Field work. It's okay.

This week I’m down at the Noongar Boodjar Language Centre in Bunbury. I’ve just finished my first interview, I’ve got a long list of interesting people to follow-up with, and every afternoon I get to go to the beach and play with my camera filters:

Field work. It’s okay.

As a feeble attempt to reciprocate the help that the Language Centre are giving me - and this barely scratches the surface as a ‘thank you’, holy crap, these women have taken it on themselves to be my PR in Bunbury and I’d be completely lost without them - I’m doing some research on the history of Noongar pronouns.

“So you're saying… you want me to go through this stack of old documents and find all the examples of pronouns and put them in a spreadsheet and look for patterns and create hypotheses and study the sources and do an analysis??”

I may have strayed into socio-linguistic-anthropology of late, but this right here is my original language heaven:

For confidentiality reasons I can’t really write about my project in terms of who I’m talking to and what they’re saying; but the other guests at the hostel, I have no ethical qualms about blogging their language views.

Sociolinguists: hostels are a microcosm of world Englishes. (Choose your own variables.) And the more people you share a dorm with, the more data you get, and the cheaper your research. It’s like the one time where funding correlates negatively with quality. You're welcome.

A case in point about language attitudes: I was chatting with this guy from Indonesia and across the table from us was this Australian bloke. These two guys were probably about the same age, same occupation, same current lifestyle; but the Indonesian guy grew up surrounded by five or six different languages, and could immediately articulate why it’s important to know your language(s) and why it’s entirely possible to learn another language, at least to get by. The Aussie guy, on the other hand - bless his determination to perpetuate all stereotypes  - the best he could manage was “in Australia people need to speak normal hey”. Like, literally that level of awareness, the monolingual mindset personified, the perfect indictment of a backwards political and education system.

Finally - I know what a pair of shoes dangling from a telephone pole means, but this is beyond my ken of semiotics. As I don't fancy waiting around under trees to find out, this will have to remain a mystery.