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 re- gion 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, focus- ing on the use of exemplar Mangarrayi utterances sourced from archival docu- ments as a key to developing a basic level of communicative competence in con- texts 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 non-specialist com- munity members in using these for learning and teaching Mangarrayi.