerribah Languages Forum, at Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island).
Aaron’s workshop focused on translating a large part of his presentation for the Minjerribah Languages Forum into Pitta Pitta. This was a huge job, which required learning new and complex grammatical constructions like purposives, causatives, and subordinate clauses. Watching Aaron introduce himself and then talk about his language journey in Pitta Pitta at the forum was such a wonderful experience, and his talk touched the hearts of everyone lucky enough to see it.
Aaron James (Pitta Pitta)
Sandra’s language expertise was also on show at the forum, not only presenting in her Jandai language on Jandai Country, but having “decolonised” and translated the hymn “The Old Rugged Cross” into a beautiful Jandai version which was sung by Mayor Karen Williams. Sandra organised the language forum on behalf of QYAC (Quandamooka Yoolooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation), and the day was a huge success, with speakers from Gidarjil Central Queensland Languages Centre, Yugambeh Museum, First Languages Australia, and the University of Queensland. It was an honour to present about RNLD amongst such a great line-up, and in such a stunning setting on Quandamooka Country.
After a well-deserved post-forum rest, Sandra was back into language the following Monday, with a workshop focusing on filling gaps in Jandai. This involved poring over multiple accounts of the “Brisbane languages” and starting a comparison of all the documented suffixes in neighbouring and related languages to Jandai. Once complete, this will begin to inform Sandra what some of the suffixes missing from the documentation on Jandai might have been, or how she might look at sound change patterns to reconstruct suffixes for Jandai.
Aaron and Sandra first invited RNLD into their language journeys 4 years ago, and it’s been such a privilege to watch their language skills strengthen so much over this time, and to see the huge impact their work has had on their families and communities. Keep up the amazing work, guys!