Applicative constructions are found in a number of the Indigenous languages spoken in Australia, though they do not exist in the majority of languages for which reliable morpho-syntactic data is available.1 Several typological patterns can be found, suggesting a basic division between comitative-locative constructions, and benefactivemalefactive constructions. These are encoded morphologically by prefixation in some languages, and by suffixation in others. In a large number of languages with applicatives, there is a relationship with causative constructions; in some a single affix serves as both applicative and causative depending on the semantic nature of the verb to which it is affixed. In some languages, applicatives only occur with intransitive base verbs. For languages where applicatives occur to transitive base verbs there are two types: (a) in those with ditransitive base verbs, applicative constructions show the applied element as a direct argument of the applied verb; (b) in those without ditransitive base verbs, antipassive constructions must be applied to the base verb before applicatives can be added, with an argument of the base transitive verb appearing in a non-argument role in the resulting applicative. Applicative lookalike constructions are found in a few languages.

Linguistic fieldwork has seen a progression of frameworksof research since the 1960s, from an ethical model ('fieldwork on'), to advocacy ('fieldwork for'), to collaboration ('fieldwork with'), to empowerment ('fieldwork by') (Cameron et al. 1992, Grinevald 2003, 2007, Grinevald & Bert 2011). Each of these impacts onrelationships to the people researchers work with and the methods they use in the field. In addition, meta-documentation (documentation of the research itself) has emerged as an area of concern to fieldworkers and in need of elaboration and practice (Austin 2013). In this paper, I give a personal account of the models and methods I have used over 50 years of engagement with the Diyari (Dieri) Aboriginal community in South Australia (Austin 2014) as a form of reflexive meta-documentation in linguistic field-based research.

This paper is an annotated and commented transcription of a conversation in the Menumeni variety of Sasak, an Austronesian language spoken throughout the island of Lombok, Nusa Tenggara Barat, eastern Indonesia. It was audio-recorded in the capital, Mataram, on 10th September 2001. The speakers are Hajji Sukri (SK), and his nephew Yon Mahyuni (YM). Both speakers originate from the Nuse hamlet of Ganti village in south-central Lombok, and are bilingual in the national language Bahasa Indonesia (BI), as well as Sasak; at the time SK was a subsistence farmer while YM was my PhD student at the University of Melbourne (he is now professor at Universitas Mataram) and spoke English fluently. The speakers had known each other since childhood, and had known the author since 1997. This text was recorded as an instance of informal conversation and is number 072 in my Sasak corpus; it was transcribed, analysed, and translated into English by me in collaboration with Yon Mahyuni.(1) Sasak is the majority language of Lombok (Austin 2003). It shows wide regional and social variation, and although speakers have an ideology that there are five ethnolinguistically labelled dialects (named after the shiboleths for 'like that-like this') there are many more variants that are differentiated lexically, morpho-syntactically, and syntactically, showing great diversity in their pronominal clitics (Austin 2004), verb alternations (Austin 2001, 2012), aspect-mood-evidentiality encoding (Austin 2013), and locational deictic systems (Austin 2008, Sutarman 2010). In the discussion below we comment at various points on the distinctive characteristics of Ganti Menu-Meni Sasak. Sasak also has a pervasive system of speech levels expressed through lexical choice, distinguishing high-middle-low forms that reflect speaker-addressee relationships as well as humble-honorific forms that express speaker-referent relationships (Nothofer 2000, Austin 2015, Austin & Nothofer 2012, Nothofer 2016). This text is primarily in low level Sasak, but does show a number of uses of high level forms to express politeness, especially by YM to the older SK. These are noted in the comments below.

A great deal of work over the past 25 years on documentation, description, and revitalisation of minoritised languages, especially those categorised as endangered languages, has centered around corpus creation and archiving. In this paper, I discuss what can be involved in such work, both for newly collected materials as well as historically existing ones (legacy corpora'), and critically examine some of the issues and challenges involved in such work. Examples are presented from a range of sources, including the author's work on value-adding in several legacy projects involving Australian Indigenous languages.

One of the main responses of academia to language endangerment has been the development of the sub-field of Language Documentation (LD, also called Documentary Linguistics). Himmelmann (1998: 161) presented its main goal as ‘to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community’ Himmelmann (2006: v) restated this as a focus on ‘the methods, tools, and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language or one of its varieties’. This approach emphasizes transparency and multifunctionality, as well as ethical engagement with a wide range of stakeholders, including speech community members. As Himmelmann (1998: 161) also pointed out, LD ‘differs fundamentally from... language description [which] aims at the record of a language... as a system of abstract elements, constructions, and rules.’ The reawakened interest in language practices in context can be traced to the Ethnography of Communication pioneered by Hymes (1964), Ethnopoetics and the study of verbal art developed by Tedlock (1983) and Hymes (1981), and the discourse-based approach of Sherzer (1987), who argues for a change in focus to contextualized language in use rather than fixed objects with grammatical structure. Language Documentation is generally understood as the creation of a corpus of archivable audio, video and textual recordings, and translating and annotating them, paying attention to relevant contextual metadata (Austin 2013). The corpus and analysis should be available and accessible to a wide range of users. These goals have been facilitated by advances in information and communication technologies and digital media, and by large infusions of funding, e.g. from the Volkswagen-Stiftung, the Arcadia Fund and the Documenting Endangered Languages Programme. Both of these developments have influenced the methodologies and directions of research.

In the last decade of the 20th century a new field of language research emerged that has come to be known as ‘language documentation’ or ‘documentary linguistics’ (Himmelmann 1998, 2002, 2006; Lehmann 2001; Austin 2010; Grenoble 2010; Woodbury 2003, 2011). In this paper we explore how it was defined in the seminal work of Himmelmann (1998) and others, including what were presented as significant characteristics that distinguished language documentation from language description, and how the field has changed and evolved over the past 20 years. A focus on best practices, standards, tools and models for documentary corpora appeared in the early years, which led later to more critical discussions of the goals and methods of language documentation. The paper examines some current developments, including new approaches to language archiving, and suggests that there are opportunities for language documentation to adopt a more socially-engaged approach to languages and linguistic research, including better engagement with language revitalisation. There are also opportunities to work towards addressing what is currently a language documentation output gap through experimentation with new genres and innovations in writing and publication.

Over the few past centuries, and the last 65 years in particular, there has been a tremendous reduction in global linguistic diversity, as people abandon minority language varieties and switch to larger and what they perceive to be more economically, socially and politically powerful regional or national languages. In addition, governments have been promoting standardised official languages for use in schooling, media and bureaucracy, often under a rubric of linguistic unity supporting national unity. The last two decades have seen a significant increase in interest in minority languages and language shift, endangerment and loss, in academia and among language speakers and the wider public. There has also been growing interest from anthropological linguists and sociolinguists in the study of language ideologies and beliefs about languages. This volume brings together chapters on theoretical and practical issues in these two areas, especially the views of linguists and communities about support and revitalisation of endangered languages. The chapters thus go straight to the heart of ideological bases of reactions to language endangerment among those most closely involved, drawing their discussions from case studies of how language ideologies and beliefs affect language practices (and vice versa). Most of the authors conduct collaborative community-based research and take a reflective engagement stance to investigate (potential) clashes in ideological perspectives. This is one of the key theoretical and practical issues in research on endangered languages, and has important implications for language documentation, support and revitalisation, as well as language policy at local, national and international levels.

1 The Sasak people of Lombok in eastern Indonesia have a writing tradition using an alphabetic script called Aksara Sasak 2 that appears to have been borrowed from their western neighbours the Balinese, and also influenced by Javanese writing traditions. Originally used for inscribing texts on the dried leaves of the lontar palm (Borassus flabellifer), a cultural tradition also shared with their western neighbours, Aksara Sasak has been used for writing on paper, starting in the 1970s. In 1994 a school book for teaching Aksara Sasak at primary school grade 4 was published (Sofii and Parman 1994) however it seems to have been little used and is now out of print. Knowledge of the script is today essentially restricted to those very few Sasaks who are interested in studying the lontar writings. There is some iconic use of Aksara Sasak, however the writing system and scribal practice can be described as endangered. Compared to research on Balinese and Javanese writing and literary traditions (Rubinstein 2000, Brandes 1901-1926, Creese 1999, McDonald 1986, among others), there has been very little work done on Sasak literacy (with the exceptions of van der Meij 1996, Achadiati et. al. 1999), and virtually nothing has been published about the alphabet itself, or its use in contemporary Sasak society. This paper is a first, and incomplete, report on Sasak writing and literary traditions.

The island of Lombok, eastern Indonesia, is linguistically and culturally complex, with several languages being used there, including Sasak, Balinese, Kawi (a form of early modern Javanese) and Indonesian. Sasak shows wide geographical and social variation, with a system of speech levels, apparently borrowed from its western neighbours. The Sasaks also have a literary tradition of writing manuscripts on palm leaves (lòntar) in a manner similar to that of the Balinese (Rubinstein 2000, Creese 1999), and historically, the Javanese. Lombok today remains one of only a handful of places in Indonesia where reading lòntar (called in Sasak, pepaòsan) continues to be practised, however even there the number of people who are able to read and interpret the texts is rapidly diminishing. In this paper I outline the nature of the Sasak literary materials (see also Marrison 1999, 2000, Van der Meij 1996, 2002), how reading is taught, the nature of reading performances, and the role of this genre within contemporary Sasak culture. This work results from fieldwork undertaken in two locations on Lombok, and studies I have carried out with some of the few younger specialists who is able to perform lòntar reading. The paper concludes with discussion of some challenges for language documentation theory and practice (Himmelmann 2002, Woodbury 2011) that arise in the process of recording and analyzing 1 Research on Sasak has been supported at various times by the Australian Research Council, the School of Oriental and African Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. I am grateful to Sasak colleagues Nur Ahmadi, Lalu Dasmara, Ispan Junaidi, Yon Mahyuni, Syahdan, Sudirman and Herman Suheri for teaching me Sasak, and to Sudirman and the people of Penujak, especially Amaq Nurul, for inviting me to observe a pepaòsan there in August 2002. Thanks are also due to Wiwik Widarti for organising a pepaòsan performance in Lenek village, east Lombok in July 2012. This paper was written while I was on research leave from SOAS (January to March 2013) and held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Australian National Dictionary Centre, Australian National University, Australia; my thanks to Sarah Ogilvie, Amanda Laugesen, and Jane Simpson for sponsoring my visit, and to David Nathan for comments on an earlier draft. Earlier versions of material in sections 2-5 was published in Austin 2010; it has been updated and expanded following further fieldwork and research. Material in section 6 is entirely new. I alone am responsible for any errors or misunderstandings in this paper.

The history of indigenous Aboriginal languages in eastern Australia for the 200 years following first European settlement in 1788 has been one of loss and extinction. By 1988 it appears that none of the approximately 70 languages originally spoken in what is now New South Wales and Victoria had fully fluent speakers who had acquired them as a first language as children. However, the last 25 years have seen the development of language revitalization projects in a number of communities across this region that have achieved remarkable outcomes, and have introduced Aboriginal languages into schools and other domains. This chapter is an exploration of the social, cultural, political, and attitudinal factors that relate to these developments, drawing on a case study of Gamilaraay-Yuwaalaraay from north-west New South Wales. The importance of local, regional, and national politics is also explored.

Language documentation emerged as a new sub-field of linguistics in 1995 and has developed and expanded over the past 20 years. In this paper we outline the defining characteristics of language documentation as presented in the late 1990s and discuss some of the changes in the field that have occurred since. These include a move away from concern for best practices, standards and tools to a more critical and reflexive approach that highlights diversity and flexibility of individual documentation projects in their social, cultural and political contexts, as well as the need for greater attention to goals and outcomes. There have also been developments in archiving that build upon social networking models linking people to each other, rather than seeing documentation as being primarily about ‘data’ and ‘resources’.

La lingua diyari era parlata tradizionalmente nell’estremo nord dello stato della South Australia, ed ha una storia interessante e complessa nota fin dal 1860, quando venne conosciuta per la prima volta da non aborigeni. Fu utilizzata per attività missionarie luterane dal 1867 al 1914, che portarono allo sviluppo di un suo uso scritto ed alla produzione di testi redatti da parlanti nativi. Ma la sua vitalità venne gravemente colpita dalla chiusura della missione nel 1914. La ricerca linguistica è iniziata nel 1960, e questa lingua è relativamente ben documentata con testi e registrazioni audio. Dal 1990 attività sociali e culturali della comunità hanno prodotto un interesse crescente per il diyari, e una serie di iniziative miranti alla sua rivitalizzazione sono state avviate a partire dal 2008. Diversamente da quanto scritto da alcuni, questa lingua non è estinta, ed ha attualmente diversi parlanti che la parlano con diversi gradi di competenza. Un attivo gruppo di componenti della comunità diyari nutre un forte interesse per la sua conservazione e la sua ripresa.

It is widely known that the phonological systems of Australian Aboriginal languages show many similarities right across the continent. One characteristic of these systems that has been often reported is the lack in most languages of a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless stops. This paper is an investigation of the occurrence of such a contrast in a number of widely scattered languages. It will be shown that, in a number of instances, phonological voicing is a recent historical development in the languages which have it, and the contrast has been subject to linguistic diffusion in one of the areas where it is found. Certain generalisations about the types of phonological voicing contrasts that tend to be found in Australia are also advanced.*