It’s 2021 and are us linguists really still doing this thing where we publish research on Indigenous languages as if they are wholly disembodied from actual humans? This article makes zero reference to Marra or Alawa people. Not even in the acknowledgements.

These languages are not dead and they are not museum artefacts or roadkill for dissection. The data used in this article came from real live Marra and Alawa people with hopes and aspirations for their languages.

There is also a language centre and community members doing contemporary work on these languages.

It’s 14 years since Prof Martin Nakata wrote:

“[the] inability of linguists to give primacy to language speakers and to the history of a language... remains a fundamental limitation of linguistic practice to this day....

... this shortcoming has come about because scholars have taken for granted an approach that single-mindedly submerges and subjugates the presence of people and their community” (Nakata 2007:39 - ‘Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines’)

The article referring to at the top is from the journal of @AusLingSoc. The article also obvs went through reviews. It depresses me that this is (still) where Australian linguistics is (apparently) at. The language data isn’t even in the languages’ orthographies.

Yet it may also be argued that noone has really done anything “wrong” according to established linguistics practice. In my view, however, if this is what still counts as established practice, it’s pretty poor, as per Nakata 2007.

In my experience though, most Australian linguists go to some (often considerable) effort to not submerge/subjugate Indigenous people in our work. I’m genuinely surprised to see this (imho) archaic approach persisting.