Revitalisation of Mangarrayi: Supporting community use of archival audio exemplars for creation of language learning resources

Abstract

Mangarrayi is a critically endangered language from the western Roper River region in the Northern Territory of Australia. Today the greatest concentration of Mangarrayi people live at Jilkminggan, 135 kilometres south-east of Katherine. Although several older Mangarrayi speakers remain, the language is no longer used in day-to-day communication. However, there is a desire amongst a number of young adult community members to learn some of their heritage language. In this paper we discuss the process undertaken to support these aspirations, focusing on the use of exemplar Mangarrayi utterances sourced from archival documents as a key to developing a basic level of communicative competence in contexts identified as important to learners. This requires a clear understanding of how and when to use the utterances. We propose using a combination of language functions, topics, and sub-topics to clarify usage and support nonspecialist community members in using these for learning and teaching Mangarrayi.