Among the vast number of things children need to learn about language is how to appropriately refer to other people. One way to do this is to use kinship terms—words like ‘great-grandmother’, ‘brother-in-law’, or ‘sister’. The particular set of kinterms a child needs t...

Two Language Snapshots on Jaru and Gija have just been published in Language Documentation and Description:

de Dear, Caroline, Francesco Possemato & Joe Blythe. Gija (East Kimberley, Western Australia) – Language Snapshot. Language Documentation and Description 17. 134–...

From late July to early September, Josh spent six weeks in Yaruman (WA) to expand our corpus of casual conversation in Jaru and to continue working on transcriptions. It was great to catch up with everyone involved in the Jaru part of the project. The field trip includ...

Ilana recently spent two weeks (July 22-Aug3) in Borroloola to (finally) begin recording new Garrwa conversations. She met up with Glenn Wightman of the NT Department of the Environment and Natural resources to work on a book of Garrwa plant and animal knowledge with M...

Lesley and Rod visited Kununurra and Wyndham between 17-26 May in our second fieldtrip for the Kimberley English sub-project – following up from the trip by Lesley and Joe in July 2018. We gave a talk on “Spatial reference and locational pointing in Murrinhpatha, Gija,...

CIARA had its first conference outing for 2019 at the Australian Languages Workshop (March 15-17) in Marysville, Victoria. Lesley presented the latest version of our analysis of pointing in Murrinhpatha, Gija and non-Indigenous Australian English conversations.

Pointing...

From mid-September to mid-November 2018, Josh had the pleasure of spending two months in Yaruman (Ringer Soak) where he continued recording Jaru and Kriol conversations and transcribing them with the help of some of the Jaru speakers. The Birlirr Ngawiyiwu Primary Scho...

Tools of engagement: selecting a next speaker in Australian Aboriginal multiparty conversations

Joe Blythe, Rod Gardner, Ilana Mushin, Lesley Stirling (2018) Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(2), 145-170. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2018.1449441

T...

In June and July 2018 Joe Blythe and Lesley Stirling joined forces for the first of the project’s field trips in the east Kimberley region of WA. While in Kununurra, Joe gave a talk about the CIARA project at the Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centr...

The CIARA blog is the public face of the project Conversational Interaction in Aboriginal and Remote Australia. We will here be providing updates about project developments, research findings, field reports, as well as links to recent publications and presentations etc...