The next intern to share his experience with us is Miles Townsend.
During my internship I have been helping Prof. Eva Schultze-Berndt with her research on Jaminjung-Ngaliwurru, spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia. For over twenty years she has been interviewing speakers of the language and is now putting the finishing touches to a dictionary that will be given to its speakers. There are fewer than 20 speakers remaining, all of whom are elderly, and their language is not being passed on to the younger generations, so I am proud to have been a part of such an important project that will help to document a language that would otherwise have been lost.
One of my main tasks has been to search through the corpus of transcribed conversations that Eva and other contributors have recorded, to find examples of each word being used in a sentence, and to export sound clips of these sentences from the corresponding sound files. I have also been editing the dictionary for consistency and spelling, and making sure it reads well and is easy to understand, with the speakers of Jaminjung-Ngaliwurru considered especially.
This internship has given me a lot of valuable experience into some of the processes involved in linguistic research. I would love to study linguistics at postgraduate level and one day do my own research on a language, so this is definitely a step in the right direction for me. I have also gained a lot of linguistic knowledge that has not been covered in my degree, so it should give me a bit of extra help going into third year.
Manchet 
Posted on August 28, 2019 by manling