DDRI: Linguistics and Language Sovereignty in Northern Australia, 1959-2008

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This Science & Society doctoral dissertation research improvement grant seeks to trace the history of how Aboriginal communities have developed language ownership. In Australia, capacity of Aboriginal communities to control access to Aboriginal languages has emerged as an expression of a new kind of sovereignty: language sovereignty. This study proposes to trace the history of language sovereignty through comparative linguistics, land activism, and endangered language revitalization over the past fifty years. Social scientists and Aboriginal activists have articulated a variety of visions of language as a form of property. Language has been viewed variously as scientific capital, as part of a public domain, as value created by the collective intellectual labor of a speech community, as an asset to be protected by copyright or trademark, and as a metaphysical entity, and as a manifestation of Aboriginal country that should be covered by something akin to native title. This research will combine analysis of archived materials and interviews. The data gathered will shed light on the activities of two communities studied in the project: 1) linguists, by examining linguistic fieldwork and language classification across northern Australia; and 2) indiginous activists, by examining community-centered language activism in the northwestern region known as the Kimberley. The study will examine how these two traditions of making knowledge about language have come into conflict in land claims. And it will ask how language science, broadly construed, has contributed to an emerging global regime of intellectual property law. In a global economy where cultural distinction has become a key criterion of value for intellectual assets (e.g., in drug development, in popular media, in food and agriculture), it is essential to understand the circumstances in which conflicts over access to culturally significant intellectual assets arise. Intellectual property, social justice, and human rights are intertwined. The aim of this study is to clarify why this is so and to suggest implications for social science and law.