Aboriginal Kinship Linguistics

Presenter: Nola Turner-Jensen

My Fellowship Linguistic Research is focused on identifying the Kinship relationship of Pama Nyungan based language families. Framed upon Original Kinship Lore. Long before British people arrived in Australia, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were governed by a Governance which was laid down by the Original Creation Ancestors. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Lore came from Mother Earth and Father Sky, not from parliaments run by a few privileged families. Kinship Linguistics is Aboriginal people taking back sovereignty over their own knowledge and governance systems. It is similar to the fields of sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics in some ways; however these two aforementioned areas do not have the Original Cultural context or Kinship First view to identify the core of Aboriginal language structure and use. After all, we are talking about the earth’s earliest languages still in use today. Kinship Linguistics looks at what knowledge or world view you need to understand and interpret a language word.