Language socialisation and the transmission of Qaqet Baining (PNG)

Towards a documentation project

Presented by Dr Birgit Hellwig

ARC Future Fellow, La Trobe University

12-1pm 27 February 2014

Arts Lecture Theatre 2, UNE

Language documentation aims to create a "comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community" (Himmelmann 1998: 166). But in actual practice, our focus tends to be on adult speech practices, and we know little about the contexts in which children become socialised and learn to speak, about the language(s) used with and around children, and about the outputs that are produced by children.

This talk explores the possibilities of documenting child language in remote communities, drawing on insights from a pilot project among the Qaqet Baining of Papua New Guinea. The focus of the talk is on methods: the design of the project together with the speech community, the involvement of the children's families, the methods of data collection and corpus construction, and the resulting types of data.