Jennifer Green

University of Melbourne | MSD · School of Languages and Linguistics

In the Gurindji community of Kalkaringi in Northern Australia the shared practices of everyday communication employed by both hearing and deaf members of the community include conventionalized manual actions from the lexicon of Indigenous sign as well as some recent visual practices derived from contact with both written English and with Auslan. We...

Spoken languages make up only one aspect of the communicative landscape of Indigenous Australia—sign languages are also an important part of their rich and diverse language ecologies. Australian Indigenous sign languages are predominantly used by hearing people as a replacement for speech in certain cultural contexts. Deaf or hard-of-hearing people...

This article considers how Indigenous peoples in Central Australia share and keep digital records of events and cultural knowledge in a period of rapid technological change. To date, research has focused upon the development of digital archives and platforms that reflect Indigenous epistemologies and incorporation of protocols governing access to i...

In Australian Indigenous societies the means for demonstrating kinship-based respect are rich and varied, and mastery of their ideological and contextual dimensions is highly valued and an indication of communicative expertise. Special speech registers, sometimes referred to as ‘mother-in-law’, ‘brother-in-law’, or ‘avoidance’ languages, are one as...

Place-based cultural knowledge – of ceremonies, songs, stories, language, kinship and ecology – binds Australian Indigenous societies together. Over the last 100 years or so, records of this knowledge in many different formats – audiocassettes, photographs, films, written texts, maps, and digital recordings – have been accumulating at an ever-incre...

The practices of archival return may provide some measure of social equity to Indigenous Australians. Yet priceless cultural collections, amassed over many decades, are in danger of languishing without ever finding reconnection to the individuals and communities of their origin. The extensive documentary heritage of Australian Indigenous peoples is...

Mudburra is an Aboriginal language of the Northern Territory (Australia). Many Mudburra people live in Elliott, Marlinja, Yarralin and Kalkaringi. The Mudburra to English Dictionary contains Mudburra words with English translations, illustrations and detailed encyclopaedic information about plants, animals and cultural practices. Also included is a...

Kinship plays a central role in organizing interaction and other social behaviors in Indigenous Australia. The spoken lexicon of kinship has been the target of extensive consideration by anthropologists and linguists alike. Less well explored, however, are the kin categories expressed through sign languages (notwithstanding the pioneering work of A...

Rapikwenty is a traditional Australian Indigenous set of stories-and-songs from the Utopia region of Central Australia performed by Anmatyerr speaking adults to lull children to sleep. The main protagonist is a boy who is left to play alone in the ashes. Like many lullabies, Rapikwenty is characterised by scary themes, soft dynamics, a limited pitc...

Understanding Linguistic Fieldwork offers a diverse and practical introduction to research methods used in field linguistics. Designed to teach students how to collect quality linguistic data in an ethical and responsible manner, the key features include: * A focus on fieldwork in countries and continents which have undergone colonial expansion, i...

In the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in remote Western Australia children play a guessing game called mama mama ngunytju ngunytju ‘father father mother mother’. It is mainly girls who play the game, along with other members of their social network, including age-mates, older kin and adults. They offer clues about target referents and establish mutual underst...

In sand stories, an Indigenous narrative practice from Central Australia, semi-conventionalized graphic symbols drawn on the ground are interwoven with speech, sign and gesture. This article examines some aspects of the complexity seen in this dynamic graphic tradition, illustrating the ways that these different semiotic resources work together to...

When the Australian writer Richard Flanagan accepted the 2014 Man Booker Prize for fiction, he said that “As a species it is story that distinguishes us”. While the prize was given for a literary work written in English, Australia and the surrounding regions are replete with a rich diversity of oral traditions, and with stories remembered and told...

Language Documentation and Conservation, Vol 9 (2015): 307-323.

In an Aboriginal children’s story from Central Australia, small creatures such as dragon lizards and ground-dwelling insect larvae known as ant lions convey rich symbolic meanings. This article analyzes the story, song, and graphic schema of a story that reinforces the dangers of being alone and the unpredictable incarnations of malevolent characte...

In culture-contact situations, it is commonplace for words to be borrowed from other unrelated vernaculars, for their pronunciations to be changed, and their meanings modified to fit new contexts. The Arandic word altyerre is a rather extreme example of this, and at the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘translation’ of the related word Alcheringa...

Sand stories from Central Australia are a traditional form of Aboriginal women's verbal art that incorporates speech, song, sign, gesture and drawing. Small leaves and other objects may be used to represent story characters. This detailed study of Arandic sand stories takes a multimodal approach to the analysis of the stories and shows how the expr...

Speakers of the Arandic languages in Central Australia use a range of semiotic systems, including everyday language, spoken auxiliary languages, the language of songs, sign language and the symbolic or graphic conventions used in sand-drawing and in various forms of Aboriginal art. Spontaneous gesture is also part of this complexity, and in a commu...

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