Towards Aboriginal language revitalisation
Australian Aboriginal languages are critically endangered; therefore, their study and documentation is presently crucial. The EU-funded project TAMEAL studied these languages in terms of how four major grammatical categories interrelate. These categories covertense/ aspect (the speaker's perception on events happening over time), modality and evidentiality (a category conveying the nature of evidence for a given utterance). Nine Australian and European researchers participated in the consortium. Together, they were successful in developing a series of descriptive, experimental, theoretical and formal tools for studying the above categories in Australian Aboriginal languages. Key achievements of TAMEAL comprise the publication of two thematic issues of international journals, the creation of sets of theoretical concepts, a database of videos and the organization of several international workshops. Cross-community research actions were also performed. The findings will be useful for linguistic research, including applied linguistic work with socioeconomic impact such as language revitalisation in areas where Australian languages are still spoken.
Keywords
Aboriginal language, language revitalisation, tense/aspect, modality, evidentiality
