General information on individual languages

Ethnologue

The Ethnologue, produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, is a catalogue of more than 6,700 languages spoken in 228 countries.
Its Name Index lists over 39,000 language names, dialect names, and alternate names.
There is a printed copy of the 13th edition in the Barr Smith Library's Reference collection at call number 409 G862e.

The Rosetta Project

Aims to build a near permanent archive of 1,000 languages. "Fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no significant documentation." This site archives over 1,200 language samples for preservation across millennia (search by language, language family, or country). Each language is archived according to seven components deemed useful for future linguistic archaeologists. Visitors familiar with uncataloged languages may submit text contributions for inclusion. Eventually, the language archive will be micro-etched on a nickel disk capable of holding over 300,000 pages per three inch disk. The disks will be widely distributed for future scholarship.

Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing

Information collected by UNESCO on a large number of endangered languages in all parts of the world.

Australian Aboriginal languages

FATSIL

The website of the Federation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages, the national body for community based Indigenous language programs in Australia. It includes information on Australian Indigenous languages, Language Centres and Research articles from the FATSIL Newsletter

Aboriginal Languages of Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages

This site has annotated links to over 130 resources for about 40 languages.
Arrangement is by information type including contacts, dictionaries, word lists, texts, papers, songs, sounds, etc., by language name or by state.
Part of the WWW Virtual Library.

Indigenous learners and language

'Improving the educational outcomes of indigenous students through a focus on the Aboriginal English/ESL interface.' This website has been developed as part of the ESL Indigenous project by the Australian Council of TESOL Associations.

Kaurna language

Kaurna has been a 'sleeping' language which is now being reclaimed and re-introduced through research, language learning courses and projects like this Kaurna Place Names web site.
Kaurna people have strong feelings about their language. There is now an active Kaurna language planning group called Kaurna Warra Pintyandi (KWP) which is based here at the University of Adelaide.
This project brings together work of the Kaurna Warra Pintyandi language group and the Land Services Group and incorporates historical reference to Teichelmann and Schürmann, Wyatt, Williams, Piesse, Norman Tindale and others.

Catalogue of electronic data files held in ASEDA - the Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies holds computer-based (digital) materials about Australian Indigenous languages in the Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive (ASEDA). ASEDA has materials including dictionaries, grammars, teaching materials, and represents about 300 languages. ASEDA offers a free service of secure storage, maintenance, and distribution of electronic texts relating to these languages.
The Archive is available to language community members and to researchers in the field of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Availability of items is subject to depositors' access conditions. This catalogue describes items held by ASEDA.

Australian Institute of Australian and Torres Straits Islander Studies (AIATSI) Library

The AIATSIS Library holds the most comprehensive collection of print materials on Australian Indigenous studies in the world and holds print materials in all formats. These include manuscript materials, serials, language materials, books, rare books, and the records of organisations, art catalogues, newspapers and newspaper clippings, maps, posters and kits, microforms and CD ROMS.
Mura® (the AIATSIS online catalogue) includes bibliographic details of all Library materials. Searching the catalogue ahead of a visit to the Library will make the best use of your time.
Note that the AIATSIS Library is open to the public but does not lend books to individuals.

Australian Aboriginal Language Material from the Flint Papers

For each language, readers can access background information about the language and its speakers, and a bibliography of other sources. For some languages there are photographs of people and places associated with the language. A table of sounds and orthographic symbols, and a brief grammatical sketch are, where possible, also given. We have also included information about the people who provided the language material, and about the circumstances in which the data was collected.
The material is drawn from the recordings and linguistic notes taken by Elwyn Flint, a University of Queensland researcher who conducted extensive language surveys throughout Queensland in the 1960s.
There are very detailed studies, with sound clips, of two Aboriginal languages: Yanyula and Garawa.

OZBIB

An Australian linguistic bibliography (printed) of Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait Islands by Lois Carrington and Geraldine Triffitt.
Published by the Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University in 1999.
Shelved in the Barr Smith Library Reference collection at call number 499.15016 C318o.

Australian National Dictionary

First published in 1988, The Australian National Dictionary was the first comprehensive, historically based record of the 10,000 words and idioms that make up the Australian contribution to the English language. Each entry provides its own fascinating insight into Australia's rich and diverse linguistic heritage.
It is a dictionary of Australianisms - those words and meanings of words which originated in Australia, which have greater currency here than elsewhere, or which have a special significance in Australian history. It records the historical development of Australian words and phrases from their earliest use to the present day, providing evidence of this history in some 60,000 dated and referenced quotations drawn from more than 9000 Australian sources.

The Barr Smith Library's Special Collections is playing a valuable part in making available significant research materials on Australian Aboriginal language and culture that have become difficult to obtain.
Texts from our collections are being scanned and presented as fully text-searchable Adobe .pdf files.
The first text to be made available in this way is The Native tribes of South Australia ... with an introductory chapter by J.D. Woods (1879), and others will follow.
Links to the scanned texts and details of the project are on the South Australian History and Exploration and Aboriginal Language & Culture web page.

A useful guide to local resource is my colleague, Helen Attar's Aboriginal Studies : a guide to library resources, especially the languages section.

Pidgins and Creoles

Pidgin and Creole languages glossary

A very useful glossary of terms related to the study of pidgin and creole languages from the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages.

Pidgin/English Dictionary

Pidgin as spoken in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. List compiled by Terry D. Barhorst and Sylvia O'Dell-Barhorst.

Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics

The Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics is organised in the interest of the academic community and not for profit. Its object is the study of pidgin and creole languages world wide, together with other languages or dialects of other languages influencing them or influenced by them.

Pidgins and Creoles Archives

A distribution point for research papers on Pidgins and Creoles hosted by the University of Siegen, Germany. Posting in PCA is open to all who wish to disseminate their work on Pidgins, Creoles, and other contact languages. You can upload your own papers or download other people's papers.

A Glossary of Lingua Franca, 4th edition

The original Lingua Franca (the 'Frankish Tongue') was a pidgin or trade language used by merchants, who traded in the Levant and then later along the Barbary Coast. It contains elements of Italian with French, Greek, Arabic, and Spanish. It is the oldest pidgin known, with written records from the latter part of the 14th century.
Placed in the public domain by Alan D. Corré.
(Thanks to Michael Quinion's wonderful World Wide Words newsletter for this information.)

Tok Pisin

Tok Pisin, a variety of Melanesian Pidgin, is one of the three national languages of Papua New Guinea. It is the most widely used language in the country, along with English and Motu.

Tok Pisin

Contains sections on background (history, current use and attitudes), vocabulary, sounds and grammar. By Jeff Siegel at the University of New England.

Robert Eklund's Tok Pisin Page

Contains: A (very) short introduction to Tok Pisin; A cute ditty in Tok Pisin; A sample of authentic conversation in Tok Pisin; A comic; Tok Pisin Speech Synthesis; A machine translation sample.

Tok Pisin dictionary

The language as spoken in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. List compiled by Terry D. Barhorst and Sylvia O'Dell-Barhorst.

Radio Australia's Tok Pisin page

An excellent learning resource with coverage of current affairs, news and even sport.

Bibliography

A very comprehensive and usefully annotated bibliography of Melanesian Pidgin English dictionaries, phrase books and study guides, compiled by Thomas H. Slone.

Tetum language

Sebastião Aparicio da Silva Project

One of the most useful sources for information on the Tetum language is the Sebastião Aparicio da Silva Project for the Protection and Promotion of East Timorese Languages (Directors: Dr Geoffrey Hull and Dr Lance Eccles).
Dr. Hull's 'The languages of East Timor: some basic facts' is an excellent summary paper, as is his 'Current Language Issues in East Timor' which is the text of a public lecture given here at the University of Adelaide on 29 March 2000.

Tetum

An excellent page from the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Has general information, a vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, etc.

Tetum/Tetun

This website has been designed to enable you to learn something about one variety of the language, the creolised variety of Tetun called Dili Tetun. It starts with a short story about life in East Timor, in Tetun, alongside an English translation and proceeds to give background information on pronunciation, grammar and so on.

National Institute of Linguistics, National University of East Timor

Lots of links to Tetum language resources as well as pdf documents on the language and vocabularies.

Learn Tetum

Tetum lessons from Timorlink - a non profit volunteer organisation which was established in 2001 to support the many groups in East Timor that do not directly benefit from international aid. Timorlink aims to help Australians participate directly in helping Timorese community groups help themselves.

East Timor Action Network/U.S.

The East Timor Action Network/U.S. supports genuine self-determination and human rights for the people of East Timor in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1960 United Nations General Assembly Resolution on Decolonization, and Security Council and General Assembly resolutions on East Timor.
ETAN/U.S. maintains a comprehensive list of websites with information on East Timor.

Selected postings from east-timor

east-timor is a list server echo of a conference (newsgroup) called reg.easttimor which originates from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) member networks (PeaceNet, GreenNet, Pegasus, etc.). Reports and translations from wire services and the Indonesian, Portuguese, Australian, British, U.S. and Irish press also regularly appear there, as well as official documents and statements from the U.N., national governments, and other sources.

Australian regionalisms

Australian Word Map

Word Map is mapping Australian regionalisms - words, phrases or expressions used by particular language communities. You are encouraged to interact with and contribute to a rich, interesting and ever-increasing collection. A co-production between ABC Online and the publishers of the Macquarie dictionary.
If you are interested in this topic, have a look at issues of the journal Australian style: issues in Australian style and the use of English in Australia. We have a complete set of the paper copy in the Barr Smith Library from volume 1-15, 1992-2007, at call number 421.5205 A938. Later issues of Australian style (and a growing number of back issues) are available online.

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This page was created and is maintained by Alan Keig