Documenting Sign Languages

Interview with Dr Samantha Rarrick 
Music by Doppel 

In today's episode we find out about Sam's research on Sinasina Sign Language of Papua New Guinea, Hawai'i Sign Language and Kere a spoken Chimbu language. We learn a little bit about language endangerment and language documentation. 

Hosts | Isabella Schulz & Lissara Bergamaschi.
Supervisor | Kelly Shoecraft Lecturer of Applied Linguistics. 
Editor | Raia Pinhati.
Music | Doppel.
Proudly supported by Griffith University, Australia.

Transcript

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Hello everyone, we're here with Sam Rorick, Dr. Sam Rorick, just for uh, Sam is a lecturer here at Griffith University, and she currently teaches courses on linguistics and language endangerment here at Griffith. Her current research focuses on documenting and describing Sina Sina, a sign language, is that right?

That's right. A sign language of Papua New Guinea, and previously she has worked with Kere. I spoke in Chimbu language, in Hawaii, which is a sign language. Um, and you like to take a different approach by helping users of endangered sign languages document their own language through community projects. Is that right?

That is right. Cool. So thank you very much for being here, Sam. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you. And, uh, well, we would like us to tell, uh, Tell us a little bit more about your research, um, I think it's interesting for linguists as well to know about your path, uh, the things that you've done and to, cause they're very inspiring.

So if you could tell a little bit, uh, about your PhD research, where you did it and everything, that would be great. Yeah, I'm actually going to start before that. Oh, even better, even better. And how when I started uni, I was absolutely positive. that I was going to be a physical therapist. And so I started my first year looking at like sports medicine and all sorts of physiology classes which were fine.

But I also had to take exercise classes for credit, and I hated that in a way that I cannot really describe. That didn't occur to you before signing up to physio? I thought it would be fine. I really did. I, at the time, not so much now, enjoyed going to the gym. Yeah. But actually doing it for credit was not a good fit.

Yeah, it seems like a whole... A whole other level of commitment. And it was kind of like, sign in to this class and then go work out with no instructions or support and then sign out. I was like, this is not a good use of my time. And you'd still have to pay for that course, wouldn't you? Yeah. You've got a grade in it and everything.

Well. Yeah. And so at the end of that first semester, really. I was like, I don't want to keep doing this. This doesn't feel like, it's like stimulating in the way that I want it to be. I don't feel like I'm learning like I am in other courses I'm taking on the side for fun, like American Sign Language. Hmm.

And so I thought, I'm not going to take, like, I'm going to stay undecided, choose from positive I'm doing this to, I don't know, something, and just see how it goes for a semester. And then at the end, Think about what I'm excited about, and think about if money was never a concern. If I won the lottery, what would I be studying, and what would I want to do?

And it came back to the thing I was doing as a, quote, hobby, or on the side for fun, which was taking language classes. And so I thought, like, I was familiar with the word linguist. Probably from that movie Atlantis and Milo Thatch. I watch a lot of Disney movies. And thought, I'll take a first year linguistics class and see what happens.

And I loved it. And so I thought, okay, well, I can switch my major to this, and I'll try it, and I'll just keep trying it and keep going until either I don't enjoy it anymore. Or, I'm not good enough, so people tell me I have to stop. And so far, that hasn't happened. That's great. That's so good. So, here we are.

And I think, when I think back of like, who I was at 18, 19, and as I found myself, what I also found is like, I love being at universities. I love being around libraries. I love talking to people who are so much smarter than me every single day. And there's something really wonderful about being the dumbest person in the room.

And that's a feeling that I just keep trying to make sure happens over and over. Is that because you've got the most to learn? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's what led to finishing a bachelor's degree in linguistics. Yeah. And then I thought, okay, well, I'm just going to keep doing this. I applied to a bunch of different schools, and I was rejected for most of them.

Hmm. But I did get into Hawaii, and at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And they actually have a program that specializes in language documentation and conservation. And it just turned out to be one of those things where I ended up where I needed to be. That's great. Is there courses like that across?

Um, the United States, or is this a pretty, um, unique course? It's quite, um, niche. Yeah. It's certainly unique. Um, there are other programs that have kind of, um, focuses on language documentation, language revitalization, but Hawaii was really the first. And so I was working and learning from people who had been doing this for a really long time.

And... If you've taken my Endangered Languages course, shout out to 3205 LHS, then you'll also know that Hawaii is one of the places that language revitalization has been most successful. So it's not just about the people in linguistics, it's the community. It's the people who are in Hawaiian studies who have really been at the forefront of fighting for their language and their culture and their rights for decades.

And so it was just an incredibly valuable experience. And after I... I actually didn't finish my master's before going into Ph. D. Um, I was invited to apply to the Ph. D. early, and so that also kind of cut down on the time that my master's Ph. D. took. But it still gave me the opportunity to take classes and do research and write.

Yeah. So, between transitioning from master's to Ph. D., my supervisor at the time, Dr. Andrea Perez Croker, was looking for someone to go as a research assistant to PNG with her, and I thought, I'll apply. What's the worst that can happen? And I ended up going with her. I also ended up going with another student, Melody Ross, and the three of us went and spent a month in Chimbu Province, well, We were based in Garoka, which is also in the Highlands, but in Eastern Highlands Province.

Um, working on some, a language that Andrea had worked with before, called Kumon. And during that time, she was also like, you should see if anyone's looking for a project here. So, kind of put that out there. Had a project that spectacularly failed. Which is fine. And at the end, basically on the last day of our trip, someone who is a friend of a friend of a friend knew we were there and literally showed up where we were staying and was like, Hey, this is my language.

I'm a speaker. Not many people speak it still. Do you want to work with us? And we're like, yep. And so that man's name is Buffy New Eli, and his language is called Kere or Talkplace Kere. He's a Kere man. Language names in PNG, especially in the Highlands, are often this word Talkplace, which means like the vernacular language of the village, and then ethnonym, so the Kere.

Clan. Speaks, talk, plays, quere. And by talking to Buffy even for a little bit, once we got back to a place where we had internet, we've realized that this language had not even been reported before. And so... Increase the number of languages that linguists know about by one. And we started working with him, and I've actually, as of about now, I've been working with Buffy for 10 years.

Wow, that's a long time. Yeah. And what kind of work have you been doing with him in, with his language? Yeah, so, Buffy is... He's an incredibly talented person who has really diverse interests. And he's one of those people who's just good at anything he tries in a way that's like impressive and like a little bit, like it makes me a little bit jealous.

Yeah. Um, but when we met, when I met Buffy, he already had experience in documentary filmmaking. He's certainly an artist. He does wood carving. He's a musician. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Like, at the time, he had made a recording studio in his house. Wow. And I was like, that's amazing. Wow, wow, wow. As a student in linguistics, that's amazing.

About as lucky as you can get. True, yeah. Unreported language, but also we have a sound booth. We're ready to go. Oh, wow. Yeah, that is spectacular. Oh, we didn't know you were coming, but we're prepared. So, yeah, um, some of the earlier stuff was really making sure that we knew enough about the language and could record especially stories from older people, because that's who knows the language best, that's who, that's who knows a lot of the traditional knowledge around caring for the environment and gardening and how to do Do things that a lot of young people don't know how to do anymore.

Um, and then we've tried to make sure that that video is also useful for the things Buffy wants to do, like make documentary films about his language, his culture, when there's big festivals, we make sure to pull out the video cameras. And if we get some footage that's also great language data, we do.

That's wonderful. If we don't, that's fine. Um. So it's very much been a collaboration with me and Buffy. Andrea was very involved in the earlier years, um, but for a variety of reasons has had less involvement as we've progressed over the last decade. Um, yeah, it's, it's been really, really good. About your question about what what do we do?

Yeah It's a lot. It's a lot of different things. So While we do try to, like, have stuff that's documentary, it's really, I would say, the core of everything we do is about building capacity in the community. So we train people to use video cameras, to use microphones, to edit video and audio recordings, to work with language software like Elon or Flex for dictionary making.

Um, it's also just kind of making sure that young people especially. Have opportunities to see and hear and work with their language. I think Buffy is probably one of the youngest speakers of Kere, and he's in his early fifties. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And so when we do things like have small little workshops or just come hang out at someone's house and learn to use these things like teach people to teach people Yeah.

to use a video camera, to use a computer. Buffy often seeks out people who don't have good options right now. And so a lot of the time it's people like young men who don't have a lot of education, or they have recently been in trouble, and they clearly need something to keep them busy that's productive, and good for them, and good for their self esteem.

Yep. Oh wow, that's so, so, um. holistic, such a holistic approach. It's not only about language and linguistics, but it's about keeping the culture and also giving those people a sense of, um, a sense of utility of, Yeah. I can do something, I can do something good. It's really great. It would add a self, a sense of purpose as well if they're feeling lost.

And they don't know what to do with their own lives, then giving them a task where they're learning skills, and then it's going for the greater good of their community, and, yeah, it's great. Especially when they can go on to teach others, and I think that is one of the things that makes Buffy so good to work with, and just a really good leader.

Yeah, sounds like, sounds like it, definitely. Yeah, and then, um, So, what is your current research focused on? Currently, I've had to take some major detours in my research in response to COVID. Right. I moved to Australia in 2019 thinking, this is going to be amazing, I'm going to be so close to PNG, I'm going to go all the time.

And the borders have been effectively or actually closed for the past... Three years. So, it's been really difficult. Um, Buffy and I have talked on the phone a couple times, and that's been wonderful, but my research has really had to take a step back so that I can go forward once things start to open up again.

Yeah. Um, one of the things that I'm focused on right now that I'm so excited about is this iBlinks project. So, when I was still a student, I would spend my summers in PNG with the Kere community, and I would spend the school year working with Hawaii Sign Language, which was first. Let's say, um, announced as a language in 2013.

I started my PhD in 2013. It was very good timing. And I had just a tiny bit of ASL behind me. Tiny bit of knowledge about signing. So I was able to contribute to that project. So through a fortunate series of circumstances, I was able to start working with the HSL Hawaii Sign Language team. to document that language, and we created a corpus of about 20 hours of stories and language lessons and all sorts of different data with signer Linda Lambrick, who has been a huge advocate for HSL for years.

She was certainly the reason that linguists even recognized that Hawai'i Sign Language is in fact a language completely separate from American Sign Language. Totally unrelated. Think, like, Spanish and Japanese unrelated. Wow, yeah. Why would they think that it wasn't related to begin with? A lot of people have had different language attitudes around signing.

And there's a lot of misconceptions about how diverse sign languages can be. One of the reasons that people hadn't recognized that it's completely separate is that... There's kind of this misunderstanding that it was an accent of American Sign Language. Right. And because all modern signers of Hawaii Sign Language are multilingual, they can also code switch really easily depending on who they're talking to.

And then the situation gets even messier because we think there's also a creel. Okay. And so there's all of this different language use, like this really dynamic, diverse language situation that people can adapt really easily depending on who they're talking to. So if you're not already aware of Hawaii's sign language, if you're not aware and kind of have your, your radar out for sign language diversity, then in Hawaii, you probably wouldn't have picked it up.

And this Creole is Hawaiian Sign Language and American Sign Language. We think so, yeah. Um, so Linda, actually, her story centers around going to a deaf university on the mainland in the U. S. and when she came back... Her brothers absolutely making fun of her so much, like absolutely mocking her because her signing was so bad and had changed so much when she went to the mainland.

Wow. And that's when she realized, oh, these are different. Like, these are really different. And her husband, who's from the mainland U. S., does not understand her when she's using Hawaii Sign Language. And her brothers didn't really understand her husband. Oh, wow. And so it was in the 80s that this all happened for her, and she started advocating for her language.

And it wasn't until 2013 that linguists finally sat down and were able to confirm what she knew all along. Wow, two decades. Yeah. So, kind of brought on by that. We started working with Linda, started working with Hawaii Sign Language. When I left Hawaii, it was very sad, um, because I was so sad to leave this project.

But in a fortunate, weird COVID related series of events, what I've done recently is take a step back from the signing and spoken language I'm looking at with the Kare community and PNG, and instead start looking at some features in Hawai'i Sign Language we hadn't looked at before, including prosody. So, uh, What is currently happening is I have a small grant from the Griffith University New Research Fund.

And that's helping me put together a small team of research assistants to go back through that older data in Hawaii Sign Language. And I have an amazing research assistant named Lisa Peterson, who's a current PhD here at Griffith. Who is tagging every single eye blink. Oh, wow. Not just like tagging it, but start and end time in Elon.

Wow. She has incredible patience and seems to kind of enjoy this. It's been about six months. That she's been doing that. Wow. Yeah.

Is that tedious? Sounds tedious. I would think so, which is why I applied for a grant to pay someone else to do it. Yeah, but... Well, good on you, Linda. Yeah, yeah. It's been, it's been really good. Um, and we're starting to look, we're starting to get to the point as the project's actually about midway through.

Yeah. Looking at what's happening with eye blinks in this language, what do they mark? They certainly seem to mark clausal boundaries. They certainly seem to mark intonation units. And so if you think about how people might say, um, to indicate they're still talking, or take a breath to indicate they're still talking, we see that with eye blinks.

I think what's even more impressive is we see the suppression of eye blinks for 45 seconds in a row, where Linda will be signing and signing and signing and signing, and she doesn't blink for these huge stretches of time. And when she does, when she finally blinks, if she's still signing, those blinks are a third the length.

of the blanks she has when she's not signing. Wow. Wow. That's really amazing. Yeah. And what gave you a clue to look into that? Other people have looked at this in other sign languages. Right, okay. There's not a lot of research, but there does seem to be patterns in sign languages that these occur much like breathing happens in spoken languages.

Yeah. And that makes sense. Of course, yeah. It's a biological thing you have to do, but there's good places and there are bad places depending on your language. Yeah. I think, yeah, a lot of, uh, the things that people don't know about sign language first is obviously that there are many sign languages and...

Every time when we say something about, hey, an American signer cannot communicate with an Australian signer, people are like, oh, is that true? Is that so? So, that shows how sign language also, uh, correlates with spoken language in other levels, like prosody and, yeah. So all those, all those parts that spoken language.

Uh, spoken languages have sign languages can also show, and that's really amazing. Absolutely. They're incredibly diverse, incredibly complex, in ways that linguists are still understanding. But babies who have this as their first language are experts at. Yeah. It's one of the great, I guess I'm gonna go with like, paradox of language.

Yeah, we study a lot. Something that a baby can do without thinking a whole lot. Yeah. Yep. , I think I remember you telling us, um, that there was a, a community that you worked with where you found that the gestures that people were using to speak were actually a sign language. And how did you figure out that it was a sign language and it wasn't just gesture?

And then second question is, Did a deaf person have to be in that, uh, immediate circle who was in the conversation, or were they just doing it to a group of hearing people because it was just what they do normally? That's really good questions. So this sign language, Sina Sina sign language, which is what I call it.

And I think that's a temporary label and not a good name. But it, I have to call it something. Is a sign language used in the Kere community? And so going back to Buffy's community, I started working with them in 2012, started visiting regularly in 2013, and because I had this side project during the school year, during when I had classes, with Hawaii Sign Language.

I was so into sign language linguistics, but I loved working in PNG, and I knew that there had been almost no research on signing in PNG. And so I kept thinking, like, my dream project would be a sign language in this community. And so I kept asking people, like, do you have people who talk with their hands?

Do you have people who don't hear? How do they talk? And I would get A lot of confusion when I'd ask these questions, and I'd get really inconsistent responses. But I had noticed that in our stories that we had recorded with people, the way they gestured seemed to be almost too systematic, and almost too predictable.

And it also didn't always match their words in the way that gestures do. Yeah. And so there were like some things about it that seemed odd, but I thought, okay, they're telling me it's not there. I've never met a deaf person here. Probably not. We'll see what happens. And in 2016, I was living with the community for six months and in month four, roughly, I was hanging out in the village, I tell this story all the time because it changed my life, but I was hanging out, hoping to go back to town eventually to charge the batteries on the video cameras on the Everything on my e reader.

Everything I had to entertain myself. The battery had died. Yep. And just kind of hanging out. It was a really warm day, so I thought, maybe I'll go take a nap. And I decided to wait a little bit longer, and this woman walked up the road. This is a really remote place, so when anyone's walking up the road, like...

You notice. Yeah, people notice, and they're like, oh, who is that? What's going on? Um... And so she walked up and suddenly all these people around me who had been saying for years, we don't have deaf people, we don't have a sign language, start having this full conversation with this woman, like multiple people start having a full conversation with this woman only using manual language, like only using a signing system.

Were you, what was your reaction? Flabbergasted. You were shooketh. Yeah, I didn't take a nap, this isn't a fever dream right now. And also a little bit of like, you guys. You've been keeping this from me. Yeah, was the breakdown in communication? How did we get here? It was this like, almost dark humor. Yep, yep, yep.

So, what ended up happening was later that day, there was actually a big community event where they had a full, big, um, I'm gonna go with like town hall type thing that I was not allowed to attend, but when people were talking about it later, it seems like the entire thing was in this sign language. Oh, oh my gosh.

I was like, okay. Okay. So. When we think about, like, is this gesture or is it something more? One of the questions would be, can you have really in depth conversations about future planning, about logistics, about things that are not concrete, and can you have it in a way that's systematic enough that a whole community understands?

And the answer seems to be yes. Right. And so as soon as I was like, Okay, this person is what I'm talking about. And the way they use their hands is what I'm talking about. They're like, Oh, yeah, we got that guy over there, and that other guy, and that other guy. I was like, Wow. Great. Thank you. Okay. Um, I still have to write a dissertation on a completely unrelated topic on the phonology of tone in the spoken language, but now I have a good idea for a follow up project.

So that's how that evolved and with the question of like, what do I call this? I kept asking people. Especially because there was clearly a huge miscommunication in asking about it. Yeah. So what do you call the way that person uses their hands? And they gave me the Tokpizan word, aksen, which means something like hand movements, gesture.

They would also use it to refer to dancing, where I've seen examples in a Tokpizan, like, corpus thing, that... Uh, use this example where they say accent like Bruce Lee to refer to like martial art arm and hand movements. So it's kind of like a body expression. Yeah, of the hands and arms. Yeah. Specifically.

Right. And so I am reluctant to just call it accent. Because it seems to be more specific to this community, and talking to Lauren Reed, who is doing her PhD at Australia National University, she's also found a signing system in another part of the Highlands. It's not identical. It has some similarities, but it's certainly not the same.

They also call that one in that community AXN. And so language labeling, language names, are hugely political. As an outsider, I think Normally, the best practice is to go with what people call it and call it what they want me to call it. They call it accent if I really kind of press them to call it anything.

They also seem to like really not care what to call it. I'm like, could we call it like quere accent? And they're like, eh, okay. Could we call it like accent? of this person or this place and they're like, I don't really, it doesn't matter. Whatever you want. I'm like, okay. Put me in a spot. Yeah. And it, of the four deaf people I've met, only two of them are Quere people.

Right. The other two are not. And so we're still trying to figure out how many different varieties or signing systems there are in the valley. Right, okay. And that could change the language name? Yeah. Because if they're not Keter people, would then they have, they created, brought their own sign language that they had from their village?

That's the big question. Yeah, because then it might be a case of something similar to what happened in Hawaii with two different languages. There might be different languages just in contact there, people code switching, and yeah. Exactly. It requires a lot of study. It does. And to kind of tease out how people feel about signing versus spoken language in this area is also really complex because it's clearly different.

They would never say, you know, spoken language is just talk. It's much more specific than that, and it's much more clearly tied to identity. Like, talk, place, care. Yeah. So... Understanding those perspectives, and how they should lead into how to label or refer to this signing system, and how that interacts with variation in neighboring villages that do have different talk place, is this enormous, complex web.

And we're still really just at the beginning of it. So my hope is that as we're exploring things like prosody and eye blinks in Hawaii Sign Language, we can start to circle back with what we find to look at sign languages more broadly, sign languages of the Pacific, small sign languages, and then apply these methods and comparison to what's happening.

In Chimbu, in the Senecenta Valley, and to talk to people and, and try to figure out a whole lot about what's happening with the system, because we still know so little. Right, yeah. So hearing people in, uh, in the valley, they can still communicate with deaf people? In the sign language. Absolutely. And sometimes they even use it even when there's no deaf people present.

Yeah. Especially women with other women. Right. So people cannot hear what they're saying if... If they think there is someone around who cannot hear it, um, who shouldn't be listening to their conversation, maybe. Yeah, or if they're trying not to interrupt. Do you mean like, they're just, or do you mean like, as in they're just talking as well, and then they're signing as they're going along?

Actually, all of those. All of the above. So there's definitely spoken language with gesture, or actually like, simultaneous. Right. Code mixing, where people are speaking and signing at the same time. There's examples of hearing people just signing for various reasons. Talking more about how this works and who uses it, with women especially, has been really effective, and it's something I've only been able to do, like, on my last trip, which was in 2018.

So it's been a long time. Um, but... It does seem to be the case that they had traditional ceremonies for when women have their first periods. And part of that is kind of, um, cloistering. Like, going away, going to be quiet, going to be with only women. And they don't talk during that time. So they don't use spoken language.

But it's fine to sign during that time. Right. Very uncommon. That's something we see in a lot of places that have these kind of like rites of passage where there's some bans on when language can and can't be used or what can and can't be used. So, um, here in Australia as well, a lot of sign languages have been discovered in Indigenous communities.

Um, I was going to ask that if, is there a reason why People here from this, from the Pacific, the Pacific region, use more sign language than, uh, in other places. As far as I know, no. It's a thing that happens. It seems to be one of those things where we know it happens in certain areas and in places where there's cultural similarities.

But... Um, I feel that once we start looking for reasons beyond that, it doesn't always still fall within linguistics. And sometimes people get ideas that certainly have correlation, but not causation. So I want to be really careful to not do that. We've seen things like people making observations that maybe there's languages with very few consonants, but a lot of vowel distinctions happen in hot climates.

And that is something that happens. There is that correlation. But I would be very hesitant to read any causation there. Yeah. Other than cultural and geographic context. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. And I also have a question about, uh, working in the community. Um, where... You don't speak their language. So how does it happen that you can go to a community and study their language, document their language, having zero knowledge about it?

Firstly, that's something that they train us for. And so we learn to do a lot of things, including what we call monolingual elicitation, which is learning as much about how to ask about things around you as quickly as possible. And trying to learn the language, even badly, as quickly as possible. Right. And so starting with things like this, that, really concrete, important things around you.

And then eventually learning to say things like, how do I say this? And that really helps. Especially because when you do try to use the language, when it's appropriate. People often give you feedback, because you're going to be really bad at it to start. And that feedback is so valuable, because you might have missed morphological patterns you hadn't noticed, or phonological patterns you hadn't heard.

And so a really common type of thing is when you have a word that ends with a glottal stop after a vowel. As an English speaker, I can almost never hear that. But people who speak languages that have minimal pairs for that. Will immediately pick up on, like, no, your vowel keeps going and it should be like this.

Yep. Mmm. So those types of corrections are really, really useful. In PNG, I studied Tark Pisin, like, on my own and with Andrea and Melody before we went. And tried to learn as much as I could, so we at least had a shared language. Yeah, of course. Which is really important. But for me in my work, because I'm working with communities with small languages, that are often really invested in revitalizing their language and making sure that young people see their language as useful and important and having value, Then, as an outsider who has, like, letters before and or after my name, who comes from a university, I try to make sure that I use their language as much as possible and appropriate, because it also shows that I think this is something that's worth using.

Yeah, you validate their culture, I think, by doing that. Especially when... I can silly ly use it in a way that's not perfect. Often not good. I think for a lot of young people, trying to re engage with a heritage language is so scary, because they don't, they're not perfect. And even if they know some, they feel like they're going to sound really silly.

And so being an outsider who's silly in a lot of ways already, you just kind of lean into it. Do you have a trip on the cards for PNG anytime soon? I'm not gonna say on the cards, but as of very recently, I'm now allowed to apply to get a visa to go back to PNG. Oh, cool. And so, I'm really hoping that at least in the next year, I will be back there.

And, it's gonna be really emotional. Yeah, I bet. I'm really looking forward to it. But it's going to be strange in a lot of ways. So much will have changed. Yeah. People's kids are going to be so much older. Yeah. There's always babies. I don't know any of the babies from the past five years. Yeah. It's just going to be different.

Yeah. And, um, I think for us linguists, PNG is a very common name to be, uh, used. listening all the time because, as we know, PNG has this huge linguistic diversity. More than 800 languages in that very small place. So, my question is, what are some of the reasons why we see such a huge linguistic diversity in places like PNG, or Indonesia, or why, why is it that Small places, small population still presents such a great amount of different languages.

In some ways we're still not really sure. Yeah. Here's some of the hypotheses that linguists and anthropologists have come up with. In PNG in particular, especially in the highlands, it is a place that has a very long history of volcanic activity. And so... It is incredibly mountainous. If you pull up a topographic map and look at PNG, the highlands, really the whole island of New Guinea, is mountains and valleys and mountains and valleys and mountains and valleys.

And so it create, the physical land creates these little tiny areas where small communities can be. Close, if you're looking from an aerial perspective, but actually quite distant because of the mountains and the valleys. And so places can be very remote and still densely packed. There's also, in my experience, talking to people who are Papua New Guinean, they seem to value multilingualism and be incredibly good at language learning.

I am often shocked at how people will say things like, Oh yeah, just learn a language, like it won't take that long. And for me, it's like, this is really hard. And so it's, it's really interesting that there does seem to be both cultural perspectives that influence people willing and able and eager. To be multilingual, to learn different languages and to use them in different ways, to express identity and belonging or not.

So that's certainly a big part of it. When we start to look at the coast, we know that Austronesian people certainly came to parts of New Guinea. And so thousands of years ago, there was certainly contact situations between coastal and, um, People who were sailing and wayfinding, and people who were not, and those are unrelated language families.

And so we start to see diversity in the areas around PNG and on the coast, even in language families. So it, people have lived there for thousands and thousands of years, 40, 000 years. They've had a long history to spread out and diversify and lean into. Being highly multilingual. That's no problem. Lots of people have four first languages.

Mm hmm. As someone not from that community, I'm always really impressed. Oh, it is super impressive and super interesting. So Sam, you were saying that you have this trip hopefully coming up and so what is What is your future in research? Um, in PNG or in general? I've got a couple things in the works right now that I'm very excited about.

One is an article that's under peer review now looking at the cultural concepts behind talk and talk place and language and accent, kind of breaking down why these miscommunications kept happening, and how researchers wanting to know more about signing in PNG can ask better questions. Oh, that's really good.

It's really interesting. So, hopefully that will be out by the end of the year. Cool. Um, I'm also working on, uh, An article that's looking at mouthings in Senesena Sign Language and Hawai'i Sign Language, where, when people are signing, how their mouth moves. And these movements are normally correlated with patterns.

Of spoken language words. And so I'm looking at that from a couple perspectives. One is how spoken language multilingualism shapes what mouthings look like in these languages. There's actually some really interesting patterns when, like, which language people mouth from. So that's a really... That's an ongoing project.

An ongoing paper. I'm... Hoping to have something on iBlinks at the end of this year at the Australian Linguistic Society's annual conference with both of my research assistants Eleanor Jorgensen and Lisa Peterson. And then in the future, the kind of the longer term, I really want to be looking more at prosody in signing, and of course, continuing community workshops and other capacity building engagement, but phonology in signing is not well understood.

It's certainly not well understood in places like the Pacific or in small languages. So I'm really hoping to keep building up. And contributing to the knowledge of what's happening with these languages, both with manual and non manual parts of signing. So the biggest thing for going back to PNG next time is seeing everyone, spending time together, catching up, making sure that we can really plan the future together.

Making sure that their goals and mine are still well aligned. But if I had a dream project that I could really throw myself at, it would be really working on what's happening with phonology and prosody. In small and emerging and endangered sign languages. Yeah. Well, you're, it's been shown that your, uh, dream goes.

Become true. So we hope that that one becomes true as well. Not the physiotherapy. physiotherapy, yeah. And I'm very grateful that that didn't work out. Me too. So am I. Yeah. I think my life would be a lot more boring. Well, Sam, thank you so much for, uh, Giving us a little bit of your time and it's been really amazing.

Really inspiring. And, um, yes. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you, you lovely linguist. Always great to see you. Thank you so much, Sam. Thank you.

This podcast is recorded on the unceded lands of the Yagra and Turbol people. Language is a collaborative project between Kelly Shoecraft. Lecture of Applied Linguistics at Griffith University. Hosted and produced by Isabella Schultz and Elisara Bergamaschi. Edited by Raio Pinotti.