Linguists and communities: discursive practice and the status of collaborative language work in Indigenous communities

Christina Eira

ceira@vaclang.org.au

tel. 613 9600 3811 fax. 613 9600 4277

Keywords: discourse analysis, professional practice, Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, field linguistics

An analysis of linguistics texts based on Indigenous community fieldwork raises questions of authority, contribution and accreditation of linguists and community representatives. The recommendations of various professional practice guidelines are considered, and possible theoretical understandings introduced. Uninterrogated writing practices may indicate underlying discourses which inhibit the development of collaborative principles.

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1. Introduction

As a non-Indigenous linguist working with Indigenous communities in Australia who are reclaiming their languages, I have been confronted, as have many of us, with the deep and ongoing questions of how this work can be carried out in ways which contribute to the decolonisation project of which it is inescapably part (see for example Lotherington, 1998; Ozolins, 2002; Rigney, 2002; Roy-Campbell, 1995).

This ultimately presents an unanswerable dilemma. As the linguist in the projects, I am the one with the advantages of formal training, a University position, access to grants, avenues for publication, time and money to travel, reflect and write, and some less tangible advantage that somehow allows me to walk into institutions of various kinds across the country and assume access to services. I am invited into the projects because of these advantages, and it is in everyone's interests that I make the best possible use of them. At the same time, my use of these advantages places me firmly in the position of the knowledgeable, authoritative, recognised, sometimes even central member of the project team. So how can I make my contribution without perpetuating the removal of authority over the language, away from Indigenous communities? This question is perhaps especially pertinent to language reclamation work, in which the underlying purpose of the whole enterprise is to reclaim what has been taken away. Being handed some books and teaching materials at the end of a project is not language reclamation. Regaining the authority that comes with the confidence of knowledge and custodianship of the language is.

There is a significant move, in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and other places where Indigenous communities are working to raise or reinstate the status of their languages and cultures, to reconceptualise the roles of academics and communities (Cameron, 1992; Hinton, 1994; Hudson, 1984; Rieschild, 2003; Smith, 1999; Wilkins, 1992). This agenda moves away from the long-inappropriate division into 'researcher-researched', acknowledging the cultural property and custodianship of Indigenous communities, and establishing principles of negotiation as the key framework of research projects, with a keen monitoring eye kept on the tangible benefit of the research to communities.

My underlying goal in this context is to investigate markers of the status of this shift within linguistics, by way of the language used by linguists in writing up findings and processes of the projects we have been involved in. I am interested in, not the overt and semantic-level tribute paid to these changing perspectives and priorities, but rather the deeper-level, discursive and grammatical evidence of our default schemas. Simply stated, I am investigating how we represent linguist and community participants in the projects – how we represent different roles and responsibilities, and how we represent the location of knowledge, authority and expertise.

This article is part of a larger project1 in which I investigate writing about community-based projects not only (i) by linguists targeted to linguists, but also (ii) specifically by Indigenous linguists to Indigenous communities2, (iii) by community members to communities, and (iv) in newspaper reporting to the general public. The supporting research for this analysis draws on (i) protocols and guidelines on language work, usually written by or in close consultation with community representatives, and (ii) views of community representatives on issues arising from the present phase of the

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work, as expressed in a number of interviews carried out by Dennis O'Brien and myself. The present article represents the core of the work focussed on the discourse of linguists and its ramifications for professional practice. The interviews and the analysed texts (ii)-(iv) will be incorporated in the next stage, which will be beyond the scope of a single article.

In this article, I first summarise the process and results of the first text analysis component, and discuss selected aspects of this. I then move to a summary of the protocols and guidelines documents studied, in terms of their relevance to informing our writing practices. Next, I make what is essentially a reflective response to the question why the way we write has developed in the ways revealed in the text analysis, relating this to recommendations of the protocols and guidelines. I close with a list of questions arising for the discipline from this work, and for the future of collaboration between linguists and communities.

2. The texts

2.1 The process

Ten documents based on research involving fieldwork in Indigenous communities were selected from the linguistics literature, published between 1982-20043. In order to balance the amount of text in different types of documents, approximately 5 pages were selected from each article or book chapter, and 10 pages from each book.4 Selections were made from different sections of each document, particularly including samples focussing on community involvement. These included acknowledgements, sections focussing on language revival, anecdotal descriptions of fieldwork processes, and discussions of language attitudes and use.

It is important to emphasise that I intend this selection to function purely as a representation of writing in linguistics. I have absolutely no intention of implying any kind of appraisal of a particular document or author, or of attempting to locate myself outside of the traditions of writing in linguistics represented by these selections. The whole point of the paper is to investigate aspects of the writing practices of the discipline in general, in an attempt to provide all of 'us', myself included, with new ways of thinking about these practices, what they say about our internalised discourses, and whether we might want to direct these discursive practices in another direction.

For this reason, in an attempt to turn attention away from the individual identity of documents and authors, the texts analysed will be referred to throughout the paper by code letters, such as [Ng]. Full details of the sources are available in the bibliography.

From these text selections, I identified each reference to L(inguists) or C(ommunity members) on the basis of presenting function – for example, someone presented as acting in the role of a linguist was classified as L, regardless of their training or general employment role. References to people outside of both these categories, or to both linguists and community members in a single token, and references not clearly identifiable as either, were set aside for the purposes of this paper.

The L and C tokens were then sorted into basic lexicosemantic categories –

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p(ersonal) n(ame) 'Velma Leeding and David Wilkins' [W] gr(ou)p n(ame) 'SIL'; 'The Yanyuwa community' [Ng] doc(ument) metonymic reference to a pseudo-animate document

rather than its author(s): 'Grimes (1975:33) points out…' [Ng]

spec(ific) N(oun) nominal reference to specific persons or groups (that is, assumed identifiable by the author, rather than defined in document-internal or anaphoric terms), e.g. 'those elders who have worked tirelessly to keep our language alive' [G]

nonspec(ific) N(oun) nominal reference to nonspecific or unbounded group of persons (assumed not identifiable by the author), e.g. 'a number of different tribes' [Lp]

spec(ific) PRO(noun) pronominal reference as for spec N, e.g. '(Luise Hercus)…she' [B]

nonspec(ific) PRO(noun) pronominal reference as for nonspec N, e.g. '(As Aboriginal people came to learn)…their'. [B]

In addition to reference categories, all possessives were marked, and VPs listed for each subject noun. Specific formats of personal name tokens were also recorded ('Snooky Varcoe, a Nunga language specialist' [K]: FnLn role).

I will begin by discussing the distinctions evident in the treatment of L and C categories in sheerly numerical terms, and then turn to the specific details of implementation, with a more discursive explication of some of the tendencies which emerge.

2.2 The numbers

Over the selected corpus, a total of 1,387 tokens were identified – 549 L tokens and 838 C tokens. These were categorised as in Table 1 (overleaf). Table 2 (also overleaf) shows the proportional comparisons for each category.

It is immediately apparent from this that there are vast differences in the distribution of reference types between L and C tokens. Some are readily predictable – particularly the weighting of grp n given the subject area of these documents, and the converse weighting of doc, according to academic convention. There are, nonetheless, questions raised by even these distributions, which will be discussed below. As to the remaining reference types, pn and to a lesser extent spec PRO are overwhelmingly L (notwithstanding the higher proportion of C tokens overall), while spec and nonspec N, and to a lesser extent nonspec PRO, are predominantly C.

The relative proportions of reference types for L and C are also quite distinct. For all documents except [G], at least 25% of L tokens are spec PRO, while for 5 documents, pn accounts for at least 20%. For C tokens, however, while the distribution is a little more even, the highest proportion is nonspec N (at least 25% of tokens in 5 documents and at least 20% for 8 documents).

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Token type

Document pn grp n doc spec N

nonspec N

spec PRO

nonspec PRO

TOTALS

Y 41 0 2 3 4 33 6 89 G 16 1 2 2 1 7 1 30 Ng 23 0 5 4 0 53 2 87 P 7 0 25 1 4 35 2 74 K 13 0 16 3 9 41 12 94 Lp 0 0 0 0 0 9 5 14 B 7 0 1 3 4 19 0 34 W 4 0 1 1 0 5 1 12 T 5 0 7 0 7 15 7 41 Nt 15 1 4 5 9 35 5 74

L

TOTALS 131 2 63 22 38 252 41 549 Y 4 18 0 10 14 12 1 59 G 8 10 0 6 39 23 15 101 Ng 1 12 0 6 19 12 8 58 P 0 7 0 39 23 20 3 92 K 4 9 0 11 17 19 12 72 Lp 0 3 0 21 36 19 20 99 B 0 5 0 6 17 12 12 52 W 2 13 0 2 69 9 28 123 T 0 1 0 21 17 26 13 78 Nt 6 5 0 34 29 20 11 105

C

TOTALS 25 83 0 156 280 172 123 838

Table 1. L and C reference types

Totals L & C 156 85 63 178 318 425 162 1387 L as % of total 84.0 2.4 100.0 12.4 11.9 59.4 25.2 39.6 C as % of total 16.0 97.6 0.0 87.6 88.1 40.6 74.8 60.4

Table 2. Comparison of L and C reference types

What do these markedly different distributions indicate? At a first glance, it seems that linguists tend to be identified more specifically than community members, who are in turn more likely to be referred to as representatives than as individuals ('the neighbouring group', 'the speaker', as distinct from 'my colleague Dorothy Hackett', 'Halliday & Hasan…their' [Ng]). What is apparently important to represent about community members is their role in relation to the language and/or language group, whereas what is important to represent about linguists is their identity as individuals and professionals. Does this imply a discursive model which still maintains a clear distinction between 'researcher' and 'researched'? Such a model would be quite at odds with trends such as those identified earlier – collaboration, negotiation, informed decision-making by community participants and on-the-job training of language workers.

One possible alternative interpretation, considering particularly the emphasis on grp n, is that the generalisation of C referents reflects a need to de-emphasise the role of the individual in the light of communal custodianship of the language and hence language planning and development. Whatever is motivating this stark contrast in numbers, the differential discursive treatment of communities and linguists it suggests is certainly worth exploring further.

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2.3 Personal names

Personal names overwhelmingly refer to linguists, in line with the general tendency to individualise linguists but not community members. 34 different forms of personal names can be found in the dataset – also with different distributions. First name alone is very rare, but does occur for both L and C. Last name only is common for L, but occurs for C only in the specific circumstances of one document [Nt], where the community members concerned are being discussed as part of the linguistic team, with a function as liaison and public relations people. (The treatment of these referents shifts between L and C for different purposes in this text, as discussed in §2.7.) The majority of components are available to L or C, not for both (see Table 3).

L C Example

Title Reverend _, Chief Investigators _, Auntie _ First name Middle name - Last name The Lns - initial(s) - description - The late _ role or (role) my colleague _, _ (Coordinator), _ an

Anglican missionary /variation or (variation) - Ginny (Jenny) _ Traditional name or (Traditional name)

-

kin term - nickname - Institution - in document - (p.c.) - (dates of birth and death) -

(Bolded parentheses are included in the actual references; those in normal font indicate optional status of the contents.)

Table 3. Distribution of personal name components

The restriction of Mn, inits and even dates to L tokens reflects the greater formality with which linguists tend to be represented – paralleled by the use of nicknames, variant forms of names and kin terms in C tokens. Including associated institutions and reference to documents or 'personal communication' in L tokens is part of standard convention in referring to academics in terms of their work. Note, however, that although all of the first-hand information is of course sourced from community members, not once is 'p.c.' used to indicate this. For academics, anything of substance that we say must be formally flagged as a piece of sourced information – possibly because of IP implications – for community members, the same does not apply. How work, knowledge and information are viewed, then, differs according to who is its originator. In this light, it is also interesting that only academic or 'mainstream' linguistic institutions are considered important to record. Although community members are often prominent in Language programs or formal community

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representative bodies, they are not referred to as associated with any kind of institution.

2.4 People of the book and people of the land

Consistent with the formal treatment of the linguist as information source, L tokens commonly occur in the form of document references, as Table 1 shows. Moreover, linguists and documents are often treated as paradigmatically and semantically interchangeable:

Eckert (1988) who worked with teenagers [P]

(the document works with the teenagers)

Meyer's work was followed up by that of Taplin (1879) [Y]

(the work of Taplin = the work of his document)

T&S, Black (1920) and Tindale [K]

(documents5 are conjoined with an author)

C tokens, on the other hand, never occur as doc, but instead are often treated as interchangeable with references to either land, or languages, or both:

It is the most southerly member of a group of five languages spoken along the Lower Murray River (in Victoria and South Australia) which appear to constitute a small linguistic area [Y]

(languages constitute an area (NB zero C token for 'spoken'))

…the Ngaatjatjarra and the Ngaanyatjarra have the word pitja meaning 'come'…Ngaanyatjarra has the word ngaanya for 'this' and Ngaatjatjarra has the word ngaatja for 'this'… [Ng]

(Ngaanyatjarra and Ngaanyatjarra refer first to people, and then to language)

The Areyonga community is located…It is set…the Areyonga community is not on its traditional land… It acknowledges their travelling

(pronouns treat community first as land and then as people)

In this way, both linguists and community members are depersonalised, but the particular metaphors of this depersonalisation are quite different – the former aligning linguists with sources of knowledge, while the latter aligns community members with prominent emblems of Indigenous identity.

2.5 Custodianship and responsibility

The question of who owns, is responsible for, and has rights over the language, the processes of research, and its products, is a key issue for negotiation between linguists and communities. Examination of the objects of possession ascribed respectively to C

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and L referents can indicate the discursive perspective of linguists in this area. 269 instances of 'possession' were identified, from weak ('his questioner' [T], 'members of the survey team' [Nt]) to strong ('Itya Maii's 1845 letter' [K], 'my book' [Y]), and including a full range of syntactic codings for possessive. I divided the lists into semantic categories based on text-internal patterns6, primarily as in Table 4.

Semantic category Examples Relative distribution Language and its elements

C: their traditional languages [B]

very common for C (36% of C possession); rare for L

Land C: his mother Nangala's country [W]

Identity (individual and relational)

C: their own identity [K]

exclusively C

People and groups C: descendants of speakers of Aboriginal languages [T]

predominantly C

Research and related work activities

L: Maryalyce McDonald's seminal contribution [Y]

very common for L (18% of L possession); rare for C

– Records L: My data [Ng] – Analysis and representation

L: her findings [T] exclusively L

– Linguistic products L: Williams' detailed grammar and wordlist [G]

Interactions L: his many years of support [G]

– Language interactions

L: their comments [K]

more L than C

Table 4. What can be 'possessed' by L or C?

It is immediately noticeable from this Table that communities are rarely included as 'owning' any of the language work. Moreover, the status of work associated with linguists is commonly raised with attributions such as 'seminal', 'valuable', 'meticulous'. Only once is a C token the possessor of a publishable product.

The general pattern of possession is in fact very close to what might be expected of a colonialist approach to language work. Outside experts are allocated control over research processes and products (areas of active involvement), while community custodianship is still framed primarily in terms of land, language and culture (phenomena rather than processes – and potential objects of research). In addition, conventions allowing the possession of language elements, people and groups by L tokens appear strangely anomalous in the light of the present discussion ('Cawthorne's wocaltee "shield"' [K]; 'his informants' [B]).

Interactions (mostly found in acknowledgements sections) are quite noticeably marked for L or C referents. The role of linguists is to provide 'helpful comments/discussion', 'painstaking reading' [Ng], 'encouragement, support and advice' [Y], while the community role is focussed on 'response' [Nt], 'interest and enthusiasm' [Y], 'informed consent' [T]. Here, only the linguists have an educative or intellectual contribution to make, while communities are primarily consigned to a

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responsive and cooperative role. This is a pattern which is more clearly evident still in another set of distributions: activities.

2.6 Attributed activities

I collected all the VPs with L and C tokens as subject or agent argument, resulting in 370 L tokens and 443 C tokens. These were categorised on the same basis as for possession, primarily as in Table 5.

Category Examples Relative distribution

language use C: pronounce [P] very common for C (28%+ of C actions); rare for L

existence/location C: live together [W] language planning C: keen to revive their traditional

languages [B]

almost exclusively C

relationship C: had had no previous contact with the Barkly Region [Lp]

predominantly C

psychological state C: will not only find satisfaction in [B] more C than L recording L: tapes recorded by herself [Y] L only analysis L: by working back from the Nukunu

cognates I was able to posit [K] very common for L (18%+ of L actions); rare for C

perception L: have noticed a continuing improvement in pronunciation [K]

product development L: published a brilliant and extensive grammar [Y]

almost exclusively L

assistance L: contributed her field notes [Y] general communication (i.e. not specific to language use)

L: need to talk about language extinction [T]

instruction L: can explain [Lp] making use of L: fortunate in being able to rely on [P] work (general) L: work initiated by [Nt]

more L than C

Table 5. What activities can L or C be involved in?

Additional categories cognition, identity/role, investigation, learning, movement and naming had approximately equal distribution.

This Table confirms that many language work activities such as analysis, product development, assistance and general work are considered primarily the domain of linguists. In addition, although cognition and investigation are apparently shared activity types, they can nonetheless be markedly different in their specifics.

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Communities 'seek out' (correction) [K], 'don't always seem to realise' [Lp], and 'have often taken for granted' [T], while linguists 'found that' [Nt], 'defines' [P], and 'is able to establish' [Y]. This dichotomous characterisation of the linguist as the knowledgeable and authoritative expert, and the community as more passive, less informed, and reliant on the linguist's expertise, is quite strongly revealed in the wider context of many of the verb phrases:

When people (C) ask me (L) what the correct response should be...I (L) respond that… [K]

The Djadjawurrung…(C) for instance, could make use of the Wemba-Wemba or Wergaya material recorded by Hercus (L). [B]

The designation of recording as an exclusively L domain seems particularly odd, as 'recording' is necessarily collaborative. The arbitrariness of this designation is immediately clear on analogy – if we were talking about music, we would ordinarily refer to the artist as the one recording their work, not the producer.

There are some welcome exceptions to the pattern discussed above. Both linguists and communities are involved in learning and instruction, and communities are viewed as responsible for language planning activities – including the shared category naming, as L naming largely concerns analytical categories, while C naming concerns use of the language. There is also one lone recognition of the agency of speakers in the creation of early documents: '…those who gave their information for wordlists in the 1840s…' [G]. These perhaps serve as early examples of an evolution towards genuinely collaborative processes. To continue this trend, linguists will need to pay significantly greater attention to the underlying perceptions of authority, agency, knowledge and work with which our language use indicates we are operating.

2.7 The corpus and its analysis – further reflections

For reasons outlined in §2.1, I have treated the corpus as a single undifferentiated whole, but this of course is not the case. In the first place, some of the projects represented in the documents are more overtly collaborative than others. The document which acknowledges the agency of historical speakers is also the one containing the only instance of a C 'possessor' of a publishable product. Secondly, the types of document are not homogenous – they include for example a dictionary and grammar, a published thesis, and a survey report. They may, then, all recognisably fit into the broad category 'the linguistics literature', but they nonetheless target different audiences7. The dictionary is intended in part as a community resource; the thesis necessarily targets prospective examiners to an extent, etc. An investigation of this variation could be expected to enable a clearer view of the diversity of current approaches, and what shifts are in process in what niches of the field. The larger project referred to earlier is in part is set up for this purpose – and to allow a closer comparison of the effects of genres and target audience on the kinds of discourse features noted above.

A second factor worth some attention is the omission from analysis of any tokens which are indistinguishably both L and C. In the corpus as currently analysed, some interesting shifting between L and C roles is evident. For example, one document [Nt] explains at length the recruitment of a number of Indigenous people to the working

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party because of their identity as C participants (though they were not from the specific communities being researched). The participation of these individuals remains marked, however, as in (italics mine) –

The Aboriginal co-surveyors

In an oral report, Hall…

and the inclusion of these men does not in the end redress the dichotomous treatment of L and C participants described above:

Andrews is one of the translators…and therefore linguistically sophisticated.

A significant number of tokens in other documents, however, do imply a more equal recognition of participation. It may not be accurate or even possible to assign an L or C label to 'the language endangerment movement' [T], 'all the many people who have assisted' [Ng] or 'learners and teachers' [K]. It will be important at a later stage to examine such tokens, as they also could be a significant indicator of what aspects of language work are coming to be seen as fully shared.

This text analysis has revealed certain patterns of discourse which may be markers of the stage we have currently attained in our attempts to shift deep assumptions informing our professional practice. The question which logically arises here is what the goals for that shift might be. I turn next to one medium which might be expected to address that question – the protocols and guidelines for research produced by and/or with input from communities.

3. Protocols & guidelines

3.1 The sources

Of the many protocols and guidelines available, nine documents were selected, representing a range of scope. These are targeted variously to researchers, the education discipline, communities and professional associations. They include influential documents formally established at national level and very local ones developed by a single language community, and they range from a single page long to an entire volume. The selected list can be found in the bibliography.

3.2 Implications of the protocols and guidelines

The first thing which is noticeable about these documents is that they have little if anything to say about the writing stage of research. Instead, the focus of the documents is generally as follows: negotiation of permission for the language work, negotiation of the research design, appropriate practices during fieldwork, roles of community collaborators and researchers, and dissemination of the results. The statement most directly relevant to writing up is in AIATSIS (1999), which notes the power of writing in the 'formation of public opinion and scholarly thinking about Indigenous people' (p. 15) – but still there are no suggestions for what this might imply for the writing itself. From a linguistics researcher's perspective there is an obvious gap here, which could perhaps be addressed in the future by a working group of linguists and community representatives.

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Given the current lack of specific recommendations then, what follows comprises a reflection on the implications of other recommendations in these documents for how we might write about the work.

Four principles of collaborative fieldwork stand out strongly throughout the guidelines: negotiation, respect, involvement and acknowledgment. I will discuss each principle briefly in turn.

Negotiation

It is probably a given by now that clear and full negotiation is necessary at all stages of a community language project. However, there are two complications to note. One is that this means the writing of the project is also a stage subject to negotiation. Here we run into problems of discipline-specific register, which by definition can be fairly inaccessible without academic linguistics training. Secondly, it is the view of many linguists that the minutiae of linguistic description are not generally of interest to communities. While the latter complication may be true in some cases, the requirement to negotiate 'all aspects of materials published in and about [the] languages' (FATSIL 2004, p. 7) remains relevant. One suggestion to deal with the former is to write two versions of a paper – one in the register of the discipline, and the other in everyday language. This may be unusual at present, but it is a feasible solution if the time it takes to do it can be a priority.

Respect

This principle has two facets: respect of Indigenous knowledge systems and their contribution to research, and the need to enact respect by reflecting Indigenous perspectives and understandings in the research. While these requirements may be obvious on the face of it, both facets involve implications which could entail some fairly radical changes to professional practice if taken to their logical conclusions.

The first implication is that oral records would need to be treated as of equal value to written records. This could seem problematic, due to the inherent potential of oral records for continuous transformation (between persons and/or over time), which in academic systems of knowledge is not definite enough, not repeatable or verifiable enough to consider reliable. Even if these academic systems of validation were taken as given, however, it would be difficult to argue that all written sources relied on by researchers fulfil them – especially many archival sources, with their multiplicity of spelling schemas, misheard and misrepresented sounds, mistaken and poorly understood translations, etc. Nonetheless, it is normal practice to spend time and energy sorting out the most likely 'originals' represented by these records. For oral representations, on the other hand, the basis for the 'discrepancies' evident is not so much errors and notational variations, but rather the outworkings of interesting and important sociolinguistic factors – allegiance to particular authorities, positioning in regard to language change, subgroup identification, etc. The time and energy needed here is for analysis of sociolinguistic as well as linguistic features, and collaborative decision-making about how many and which variations to include in formal records, analyses, publications and teaching. Again, the perceived worth of this work will depend in part on perceptions of the sources of important and authoritative information.

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This leads us to the second key implication. Community-based linguists are well aware that our analysis of a given language feature diverges on occasion from community analyses (usually designated as 'perceptions'). There are various possible epistemological explanations for this. My own preferred explanation is that as linguists we bring particular kinds of knowledge and analysis to the projects which, because of the way we are trained and the established strength of the discourse within which this training occurs, we sincerely believe is the best knowledge and analysis. This may be our greatest challenge – to accept and work with kinds of knowledge and analysis which appear at times diametrically opposed to those which 'ring true' to us. I return to this and related issues in §4.2 and §4.3.

Involvement

The perspective on participant involvement offered by some of the guidelines is quite revealing in the light of the text analysis under §2. An indicative list prepared by FATSIL (2004) suggests that community participants should be involved

in all aspects of the project, including developing language research skills, collecting language data, documenting language, using equipment/technologies, analysing language data, making decisions about publication… (p. 16)

This is a far cry from the activities attributed to community participants as seen in §2.6. The distribution of verb phrases indicates a clear and quite firm view of different participants as having particular roles and contributions. This is not to say necessarily that community participants do not engage in the activities listed by FATSIL, but rather that they are not seen as engaging in such activities. Some of this may be due to uninterrogated definitions of various activities, such as 'recording'. As another example, 'analysing language data' by means of a round table discussion of who says what, why, and what it means, might easily be overlooked by the linguist in favour of analysis by sitting at the computer or sifting through archival records. In the light of the lists of possible or preferred roles of community participants provided in some of the protocols and guidelines, this firm conceptualisation of the division of labour clearly warrants some rethinking.

Acknowledgement

This principle, again, has two main facets: acknowledgement of the various kinds of expertise and contributions provided, and acknowledgment of the custodial rights and responsibilities of the community. The former is fundamentally connected with representation of involvement, as discussed above. One element of our writing which may reflect the latter is the patterning of grammatical possession (see §2.5). These patterns betrayed no uncertainty as to 'whose language' it is, but did indicate that language work was invariably viewed as the domain and responsibility of the linguist. That language planning activities were more commonly assigned to the C participant may signify a gradual shift in the conceptual division of labour. Nonetheless, there is a noticeable tendency to confine acknowledgement of community participants to Acknowledgements sections. To acknowledge community and linguist participants on a more even-handed basis will require recognition of the work of both, as actors, agents and 'possessors' (custodians), throughout the unfolding of the work.

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4. A reflective response

I would like to spend this section considering why we write like we do. This is entirely a reflective response, not based on any collection of the views of other linguists – though this could also form a useful addition to future research. I am well aware that many linguists hold considerable respect for the abilities of those they are working with, and greatly appreciate the collaborative interchange that the best fieldwork experiences offer. Many linguists, including most of those represented in this corpus, actively promote recognition of the work of community participants:

It is important for contemporary speakers or descendants of speakers of Aboriginal languages to define directions for language work themselves. [T]

The primary foundation of these programs is the ongoing work of elders to maintain and revive language. [G]

Lewis O'Brien8 (6 June 1995) thought it appropriate to incorporate Narungga words directly into Kaurna because the languages were so close. [K]

Yet the way we write about language work appears to counter the spirit of the protocols, and even our own professed ethos. What is going on?

I will propose three answers-in-process to this question in turn: the effects of intertextuality, epistemology, and the location of authority.

4.1 Intertextuality

My first answer is that the reason we write this is way is that this is the way we write. In order for our written discourse to be recognisable within our target genres, and to be respected within our own scientific community, it is essential that we employ the established register of the discipline. By register, I am referring to not only lexical, grammatical and organizational features of the text, but also conventions of semantic role assignment, citation, metonymic equivalences, and even fundamental questions of the kinds of information included in the document. Much of this article amounts to no more than a description of the ordinary conventions of academic writing in linguistics. If we were to rework our writing patterns into a new discursive style that better reflects how we want to see ourselves as relating to co-workers in the field, we could initially face a significant risk to the academic legitimisation of what we write. It could affect our ability to publish, where we can publish, the perceived identity of the target audience, and so on. One of the documents in my corpus which does 'reverse' some of the norms of agency and prominence is a case in point – it does not 'read like' a rigorous linguistic study targeted to linguists:

… people don't feel they have the right to invent words. Some people even prefer to have witnesses when they teach language, or talk about language, in case other people accuse them of inventing words. Sometimes people say of a particular word "I heard old people say it like this." [W]

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Compare this with the following, much closer to the legitimated register, although on a very similar topic:

Lexical resources are being recovered from historical sources and made available to the community and Kaurna programs in Amery (1995c, 1997). It is envisaged that this lexicon will be continually updated with each successive printing of the source. It is based on the vocabularies compiled by T&S and TMs, incorporating words from other Kaurna sources where a counterpart does not exist in the German sources. [K]

This aspect of intertextuality forms a highly significant base of the discourses in which we write and a major barrier to change. A second consideration is that we need to be able to track sources and successive developments of linguistic analyses, orthographies etc. through successive documents. Traditions of reference to a given text may be deeply embedded in over a hundred years of publication on a given subject. So if I begin referring to Tindale (1936)9 as 'Louisa Egginton's list', prioritising acknowledgment of the speaker over the recorder of the list, then suddenly my reference to this list becomes disconnected from 70 years of discussing it. This issue is linked also with our approach to what constitutes knowledge, and who therefore needs to be acknowledged for its contribution.

4.2 Epistemology

An important site of contestation both amongst linguists, and between this community and Indigenous communities, is the question of whose is the knowledge created in language work. This is quite aside from questions of ownership of the language per se, and of authority over the language. Key epistemological questions stem from issues concerning what constitutes an original contribution, what constitutes analysis of language, and whether this is clearly distinguishable from knowledge of a language. These underlying questions are critical to debates about intellectual property, accreditation, publishing rights and the ensuing greater prominence in the wider community of particular participants in the language work (see for example Gerdts, 1998).

The principle that 'it's not knowledge until a white man knows it' is fortunately becoming something of an anachronism in the context of exploration myths, as evidenced by the increasing acceptance of re- or dual naming of land features such as Uluru (formerly Ayer's Rock). This same principle seems often to pass by unnoticed, however, in the form '…until a white scholar publishes it'. Throughout the present corpus, knowledge continues to be equated with knowledge by the linguistics community, in the forms that we recognise. 'We' are invariably the unidentified we responsible for knowledge:

the normal sort of linguistic change that we know happened [Lp]

We do not know when these words first came into the languages [W]

The default working position of linguists as to who is responsible for the creation of knowledge is clearly evident from the sharp division between L or C participants in terms of types of work, reference to people in terms of their work, praise of particular

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work achievements, and identification of an individual (responsible for the work) or a group (stakeholders in the work). Nonetheless, it would be overly simplistic to assume that the embedded discourses of these texts reflect our conscious attitudes or intended directions. Instead, I suggest that what is reflected are our unconscious, naturalised assumptions about the definitions of and responsibility for knowledge and knowledge creation. Very possibly these well-established, internalised norms of practice are a bigger barrier to change than the external barriers we battle with at a conscious level.

4.3 The location of authority

A final consideration, related to acknowledgment of work, is where we locate authority in language work. Again, the underlying position of linguists is clear from the analysis presented here. In the first place, it is interesting that while L tokens account for 40% of the total number of tokens, the proportion of L tokens in agent or subject roles is higher, at 45%. Secondly, as noted previously, the kinds of activities assigned to linguists place us in the more active and authoritative role – we instruct, we recommend, we assess, we develop products. We do this from the baseline assumption that the kinds of knowledge and approach we bring are the correct kinds:

Learners are generally willing to be guided and corrected. [K]

…these dialects, which their speakers would prefer to call languages [Ng]

The close similarity of the languages of the tribes never gave rise to consciousness of a shared language [Y]

Consistently, the understanding of the linguist (that the linguistic forms are dialects; that the language is shared) is the unmarked, the assumed knowledge. Moreover, knowledge is validated by reference to a linguist, rather than by the authority of a community representative:

many linguists consider that only items fully assimilated into the receiving language should be considered as borrowings. [P]

Nonetheless, many linguists are actively engaged in promoting the authority of the community over their language. One piece of evidence for this is the prevalence of C tokens as agents of language planning activities. Once again, it is possible that for some of us at least there is disjunction between our preferred discourse of authority and the one we are unconsciously working from. As Halliday (1992) explains, the function of grammar to preserve deeply-embedded memories of experience and action entails that there will be 'disjunctions, contradictions and overdeterminacies which ensure that it must continue to evolve' (p. 86). The question, then, is at what point will a shift towards genuinely collaborative community linguistics begin to be reflected at this grammatical level when we write about language work?

5. Addressing the disjunctions?

It is not appropriate at this stage to issue a list of recommendations arising from this analysis. Rather, I will simply pose some of the questions which emerge from it, which could perhaps form the basis for some open and honest discussion between linguists and communities. The clearest questions I see are:

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• What are the tensions for linguists between what we know from our training and experience, and the imperative to collaborate equally with people with different approaches to knowledge, training and experience?

• What do we want to do about the discrepancies between protocols and guidelines implications and standard practices in linguistics research writing?

• What do we want to do about any discrepancies between our goals and our (writing) practices?

• What might a revised model for writing linguistics research look like?

• What might a collaboratively negotiated protocol look like?

• How/Can we realistically revise the conventions by which we gain validation in systems of publication, funding, etc?

There are problems inherent in interrogating the practices of one's own discipline. In the first place, the critic appears to see themselves as beyond the issues being raised. In the second place, the works selected for analysis inevitably include those of friends and colleagues. For these reasons I would like to apologise if there is any offence, and stress that this is not my intention. I see this work as raising issues common to the linguistics discipline as a whole, not as some kind of ethics policing of linguistics. My aim is to promote the engagement of all of us who work with communities – but perhaps especially Indigenous communities – in joint, constructive, and ongoing rethinking about some of the above questions, about ways in which we may be sabotaging our intentions through our practices (and how to subvert that), deep-level implications of changes in the location of authority, and what it would mean to develop genuinely collaborative language work in its fullest form.

References

Cameron, D. (1992) Researching language: Issues of power and method. London: Routledge.

Gerdts, D.B. (1998) Beyond expertise: the role of the inguist in langauge revitalization programs. In N. Ostler (ed.) Endangered languages: what role for the specialist? Proceedings of the second FEL Conference, University of Edinburgh, September 1998.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1992) New ways of analysing meaning: The challenge to applied linguistics. In M. Pütz, (ed.) Thirty years of linguistic evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hinton, L. (1994) Flutes of fire: Essays on California Indian languages. Berkeley: Heyday Books.

Hudson, J. (1984) An orthography chosen by those who speak Gooniyandi: Explanatory notes. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics.

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Lotherington, H. (1998) Trends and tensions in post-colonial language education in the South Pacific. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

Ozolins, Uldis. (2002) Post-imperialist language situations: The Baltic states. Workshop at the World Congress on Language Policies, Barcelona April 2002. Online document at URL http://www.linguapax.org/congres/taller/taller1/Ozolins.html [17/11/2006].

Rieschild, V.R. (2003) Origami in a hurricane: Current challenges to linguistic research. Australian Journal of Linguistics.

Rigney, L.I. (2002) Bread versus freedom: Treaty and stabilising Indigenous languages. Paper presented at the National Treaty Conference, Canberra August 2002. Online document at URL http://www.fatsil.org/papers/research/rigney-2.htm [17/11/2006].

Roy-Campbell, Z.M. (1995) Does medium of instruction really matter? The language question in Africa: The Tanzanian experience. Utafiti Journal.

Smith, L.T. (1999) Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books.

Wilkins, D. (1992) Linguistic research under Aboriginal control: a personal account of fieldwork in central Australia. Australian Journal of Linguistics.

Texts analysed

Amery, R. (2004). Warrabarna Kaurna! Reclaiming an Australian language. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger.

Ash, A., Giacon, J. and Lissarague, A. (comps) (2004) Gamilaraay, Yuwaalaraay, & Yuwalayaay dictionary.Alice Springs: IAD Press.

Black, P. (1982). Why and how languages change. In J. Bell (ed.) Language planning for Australian Aboriginal languages. Proceedings of the Workshop to Develop Aboriginal Leadership in Language Planning, Alice Springs, Feb 16-20, 1981. Alice Springs: Institute for Aboriginal Development in association with the Aboriginal Languages Association

Blake, B. (2002) Reclaiming languages in Aboriginal Victoria. In D. Bradley and M. Bradley (eds) Language endangerment and language maintenance. London: RoutledgeCurzon.

Glass, A.D. (1997) Cohesion in Ngaanyatjarra discourse. Darwin: SIL-AAB.

Graber, P.L. (1988) Kriol in the Barkly tableland. In M.J. Ray (ed.) Aboriginal language use in the Northern Territory: 5 reports. Darwin: SIL-AAB.

Langlois, A. (2004) Alive and kicking: Areyonga teenage Pitjantjatjara. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU.

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McDonald, M. (2002) A study of the phonetics and phonology of Yaraldi and associated dialects. Munich: Lincom Europa.

Ray, M.J. (ed.), 1988. Introduction. In Aboriginal language use in the Northern Territory: 5 reports. Darwin: SIL-AAB.

Simpson, J. (1985) How Warumungu people express new concepts. Language in Central Australia.

Thieberger, N. (2002) Extinction in whose terms? Which parts of langauge constitute a target for language maintenance programmes? In D. Bradley and M. Bradley (eds) Language endangerment and language maintenance. London: RoutledgeCurzon.

Protocols and guidelines

Aboriginal Languages Standing Committee (2003). Indigenous intellectual and cultural property rights position paper. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Education and Children’s Services, South Australia. Available from G. Wilson, Project Officer Aboriginal Languages, SA DECS wilson.gregory@saugov.sa.gov.au.

Aboriginal Research Institute (1993) Ethics in Aboriginal research. Unpublished manuscript, University of South Australia.

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (2000) Guidelines for ethical research in Indigenous Studies. Canberra: AIATSIS. Online document at URL http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/2290/ethics_guidelines.pdf [17/11/2006]

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (1999) Research of interest to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. Canberra: National Board of Employment, Education and Training, Australian Research Council.

Australian Linguistics Society (1984) Linguistic rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. ALS Newsletter.

Australian Linguistics Society (1990) Statement of ethics. ALS Newsletter.

Federation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages (2004). Guide to community protocols for Indigenous language projects. Melbourne: FATSIL.

Kaurna Warra Pintyandi, Rigney, A.W. and O'Brien, L. (2003) Kaurna information requests. Unpublished manuscript. Available from R. Amery, University of Adelaide rob.amery@adelaide.edu.au.

Narungga Aboriginal Progress Association, 2005. Protocols. Unpublished manuscript. Used by permission.

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1 This project was made possible through a grant from the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (G2004-6905). Many thanks to several people who assisted in the collection and collation of materials: Kathleen-Mary Graham, Laura Cook, Denica Tothill, and especially Dennis O'Brien and Kylie Makhoba.

2 In the first text set, targeted to linguists, there were no samples of Indigenous linguists' writing – though this would also be a useful text set to include as a comparison.

3 One text [Y], however, was originally written up as a Masters thesis in 1977.

4 In the case of [Nt], which is a collection of papers by different people working under the same overarching direction, 5 pages from one paper were selected as well as the 2-page general introduction.

5 'T&S' has been established as the abbreviation for a particular document in this text.

6 That is, establishing the categories to reflect the predominance of particular semantic occurrences.

7 As pointed out by Diana Eades at ALS 2005.

8 A Kaurna Elder.

9 Tindale, Norman, 1936. 'Notes on the Natives of the southern portion of Yorke Peninsula, South Australia'. Transactions & Proceedings of the Royal Society of SA 60: 55-69.

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