Skip to main content

Day 4: Guguu Yimithirr, Gaelige, Mazatecan, Zapotecan and Cree

Now I am really starting to get into the swing of things.  I spent the early morning listening to radioNZ to hear the results of the coaltion talks announced, and then the press conferences with the new prime minister. Wunderbar!

My work today mainly focused on five bilingual books (I am focussing on a subset of these while I find more multilingual ones) which support indigenous languages under threat (to varying degrees). My set of books have the following language combinations: English/Guguu Yimithirr (From Cape Hope in Far North Queensland); Gaelige/English (from Ireland); Spanish/ Mazatecan and Spanish/Zapotecan (from Mexico); English/Cree (from Canada). It is fascinating to examine how the languages are presented in each book, and then to research the revitalization efforts from each country regarding the indigenous languages represented. It seems clear to me that when you have two languages in a book and one of them is threatened then that is the language that should be given prime place on the page, but of course this is not always the case, and I am enjoying thinking about why. I think the question of who the books are meant for is important, and the answer to this question is not at all clear. Sometimes I wonder if the production of a book featuring an indigenous language is a symbolic act, and this means that the design of the book is not always maximized in favour of the language needing the most support. I’m still pondering this one.


After work, I walked with Nina from Norway (nice alliteration- and of course I am Nicola from New Zealand) to the closest big station in Pasing. This a relatively bug hub, and I was able to find an Aldi supermarket to do some budget shoppingJ The walk to and from the station follows the Wurm river and is very pleasant at the moment with the autumn colours and the warm sunshine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 1 at Schloss Blutenberg

After the long (but comfortable- I can recommend Qatar Airways) flight here, today has seemed rather surreal. I arrived at my accommodation by about 3pm yesterday (Sunday) after a very straightforward train ride and then short taxi drive from Munich Airport. It was a stunning and warm autumn day, and the place I am staying at is right beside a very fast flowing little river called the Wurm (with an umlaut over the ‘u’). There are lots of established autumn coloured trees and many people from the very young to the very old out on the bike path beside the river. My landlady is currently out of the country, but another of her tenants met me and gave me some lunch and dinner as no shops are open on a Sunday in this part of town. I stayed awake as long as I could before falling into a heavy sleep around 8pm, and then woke at a not too indecent hour today. I got up quite early and popped into a local bakery and vege shop to stock up on some food, and then headed into Schloss Blutenberg
1 comment
Read more

Day 2: The Research begins

Today was another warm autumn day, a pleasure to walk to work in. I arrived at 9.30 and started looking through the box of books I ordered through the IJB catalogue before I arrived. It is very difficult searching for books which are multilingual as this is not a tag in the search criteria. The books found were a mixture of quite a few bilingual Japanese/English books, and a selection of books featuring English and a minority language such as Cree, Spanish, Inuktituk and Greenlandic. There were also three picturebooks featuring characters discussing issues relating to being bilingual, for example in Yoko Writes her Name  (Rosemary Wells, 2008),   Yoko can write her name in Japanese and English. Her classmates respond with jealousy and in the process draw on several common prejudices around bilingualism. The search also did   manage to identify 5 picturebooks with between 3 and 5 languages in them, and I spent most of the day really enjoying analysing the linguistic landscape of t
1 comment
Read more

Day 17: Attitudes to language

A few more books have come up from the stacks, and I have enjoyed a day back analysing some picturebooks, this time relating to attitudes to language. One I’d like to share with you is Yoko Writes her Name (Wells, 2008), an anthropomorphic tale of a kitten at kindergarten called Yoko who can write her name and numbers in Japanese. Some of the children in the class make fun of here and tell her she will not graduate from kindergarten, but the teacher, Mrs. Jenkins, decides that the class will have Japanese as a second language, and Yoko helps her classmates learn to write their names in Japanese Katakana script. This story reflects many different attitudes towards bilingualism, and presents many opportunities for children to start to learn to think about what characters in the story may be feeling. At the start of the story Yoko’s mum says she is proud of Yoko for writing her name. The text states “Yoko could write her name perfectly”, and the illustrations show she is writing
Post a Comment
Read more