Siraya petition

[Jessica Denniss]

Hi everyone,

Piers, I wanted to comment on your suggestion 'perhaps as descriptive
linguists we should even think about stepping back a bit to encourage
other skilled people to enter the space.'

I agree. Too often positions are filled by people without the right
skills or passion. This gives others the impression that work is
already being done, so they back off. Perhaps in our (admirable)
desire to push for maintenance work we are missing out on developing a
valuable partnership with other skilled individuals.

Good idea!
Jessica


On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Margaret Florey
<margaret.florey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> It's great to see this discussion under way.
>
> I thought you might also like to know that Chun Huang (who is himself
> Sirayan), gave a very interesting and moving paper at the ICLDC conference
> in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago on "Language revitalization and identity
> politics: a case study of Siraya in Taiwan".
>
> Nick Thieberger and the other conference organizers at UH are processing the
> recordings of the conference talks now, and they plan to put them up on the
> conference web site <http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ICLDC09/> in the next couple of
> weeks, along with PDFs of handouts etc. so you'll be able to listen to
> Chun's presentation. It was an exciting and highly successful conference,
> and you might like to look at/listen to some of the other talks too if you
> weren't able to be there.
>
> cheers,
> Margaret
>
>
> 2009/4/2 William J Poser <wjposer at ldc.upenn.edu>
>>
>> I too am unsure of how effective such petitions are likely to be,
>> but I think that there is one important difference between the problems
>> of language endangerment and the Siraya issue, namely that the
>> difficulties
>> of language endangerment (at least in the kind of situation found in
>> Australia) are not primarily political, whereas the Siraya issue is
>> political.
>>
>> As I understand the situation in Taiwan, it is like this. Once upon a time
>> Austronesian-speaking peoples occupied all of Taiwan. Chinese colonization
>> gradually pushed the aboriginal people back primarily into mountainous
>> areas. During the period of Japanese administration, the government
>> distinguished between more- and less-assimilated aborigines, this
>> distinction
>> being correlated with lowland vs. mountain residence. More recently, the
>> government of Taiwan has given official recognition to the "mountain
>> people" (this is the term I have heard Taiwanese people use in Chinese)
>> but not to the lowland people. This is significant because, after a long
>> period of promoting "Mandarin" Chinese at the expense of all other
>> languages,
>> some years ago the government of Taiwan decided to recognize the role of
>> Taiwanese (the Southern Min dialect spoken by most Chinese residents of
>> Taiwan prior to 1948), Hakka (another Chinese dialect), and the aboriginal
>> languages, and in particular to promote the retention and revitalization
>> of the aboriginal languages. The lowland peoples do not benefit from this
>> as they are not recognized as aboriginal.
>>
>> So, the present issue is not one of those sticky issues of how best
>> to maintain, revitalize, or document a language, but the much simpler
>> political issue of whether the government will recognize the aboriginal
>> status of lowland people.
>>
>> Bill
>
>
>
> --
> Margaret Florey
> Margaret.Florey at gmail.com
> Ph: +61 (0)4 3186-3727 (mob.)
>