- Title
- Applying multilingual knowledge to decpiher an historical song of change
- Creator
- Kelly, Raymond; Harkins, Jean
- Relation
- Recirculating Songs: Revitalising the singing practices of Indigenous Australia p. 172-186
- Relation
- https://hunterpress.bigcartel.com/product/recirculating-songs-revitalising-the-singing-practices-of-indigenous-australia
- Publisher
- Hunter Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- Aboriginal songs from the Mid North Coast of New South Wales ha ve been audio recorded since the 1930s, following on from previous written accounts of songs and verse by Threlkeld (n.d. [1820s?]) and others. Here we examine a song recorded at Armidale, in the 1960s, preserved in the AIATSIS sound archive, but not hitherto transcribed and analysed. Although it contains only six lines, the complex interplay of words and phrases from traditional language (primarily Thangatti~Dhanggati) and Aboriginal English (with some NSW Pidgin), had made it difficult for previous researchers to ascertain the meaning even at the surface level. By employing a combination of local cultural background knowledge and Indigenous-led linguistic investigation, we aim to: explore some of the richness of the song's cultural meaning from an Indigenous perspective ; show how the features of the song connect with a contemporary understanding, as a multilingual and multicultural welcome to youngsters of an age to commence formal education ; argue that the potential for re-evaluating, re-analysing and re valuing such cultural material is worth facing the many analytical challenges it presents. By tracing relationships of structure and meaning, we can discern many of the elements that open up such understandings for 'enculturated listeners' (Turpin and Stebbins 2010:2). The patterned code-switching between language varieties further illustrates features of multilingual discourse at the crossroads of intergenerational language shift.
- Subject
- Aboriginal song; sound archives; transcription; multilingualism; language contact; Dhanggati; south-eastern Australia; NSW Pidgin; Aboriginal English
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1389878
- Identifier
- uon:32943
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780994586315
- Language
- eng
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