Past Programs
Language and Linguistics - 2008
2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003
Call for a national Indigenous languages policy
08/11/2008
Despite Australian Indigenous languages being among the most endangered in the world, their use in education facilities is becoming evermore restricted, with the focus instead on schools providing better English-language skills to Indigenous students.
But there is also a groundswell calling for a national Indigenous languages policy, as well as for the promotion of bilingual or 'two-way' education in schools, using Indigenous languages as well as English.
Italian Language in the World Week
25/10/2008
For the 8th annual Italian Language in the World Week, the journalist and author Beppe Severgnini explains this year's theme of the piazza, a particular kind of gathering place that has been described as 'the concrete representation of language'.
I go, like, 'Whatever!'
20/09/2008
The words 'like' and 'go', when classed as 'new quotatives', have linguistic functions way beyond their traditional meanings. And this phenomenon is not confined to English; but is used in many other languages.
Indigenous Literacy Day
30/08/2008
On Indigenous Literacy Day, 3 September this year, Australian booksellers and publishers, writers, libraries and schools will join together to raise awareness and resources to promote literacy in English in remote Indigenous communities.
Romani: a stateless language
23/08/2008
Between three and five million people speak Romani, the language spoken by the Rom people, yet it originated in India. Professor Yaron Matras explains how this Indic language is thought to have become so widespread in Europe.
Aboriginal loanwords in Australian English: Lost and found
09/08/2008
Borrowings from Aboriginal languages into Australian English have not been so numerous. Those on record total around 400, most of which relate to the bush environment.
Aboriginal names for flora and fauna were also sometimes paraphrased away by English substitutes, so that the echidna became the 'native hedgehog' and the quoll the 'native cat'. The Aboriginal loanword was consigned to a kind of linguistic twilight, only to be reclaimed when the animal was close to extinction.
Another loanword with a shadowy existence is 'bogan', early enshrined in proper names and rural idioms but which is now part of contemporary Australian vernacular.
Linguistic typology
02/08/2008
The polyglot linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald describes the study of linguistic typology: classifying how languages are structured and comparing them to ascertain recurrent patterns and variations.
This program was first broadcast on 24/5/2008.
Me and other languages
26/07/2008
Marking the United Nations-declared International Year of Languages, as well as its goal to preserve and promote linguistic diversity, the linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald tells the story of her own multilingualism, which reflects the story of a country that no longer exists.
This program was first broadcast on 9/2/2008.
Saying 'sorry' and being sorry
19/07/2008
The word, 'sorry', has different meanings in Australian English and Aboriginal English. So what did Prime Minister Rudd's historic apology, made earlier this year, actually signify for the Indigenous Australians to whom it was offered?
Learning Adnyamathanha language
12/07/2008
There are only some twenty people still fluent in the Adnyamathanya language of the Indigenous people of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. But they are teaching many others, passing on their cultural heritage to all who are willing to learn.
(This year's NAIDOC Week is being celebrated 6-13 July. NAIDOC celebrates the survival of Indigenous culture and the Indigenous contribution to modern Australia.)
Join the British Army and learn to read
05/07/2008
Some of those joining up to the British Army these days have less than adequate literacy skills, some as low as those normally expected of five- to seven-year-olds. So it falls to basic recruit training to bring them up to the literacy levels of nine- to 11-year-olds required in order to pass out.
Jill Kitson interviews Martin Rose, Basic Skills Development Officer for the British Army, about how the Army succeeds after schools have failed.
The economic costs of spelling
28/06/2008
English-language countries have higher rates of dyslexic failure in literacy than those where languages have more consistent spelling. That's just one of the many costs of the unnecessary difficulties in English spelling which the UK Spelling Society tried to quantify at its centenary conference earlier this month.
Who's a lesbian?
14/06/2008
On the case heard last week, in a court in Athens, about the word 'lesbian', in which the plaintiffs are claiming that the prerogative to the term belongs to the inhabitants of the island of Lesbos. They are seeking for a ban to be placed on its use by the gay organisation, the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece.
'Good American Speech' comes from Melbourne
07/06/2008
How an Australian invented 'Good American Speech' in the golden age of Hollywood. The historian Desley Deacon tells Jill Kitson about Australia's own Henry Higgins.
Spelling still not simple
31/05/2008
The Simplified Spelling Society is celebrating its centenary but without any success at reforming the complexities of written English. Why not?
Linguistic typology
24/05/2008
The polyglot linguist, Alexandra Aikhenvald, describes linguistic typology: classifying how languages are structured and comparing them to ascertain recurrent patterns and variations.
That last, posthumous, goodbye
10/05/2008
Dealing with the death of someone close is one of life's biggest challenges. Having to find the words for a eulogy, and the emotional strength to present it publicly, can be almost as confronting, as Mark Wakely explores in his new book, Sweet Sorrow: A Beginner's Guide to Death.
Unified English Braille
19/04/2008
The fourth general assembly of the International Council on English Braille has just been held in Melbourne, to discuss the ongoing significance of braille for blind, and other visually-impaired people, in the ever-changing media-rich and increasingly digitally-based environment of our world today.
William Jolley, who attended, tells about how braille is his literacy bedrock, as well as why the relatively new code of Unified English Braille can improve braille communication in so many ways.
Codes for kids
05/04/2008
Ursula Dubosarsky's first non-fiction publication is a kids' book about the English language, featuring such linguistic codes as pangrams and anagrams, palindromes and rebuses, lipograms and Tom Swifties too!
Grammar and guns
29/03/2008
A case just heard in the US Supreme Court, challenging Washington DC's ban on handguns, seeks an interpretation of the language of the Second Amendment of the American Constitution as a guarantee of the right to bear arms.
Please note: this program was first broadcast on 14 December 2002.
Plain speak
15/03/2008
Pennsylvania German is a language that came about when a number of regional varieties of German were blended in the communities of immigrant Anabaptists who went to live in American Pennsylvania during the 17th century.
Interestingly, some of the very features that would have dire consequences for other minority languages -- such as its lowly status -- have the opposite impact on Pennsylvania German.
Chinglish
01/03/2008
The German Sinologist Oliver Lutz Radtke has a made a study of Chinglish, the name given to the expression of English words in a peculiarly Chinese way that many assume is just 'wrong' English.
Spoken Israeli Hebrew
23/02/2008
Hebrew is the only language that has died out and then been revived, to become the lingua franca of all the Jews who'd come from elsewhere, to live in British-mandated Palestine after World War 1, and then the spoken native language of the generation growing up in the Jewish community in Palestine in the 1920s and '30s.
Mother tongue, father tongue
16/02/2008
A keen proponent of bilingualism, Michael Clyne grew up with two languages, one of which -- German -- became the language he gave his daughter, to become her father tongue.
Me and other languages
09/02/2008
Marking the United Nations-declared International Year of Languages, as well as its goal to preserve and promote linguistic diversity, the linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald tells the story of her own multilingualism, which reflects the story of a country that no longer exists.
Frisson of the new
02/02/2008
The new year is when the words of the year for last year are announced. As a phenomenon they even have their own new word, the acronym WOTY.
While the Americans as well as the Dutch announced their best and favourite WOTYs for 2007 weeks ago, the Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year Committee announced its winning new word of the year this week and it is 'pod-slurping'.
The People's Choice goes to 'password fatique', a term that also gets a mention in the linguist Ruth Wajnryb's ruminations on neologisms.
Whose English is it, anyway?
19/01/2008
On the colonial, postcolonial and now global lives of the English language - and in particular, how it has evolved in some Asian countries - as well as how the English literary tradition has been adapted over time to express ideas that are not, simply, English.
First broadcast 25/8/2008.
Review of new Collins Australian Dictionary
12/01/2008
With a new, the 9th, edition of the Collins Australian Dictionary published last August, how does it compare with others in the market and what more does it offer than previous versions?
This program was first broadcast on 11/8/2007.
Frequent coarse language
05/01/2008
Keith Allan and Kate Burridge describe how we censor our own language in order to negotiate taboo topics.
First broadcast on 8/9/2007.
