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Minimal English and Revitalisation Education: Assisting Linguists to Explain Grammar in Simple, Everyday Words

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Abstract

Whilst language revitalisation projects must be community directed in order to be sustainable, linguists often play an advisory role, and in this capacity, one of their main tasks is to help develop educational resources such as learners’ dictionaries and community grammars. This requires explaining aspects of language structure in a way which is accessible from the community’s point of view. This chapter will consider how Minimal English can address the communication gap between linguists and community members in the field of language education. It will present three exploratory studies illustrating the ways in which part of speech terms (‘noun’, ‘verb’ and ‘adjective’), the concepts of ‘root’ and ‘suffix’ and the idea of different “forms” of a word or suffix can be explained in Minimal English texts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    While known to be conceptually complex (Wierzbicka 2002: 282–283) and therefore not permissible in NSM, simple questions are allowed in Minimal English because it is believed that they have equivalents in all or most languages (see Chap. 1).

  2. 2.

    The idea that the possibility of breaking words into parts depends in some important way on seeing them in the written form deserves much fuller attention, not possible here for reasons of space.

  3. 3.

    Although imperative sentences are conceptually complex and are therefore not allowed in NSM explications and scripts, they appear to have equivalents in all languages, and so are acceptable in Minimal English texts (see Chap. 1).

  4. 4.

    Obviously, this is not a full explanation of the Yankunytjatjara verb class system. It is just a way of illustrating different forms of a suffix, using common and salient examples. The most suitable examples will differ from language to language.

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  1. Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Elita Machin

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  1. Elita Machin
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  1. Sch Humanities, Languages & Soc Sci, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Cliff Goddard

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Machin, E. (2021). Minimal English and Revitalisation Education: Assisting Linguists to Explain Grammar in Simple, Everyday Words. In: Goddard, C. (eds) Minimal Languages in Action. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64077-4_4

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