The Aboriginal Languages Research and Resource Centre (The Languages Centre)
The Department is ensuring that future generations can use and appreciate Aboriginal languages by providing communities and schools financial support and helping them develop teaching materials so that Aboriginal languages can be taught.
The Language Centre specifically provides Aboriginal communities with:
- Technical linguistic and teaching advice
- Research assistance
- Assistance to record language speakers
- Relevant language revival related training tailored to community needs
- Mentoring of networking and collaboration between language initiatives across the State
- Advice regarding sources of funding available to language projects; and
- Strong advocacy for the revival of Aboriginal languages.
The Language Centre is also a central point of contact for members of the public seeking information about Aboriginal languages in New South Wales.
The Language Centre administers the DAA’s Community Language Assistance Program, which provides grants of $5000 to $50,000 to projects to revive NSW Aboriginal Languages. The 2006 -2007 round of grant funding deadline and guidelines will be available on this website soon. See Language Funding
Our purpose
The NSW Government established the Aboriginal Languages Research and Resource Centre to play a key role in the preservation and revitalisation of Aboriginal languages in New South Wales.
The Language Centre fosters and supports the recording, retention and understanding of those languages and helps Aboriginal communities regain and strengthen access to their languages as a pathway to revitalising their culture.
Operations
The Language Centre provides funding and leadership for Aboriginal communities. By linking people with a network of similar groups, the Language Centre provides the tools, techniques and support to record, preserve and access languages. It recognises that each language belongs to its community and that each community has the right of ownership for the language and materials about it.
The Language Centre works actively with linguists and other researchers and encourages and supports their work in ways that are consistent with the rights of Aboriginal language groups.
What we’ve achieved so far
Since 2003, the scope of projects funded have included oral history recording projects, community language schools, language dictionaries, interactive CD-ROM’s, production of teacher resource packs for language teaching, transcription of language recordings, story books and language posters (see Online Language Archive to download these resources). The Language Centre has provided over $600,000 to language revitalisation programs in NSW.