Family in mind
Socio-spatial knowledge in a Ngaatjatjarra/Ngaanyatjarra children’s game
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.28442Keywords:
Indigenous Australia, children’s play, kinship, spatial awareness, language socialisationAbstract
In the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in remote Western Australia children play a guessing game called mama mama ngunytju ngunytju ‘father father mother mother’. It is mainly girls who play the game, along with other members of their social network, including age-mates, older kin and adults. They offer clues about target referents and establish mutual understandings through multimodal forms of representation that include semi-conventionalized drawings on the sand. In this paper we show how speech, gesture, and graphic schemata are negotiated and identify several recurrent themes, particularly focusing on the domains of kinship and spatial awareness. We discuss the implications this case study has for understanding the changing nature of language socialization in remote Indigenous Australia. Multimodal analyses of games and other indirect teaching routines deepen our understandings of the acquisition of cultural knowledge and the development of communicative competence in this context.
References
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Berndt, R. M. (1940). Some Aboriginal Children’s Games. Mankind, 3(9), 289–293. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1835-9310.1940.tb00974.x
Blythe, J. (2013). Preference Organization Driving Structuration: Evidence from Australian Aboriginal Interaction for Pragmatically Motivated Grammaticalization. Language, 89(4), 883–919. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2013.0057
Brooks, D. (2011). Dreamings and Connections to Country among the Ngaanyatjarra and Pintupi of the Australian Western Desert. PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra.
Butterworth, B., Reeve, R. & Reynolds F. (2011). Using Mental Representations of Space When Words Are Unavailable: Studies of Enumeration and Arithmetic in Indigenous Australia. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42, 630–638. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022111406020
Carew, M., Green, J., Kral, I., Nordlinger, R. & Singer, R. (2015). Getting in Touch: Language and Digital Inclusion in Australian Indigenous Communities. Language Documentation and Conservation, 9, 307–323.
Cazden, C. (1988). Classroom discourse. London: Heinemann. Deppermann, A. (2013). Multimodal Interaction from a Conversation Analytic Perspective. Journal of Pragmatics, 46(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.11.014
Dousset, L. (2003). Indigenous modes of representing social relationships: A short critique of the ‘genealogical concept’. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1, 19–29.
Dousset, L. (2011). Australian Aboriginal kinship: An introductory handbook with particular emphasis on the Western Desert. [Marseille]: Pacific-Credo Publications.
Duranti, A., Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. B. (eds) (2014). The handbook of language socialization. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Eickelkamp, U. (2008). ‘I don’t talk story like that’: On the social meaning of children’s sand stories at Ernabella. In J. Simpson & G. Wigglesworth (eds), Children’s language and multilingualism: Indigenous language use at home and school (pp. 78–99). London: Continuum.
Eickelkamp, U. (2011). Sand storytelling: Its social meaning in Anangu children’s lives. In U. Eickelkamp (ed.), Growing up in Central Australia: New anthropological studies of childhood and adolescence (pp. 103–130). New York: Berghahn Books.
Ellis, E. & Wilkes, M. (2010). What’s in a word? Word form and meaning in a Ngaatjatjarra traditional story. Ngoonjook, 35, 6–18.
Ervin-Tripp, S. M. (1991). Play in language development. In B. Scales, M. Almy, A. Nicolopoulou & S. M. Ervin-Tripp (eds), Play and the social context of development in early care and education (pp. 84–97). New York: Columbia Teachers College.
Evans, N. (2003). Context, culture, and structuration in the languages of Australia. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32, 13–40. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093137
Goodwin, M. H. (1985). The serious side of Jump Rope: Conversational practices and social organization in the frame of play. Journal of American Folklore, 98 (389), 315–330. https://doi.org/10.2307/539938
Goodwin, M. H. (1990). He-said-she-said: Talk as social organization among black children. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Goodwin, M. H. & Kyratzis, A. (2007). Children socializing children: Practices for negotiating the social order among peers. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 40(4), 279–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351810701471260
Green, J. (2014). Drawn from the ground: Sound, sign and inscription in Central Australian sand stories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139237109
Green, J. & Turpin, M. (2014). If you go down to the soak today: Symbolism and structure in an Arandic children’s story. Anthropological Linguistics, 55(4), 358–394. https://doi.org/10.1353/anl.2013.0025
Haagen, C. (1995). Bush toys: Aboriginal children at play. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Hale, K. L. (1966). Kinship reflections in syntax: Some Australian languages. Word, 22, 318–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1966.11435458
Haviland, J. (2003). How to point in Zinacantán. In S. Kita (ed.), Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet (pp. 139–169). New York: Psychology Press.
Heath, S. B. (1982).What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11(2), 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500009039
Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: A brief history. Abingdon: Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Abingdon: Routledge.
Kral, I. (2007). Writing words right way! Literacy and social practice in the Ngaanyatjarra world. PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra.
Kral, I. (2012). Talk, text and technology: Literacy and social practice in a remote Indigenous community. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Kral, I. & Ellis, E. M. (2008). Children, language and literacy in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands. In J. Simpson & G. Wigglesworth (eds), Children’s language and multilingualism: Indigenous language use at home and school (pp. 154–172). London: Continuum.
Kral, I. & Ellis, E. M. (in press). Language vitality in and out of school in a remote Indigenous Australian context. In T. L. McCarty, S. E. Nicholas & G. Wigglesworth (eds), A world of Indigenous languages: Politics, pedagogies, and prospects for language revitalization and maintenance. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Kral, I. & Ellis, E. M. (in preparation). In the time of their lives: Communication and social interaction in the Western Desert of Australia.
Langlois, A. (2006). Wordplay in teenage Pitjantjatjara. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 26(2), 181–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268600600885510
Laughren, M. (1978). Directional terminology in Warlpiri. Working Papers in Language and Linguistics, 8, 1–16.
Laughren, M. (1984). Warlpiri baby talk. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 4, 73–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268608408599321
Meakins, F. (2011). Spaced out: Intergenerational changes in the expression of spatial relations by Gurindji people. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 31(1), 43–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2011.532857
Munn, N. (1973). Walbiri iconography: Graphic representation and cultural symbolism in a Central Australian society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Nevile, M., Haddington, P., Heinemann, T. & Rauniomaa, M. (2014). Interacting with objects: Language, materiality, and social activity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.186
Ochs, E., Solomon, O. & Sterponi, L. (2005). Limitations and transformations of habitus in child-directed communication. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 547–583. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605054406
Paugh, A. L. (2005). Multilingual play: Children’s code-switching, role play, and agency in Dominica, West Indies. Language in Society, 34(1), 63–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404505050037
Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Romaine, S. (1984). The language of children and adolescents: The acquisition of communicative competence. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Singer, R. & Harris, S. (2016) What practices and ideologies support small-scale multilingualism? A case study of unexpected language survival in an Australian Indigenous community. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 241, 163–208. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2016-0029
Snow, C. E. & Ferguson, C. A. (eds.) (1977). Talking to children: Language input and acquisition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Street, B., Pahl, K. & Rowsell, J. (2009). Multimodality and New Literacy Studies. In C. Jewitt (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis (pp. 191–200). London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Tjitayi, K. & Lewis, S. (2011). Envisioning lives at Ernabella. In U. Eickelkamp (ed.), Growing up in Central Australia: New anthropological studies of Aboriginal childhood and adolescence (pp. 49–62). Oxford: Berghahn
Books. Turner, M. M. & Breen, G. (1984). Akarre Rabbit talk. Language in Central Australia, 1, 10–14.
Turpin, M., Demuth, K. & Ngampart Campbell, A. (2014). Arandic baby talk. In R. Pensalfini, M. Turpin & D. Guillemin (eds), Language description informed by theory (pp. 49–79). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.147.04tur
Watson, C. (2003). Piercing the ground: Balgo women’s image making and relationship to country. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
Wilkins, D. P. (1997). Alternative representations of space: Arrernte narratives in sand. Proceedings of the CLS Opening Academic Year, 97(98), 133–164.
Wilkins, D. P. (2004). The verbalization of motion events in Arrernte. In S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (eds), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives (pp. 143–157). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Wilkins, D. P. (2006). Towards an Arrernte grammar of space. In S. C. Levinson & D. P. Wilkins (eds), Grammars of space: Explorations in cognitive diversity (pp. 24–62). New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486753.003
Wilkins, D. P. (undated). Finding your way around is child’s play: A traditional Arrernte ‘space game’. Unpublished manuscript.
Bavin, E. L. (1991). The acquisition of Warlpiri kin terms. Pragmatics, 1(3), 319–344. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.1.3.02bav
Berndt, R. M. (1940). Some Aboriginal Children’s Games. Mankind, 3(9), 289–293. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1835-9310.1940.tb00974.x
Blythe, J. (2013). Preference Organization Driving Structuration: Evidence from Australian Aboriginal Interaction for Pragmatically Motivated Grammaticalization. Language, 89(4), 883–919. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2013.0057
Brooks, D. (2011). Dreamings and Connections to Country among the Ngaanyatjarra and Pintupi of the Australian Western Desert. PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra.
Butterworth, B., Reeve, R. & Reynolds F. (2011). Using Mental Representations of Space When Words Are Unavailable: Studies of Enumeration and Arithmetic in Indigenous Australia. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42, 630–638. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022111406020
Carew, M., Green, J., Kral, I., Nordlinger, R. & Singer, R. (2015). Getting in Touch: Language and Digital Inclusion in Australian Indigenous Communities. Language Documentation and Conservation, 9, 307–323.
Cazden, C. (1988). Classroom discourse. London: Heinemann. Deppermann, A. (2013). Multimodal Interaction from a Conversation Analytic Perspective. Journal of Pragmatics, 46(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.11.014
Dousset, L. (2003). Indigenous modes of representing social relationships: A short critique of the ‘genealogical concept’. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1, 19–29.
Dousset, L. (2011). Australian Aboriginal kinship: An introductory handbook with particular emphasis on the Western Desert. [Marseille]: Pacific-Credo Publications.
Duranti, A., Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. B. (eds) (2014). The handbook of language socialization. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Eickelkamp, U. (2008). ‘I don’t talk story like that’: On the social meaning of children’s sand stories at Ernabella. In J. Simpson & G. Wigglesworth (eds), Children’s language and multilingualism: Indigenous language use at home and school (pp. 78–99). London: Continuum.
Eickelkamp, U. (2011). Sand storytelling: Its social meaning in Anangu children’s lives. In U. Eickelkamp (ed.), Growing up in Central Australia: New anthropological studies of childhood and adolescence (pp. 103–130). New York: Berghahn Books.
Ellis, E. & Wilkes, M. (2010). What’s in a word? Word form and meaning in a Ngaatjatjarra traditional story. Ngoonjook, 35, 6–18.
Ervin-Tripp, S. M. (1991). Play in language development. In B. Scales, M. Almy, A. Nicolopoulou & S. M. Ervin-Tripp (eds), Play and the social context of development in early care and education (pp. 84–97). New York: Columbia Teachers College.
Evans, N. (2003). Context, culture, and structuration in the languages of Australia. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32, 13–40. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093137
Goodwin, M. H. (1985). The serious side of Jump Rope: Conversational practices and social organization in the frame of play. Journal of American Folklore, 98 (389), 315–330. https://doi.org/10.2307/539938
Goodwin, M. H. (1990). He-said-she-said: Talk as social organization among black children. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Goodwin, M. H. & Kyratzis, A. (2007). Children socializing children: Practices for negotiating the social order among peers. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 40(4), 279–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351810701471260
Green, J. (2014). Drawn from the ground: Sound, sign and inscription in Central Australian sand stories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139237109
Green, J. & Turpin, M. (2014). If you go down to the soak today: Symbolism and structure in an Arandic children’s story. Anthropological Linguistics, 55(4), 358–394. https://doi.org/10.1353/anl.2013.0025
Haagen, C. (1995). Bush toys: Aboriginal children at play. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Hale, K. L. (1966). Kinship reflections in syntax: Some Australian languages. Word, 22, 318–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1966.11435458
Haviland, J. (2003). How to point in Zinacantán. In S. Kita (ed.), Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet (pp. 139–169). New York: Psychology Press.
Heath, S. B. (1982).What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11(2), 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500009039
Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: A brief history. Abingdon: Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Abingdon: Routledge.
Kral, I. (2007). Writing words right way! Literacy and social practice in the Ngaanyatjarra world. PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra.
Kral, I. (2012). Talk, text and technology: Literacy and social practice in a remote Indigenous community. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Kral, I. & Ellis, E. M. (2008). Children, language and literacy in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands. In J. Simpson & G. Wigglesworth (eds), Children’s language and multilingualism: Indigenous language use at home and school (pp. 154–172). London: Continuum.
Kral, I. & Ellis, E. M. (in press). Language vitality in and out of school in a remote Indigenous Australian context. In T. L. McCarty, S. E. Nicholas & G. Wigglesworth (eds), A world of Indigenous languages: Politics, pedagogies, and prospects for language revitalization and maintenance. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Kral, I. & Ellis, E. M. (in preparation). In the time of their lives: Communication and social interaction in the Western Desert of Australia.
Langlois, A. (2006). Wordplay in teenage Pitjantjatjara. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 26(2), 181–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268600600885510
Laughren, M. (1978). Directional terminology in Warlpiri. Working Papers in Language and Linguistics, 8, 1–16.
Laughren, M. (1984). Warlpiri baby talk. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 4, 73–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268608408599321
Meakins, F. (2011). Spaced out: Intergenerational changes in the expression of spatial relations by Gurindji people. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 31(1), 43–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2011.532857
Munn, N. (1973). Walbiri iconography: Graphic representation and cultural symbolism in a Central Australian society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Nevile, M., Haddington, P., Heinemann, T. & Rauniomaa, M. (2014). Interacting with objects: Language, materiality, and social activity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.186
Ochs, E., Solomon, O. & Sterponi, L. (2005). Limitations and transformations of habitus in child-directed communication. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 547–583. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605054406
Paugh, A. L. (2005). Multilingual play: Children’s code-switching, role play, and agency in Dominica, West Indies. Language in Society, 34(1), 63–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404505050037
Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Romaine, S. (1984). The language of children and adolescents: The acquisition of communicative competence. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Singer, R. & Harris, S. (2016) What practices and ideologies support small-scale multilingualism? A case study of unexpected language survival in an Australian Indigenous community. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 241, 163–208. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2016-0029
Snow, C. E. & Ferguson, C. A. (eds.) (1977). Talking to children: Language input and acquisition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Street, B., Pahl, K. & Rowsell, J. (2009). Multimodality and New Literacy Studies. In C. Jewitt (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis (pp. 191–200). London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Tjitayi, K. & Lewis, S. (2011). Envisioning lives at Ernabella. In U. Eickelkamp (ed.), Growing up in Central Australia: New anthropological studies of Aboriginal childhood and adolescence (pp. 49–62). Oxford: Berghahn
Books. Turner, M. M. & Breen, G. (1984). Akarre Rabbit talk. Language in Central Australia, 1, 10–14.
Turpin, M., Demuth, K. & Ngampart Campbell, A. (2014). Arandic baby talk. In R. Pensalfini, M. Turpin & D. Guillemin (eds), Language description informed by theory (pp. 49–79). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.147.04tur
Watson, C. (2003). Piercing the ground: Balgo women’s image making and relationship to country. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
Wilkins, D. P. (1997). Alternative representations of space: Arrernte narratives in sand. Proceedings of the CLS Opening Academic Year, 97(98), 133–164.
Wilkins, D. P. (2004). The verbalization of motion events in Arrernte. In S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (eds), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives (pp. 143–157). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Wilkins, D. P. (2006). Towards an Arrernte grammar of space. In S. C. Levinson & D. P. Wilkins (eds), Grammars of space: Explorations in cognitive diversity (pp. 24–62). New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486753.003
Wilkins, D. P. (undated). Finding your way around is child’s play: A traditional Arrernte ‘space game’. Unpublished manuscript.
Published
2017-12-18
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Ellis, E. M., Green, J., & Kral, I. (2017). Family in mind: Socio-spatial knowledge in a Ngaatjatjarra/Ngaanyatjarra children’s game. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 1(2), 164-198. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.28442
