Reawakening Wangaaypuwan and A Plain Language Grammar

Abstract

In this research I undertook to write a plain language grammar of Wangaaypuwan, and I also decided that this project would reflect what I had learned about community directed and controlled research and it would be a case study in how linguistic research could be conducted in a genuinely ethical manner, and meet the needs and desires of the community, and the linguist both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. The main thrust of this research project was to translate Tamsin Donaldson's 1980's Ngiyambaa (1980) grammar into plain language so that the Wangaaypuwan community would have some chance of perhaps understanding the structure of the language and to allow for the possibility of developing language learning and teaching materials into the future. I engaged a small focus group of Ngiyampaa co-researchers that have worked with me to translate technical linguistic terms into plain language throughout the course of this research. The research project is primarily for the benefit of the Wangaaypuwan community, to give them the best possible access to our language, hopefully without ever having to study linguistics. However, over the course of five years, this research project has become much bigger than the plain language Wangaaypuwan grammar alone. Throughout the course of my research, I have also been engaging in capacity building with the Wangaaypuwan community and developing an ecosystem in which language and culture can thrive. We have been successful in securing grants to reprint the Ngiyampaa dictionary (2020) and produce on online version of that dictionary , to record place names and stories of place on ngurrampaa, developing an online community archive in a program called Keeping Culture and building a physical Keeping Place on the Indigenous Protected Area of Mawonga Station, where I currently work and live. We are also developing research policies and guidelines and a research agenda for the community. In this way the research could be thought of as participatory action research. I outline the methods I used in this research project because I believe that the description of this process, will be useful for the benefit of other Indigenous communities who may be thinking of doing something similar with their own language as an example of the approach I took and what that looks like, in the hope it might give them some ideas about how to approach decolonising their own language. Importantly, this research is also for the benefit of other linguists, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who might be considering using plain language in their own research outputs or developing courses that teach about using plain language alternatives to the technical linguistic terminology. It is also hoped that in the future, the discipline of linguistics, particularly documentary linguistics might move to a plain language model. I had three research questions: 1. What can genuinely ethical linguistic research look like from an Indigenous perspective? 2. Is it possible to write a truly accessible plain language descriptive grammar without a reliance on the technical terminology of linguistics and how could this be achieved? 3. Is it possible that the field of linguistics could move towards a plain language model when their research involves the Indigenous languages of Australia? Critically, I demonstrate how I have engaged with the Wangaaypuwan community and discuss the issues of community control and ownership of the research project. I talk about how this can apply to other linguistic research contexts in the hope that this will enable better understanding of the issues and promote more genuinely ethical linguistic research practice in the future that addresses the human rights of Australia's Indigenous people. Show more