Confirmed Plenary Speakers

Abstract

The year 2027 marks the mid-point of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages and a moment in the new era of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) when we might expect multilingual large language models (LLMs) to enhance the future prospects of Australia’s Aboriginal languages. The presumed opportunity is for people to reclaim their ancestral languages with the support of chatbots that have been trained on all available content. However, LLMs perform poorly on Indigenous languages, not just because of the dearth of training data, but because oral cultures are out of view of LLMs trained on monolingual text collections. What, then, does cultural survival look like in the GenAI era? We seek nuanced answers to this question that fall between the extremes of blind acceptance and outright rejection. Key themes include: (1) relationality, where knowledge is embedded in the land and transmitted at the right time and right place to the right people, not the free-for-all assumed by GenAI; (2) hybridisation, where communicative practices may be Indigenous-western hybrids, not the pure forms found in documentary records; and (3) embodiment, where language serves local participation, and is not the information-seeking activity commonly assumed by designers of GenAI. This presentation will draw on experiences arising in collaborations with First Nations speech communities and language centres in the north and west of Australia, and shared with permission.

Ian Gumbula is a Yolŋu elder and PhD student, collaborating with Steven Bird at Charles Darwin University, supported by an ARC project "Investing in Aboriginal Languages". Ian is from the Daywurrwurr Gupapuyŋu clan from Northeast Arnhem Land. Ian is a qualified teacher and has worked extensively in education, youth work, community governance, and intercultural facilitation.

Steven Bird studies language vitality and Indigenous agency in shaping programs designed to keep languages strong. Steven is past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, co-founder of the Open Language Archives Community, lead developer of the Natural Language Toolkit, producer at LanguageParties.org, and has held academic positions at U Edinburgh, Penn, Berkeley, Melbourne, and CDU.

Abstract

This three hour masterclass introduces multimodal ethnography as a set of methods for linguists who want to analyze language in relation to embodiment, interaction, and the material organization of social life. It is designed for researchers interested in how talk is coordinated with gaze, gesture, posture, movement, objects, and space in naturally occurring settings, and in what follows analytically when speech is studied within that broader field of action.

The session focuses on how multimodal approaches can enrich linguistic research on interaction, phonetic detail, prosody, stance, turn taking, participation, and the situated production of social meaning. Participants will be introduced to some principles in multimodal interaction research and to practical strategies for bringing these into ethnographic and linguistically oriented projects. Topics include video-based field recording, transcription of embodied conduct, analytic segmentation of recorded events, and the relation between close analysis and longer term ethnographic immersion.

Attention will also be given to issues central to linguistic research, but often left outside the scope of narrower approaches to language: how speech is coordinated with bodily conduct, how material environments and spatial arrangements enter into the organization of action, and how interaction is organized in multispecies settings. The masterclass provides participants with a methodological framework for incorporating multimodal analysis into linguistic research.

Norma C. Mendoza-Denton is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she founded and directs the Language, Electronic Gaming, and Interactional Technologies Lab. Trained in linguistics at Stanford University, she works in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and the study of race, gender, and media. Her research focuses on language, identity, and power, with particular attention to Latina/o youth, political discourse, and digital culture. She is the author of Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs and co-editor of Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies. She has also served as Associate Dean in UCLA’s Graduate Division and as President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology within the American Anthropological Association. She is currently writing a textbook on Multimodal Ethnographies.