From self-discovery to helping save an endangered language, a long-awaited chance to complete a degree opened up a whole new world for online student Catherine Dennett.
“Once my four kids graduated, I thought it was my turn to earn a degree,” Dennett says.
“I had studied science straight out of school but didn’t complete the degree due to family commitments.
“I loved history and chose to study that. But I found linguistics totally by chance. I liked grammar so thought it would make an interesting elective. I got hooked pretty quickly!”
“Keeping languages alive is important, and language documentation contributes toward that.”
UNE student Catherine Dennett
From not really understanding what linguistics was, Dennett discovered she had a talent for it, and ended up completing what her UNE supervisor, Dr Cindy Schneider, describes as “an epic thesis” on a Papua New Guinea language for a master’s degree.
Protecting disappearing language
Her work, describing the previously undocumented language of the Kairak people, who live in East New Britain Province, was not only personally satisfying, but will help protect it from disappearing.
“The Tok Pisin language is the common language spoken more and more by the younger generation, and English is regarded as the language of business and economic progress, so many of the hundreds of indigenous languages in PNG, including Kairak, are in danger of becoming extinct,” Dennett says.
“Keeping languages alive is important, and language documentation contributes toward that.”
While linguistics can require lots of field work, spending months overseas to collect data was not an option for Dennett. But a little creative thinking enabled her to complete the work fully online.
“I was able to use hundreds of pages of stories and data collected by my supervisor, Dr Cindy Schneider, that she had collected from the Kairak people in Papua New Guinea after she had stayed with them for a number of months.”
Analysing language was a skill Dennett didn’t know she had, until a unit in descriptive linguistics, which set her on her path for her thesis.
“Descriptive linguistics is the process of describing a language as it is, not how it compares to other languages. It values the language in its own right,” she says.
“I did an assignment as part of the undergraduate degree where we had about 50 sentences in an unknown language, then the translation under them, and we had to write as much of a grammar as we could. It was so much fun. Who would have thought?! It was kind of like an enormous sudoku, but with words, not numbers. I had always thought I was a creative thinker. I hadn’t realised my strength is actually in analytical thinking.”
Dennett says she wanted to be able to have a go at descriptive linguistics herself, “and I am really happy to have had that opportunity”.
“It’s really exciting when you look at the data and find something ‘new’, then are able to confirm that pattern elsewhere in the data,” she says.
“My dissertation aimed to describe and document as much of the Kairak language as I could. I described the nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives. The data I had was several hundred pages of stories that had been transcribed from recordings and then translated into Tok Pisin. I had no prior knowledge of Tok Pisin, so that was a huge task in itself.”
A short trip to Papua New Guinea reminded her how far she’d come.
“I happened to be there at the same time as the Linguistic Society of PNG was holding its annual conference and was invited to attend. It was a great experience listening to all the papers about Indigenous languages and realising that I could actually follow everything,” says Dennett.
“I think study makes one’s world a bit larger and more interesting. I have enjoyed having my world expand.”
