AustLit

'In this paper I will report on community-based language maintenance and preservation activity being undertaken by Alyawarr and Eastern Anmatyerr speakers on the Utopia homelands. Utopia (as it is generally referred to) is located in remote central Australia, approximately 300 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs. This decentralised community comprises sixteen or so homelands situated on the traditional country of the Alyawarr and Eastern Anmatyerr people. I will provide a background to language documentation and conservation, outlining current theoretical frameworks regarding linguistic fieldwork and briefly discussing how the two main branches of descriptive linguistics and documentary linguistics sit within them. I will then introduce the notion of community-based language documentation by offering a snapshot of ongoing work from the fledgling documentation project at Utopia.' (Abstract)