26 Increasing the acessibility of information on the Indigenous languages of Victoria
Heather Bowe, Julie Reid, Kathy Lynch · The Sydney eScholarship Repository (The University of Sydney) · 2010
The authors have developed a web resource portal that allows easy access to information about the Aboriginal languages of Victoria.Written records of Victorian Aboriginal languages include language resources gathered in the 18th and early 19th centuries by government officials and interested private citizens.Some material was published at the time of collection, and is available in the reference collections of major libraries.Other material is only available in manuscript sources in research libraries or on microfiche.In the last 50 years linguists have analysed such material producing overview classifications of the languages of Victoria and, in some instances, complex linguistic descriptions of a particular language.These descriptions, called sketch grammars, are not easy to understand without linguistic training.The portal will enable non-linguists to access this vital language information via the web and provides a comprehensive list of sources for all of the major Victorian languages arranged according to the linguistic classification developed by Hercus (1969, 1986), Dixon (1980, 2002), and Blake & Reid (1998).The resource portal is presented according to geographical regions and languages.It provides a window to information on the languages, their relationship to each other, lists of academic and historical resources, comparative wordlists, simplified grammars with examples, and comprehensive lists of the words collected for each language.It also allows for the uploading of community created resources, such as stories and images, together with an online discussion area.The site has the capability to be expanded to add comprehensive detail for all languages of Victoria, subject to funding constraints.