Emergency language documentation teams: the Cape York Peninsula experience

Language revitalisation and endangered language documentation are complementary endeavours – they feed into each other and both benefit from the support of the other. This idea is at the heart of a community teams approach called Emergency Language Documentation Teams (McConvell et al. 2005). This paper will review the underpinnings of this idea and discuss the successes and difficulties encountered while applying it in the Cape York Peninsula region. The findings of the Cape York Peninsula Language Documentation project pilot discussed in this paper include that informal approaches to both language worker training and language learning were, across the board, far more successful than more formal approaches (including one-on-one versions of master–apprentice schemes). We also found that the project approach was more difficult in situations where there were more social and linguistic divisions and heterogeneity. There is some irony in this given that often in the Australian context linguistic homogeneity within a speech community can itself be a result of language shift and language loss.