Kenny, Anna-Maria2021-05-100029-8077http://hdl.handle.net/1885/232567The Aboriginal people of the Upper Finke River in central Australia have followed a literacy tradition for over 130 years. When the first Lutheran missionaries arrived, they immediately started to study the local Arandic language and were teaching reading and writing by 1879. Despite this long exposure to literacy and the Lutheran influence on it, the issue of the right orthography for this Arandic language variety is emotionally charged and politically very contested. In this post-colonial context, orthography has become a sociocultural and symbolic, rather than a phonemic, matter.An ARC postdoctoral fellowship at the ANU has made it possible to write this paper that was presented in November 2013 at the AAS conference in Canberra and in February 2014 at the Central Land Council in Alice Springs. It is part of ARC Linkage grant LP110200803, 2011–2014 Rescuing Carl Strehlow’s Indigenous cultural heritage legacy: the neglected German tradition of Arandic ethnographyapplication/pdfen-AU© 2017 Oceania PublicationsWestern ArandaArrernteArrarntacentral AustralialanguageArandic orthography and identity201710.1002/ocea.51692020-11-23