Wow, we have hit the big 3-0! It's hard to imagine that I've been writing incessantly about sociolinguistics for this long, but here we are. This week, we'll be talking about Liz Thompson.

Liz Thompson, like Chris Rainier, has been working on Aboriginal language preservation for a long, long time. Also like Rainier, she sees a beneficial aspect in using technology to document Aboriginal languages. She dabbles in all forms of art, including photography, filmmaking, writing, and radio-producing. A recent project of hers, Sharing Our Stories, is a fourteen-book series documenting indigenous life and culture in Australia. There exists a Sharing Stories Foundation that works alongside the project. This foundation provides access to lots of material used in preserving languages.

The Sharing Stories Foundation has created so many resources for endangered languages, including (but not limited to) digital storytelling workshops aiming to record stories and languages with technology (similar to Chris Rainier's approach), publishing programs to translate many English texts into Aboriginal languages and vice versa (to raise awareness on both sides), and annual reports acting as archives for the languages already documented.

Another extremely important facet of this Foundation is The Songlines Project. In Aboriginal communities, Ancestral Dreaming Tracks are key in passing down culture. These are a collection of songs and stories, written by ancestors, detailing the geography of their Country. By singing about the landscapes and the people's journeys, a "map," or Songline, is created. Essentially, all of a community's history and geographical trek is preserved in the Dreaming Tracks.

The Sharing Stories Foundation's Songline Project uses a Cultural Mapping Program to preserve these Ancestral Dreaming Tracks before they are lost to time. The Mapping includes technology like GPS, surround-sound detection, and 360-degree panoramic video to document and interpret the Dreaming Tracks that the Aboriginal communities want to share. Again, all that is documented is voluntarily offered information by Aboriginal communities who want to actively combat language endangerment.

The Sharing Stories Foundation is extremely sensitive to cultural nuances. For example, Aboriginal communities have many avoidance practices, including an avoidance of naming the dead. This is usually done out of respect, but the utterance of a dead person's name is also often considered too painful for the grieving family. However, references to the dead are often necessary in documenting a community's history. Because of this nuanced awareness, the Foundation's website displays a warning upon first opening the page: "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that the content on this site may contain images and references to deceased persons."

Another notable development of the Foundation is the Sharing Stories Language Lightbox. It is a repository of audio-visual language, first implemented with New South Wales' Paakantji people, but has since been adapted to work with many other communities as well. The Lightbox is an iOS program that holds the community's knowledge on dialects, geography, and historical stories. Many spoken words or phrases are also included in an iBook phonetic guide. So far, the process of teaching Aboriginal students and older community members to use this technology has been successful, and it has done much language preservation and no changing-the-very-culture-that-we-are-trying-to-preserve.

Not only has her Foundation helped with language preservation, the very existence of her book series has been monumental to the movement as well. A few books in the series are children's books, illustrated for and geared toward children of elementary school age. Because these books are readily available and have become handy resources, the Australian government has agreed to use them in schools. Now that the Sharing Our Stories series is found in school libraries across the country, both indigenous and nonindigenous students can learn about Aboriginal cultures.

The indigenous communities often face a dilemma with their children's education: they can either teach their children about culture within the community, or they can send their children to an English-teaching school and get a better "education" (in terms of what globalization has deemed "useful" to a child's future). Further, if indigenous children do not learn to speak English, they are often scoffed at in the workforce, and employers are hesitant to hire them.

However, learning languages does not have to be a "choose one, sacrifice the other" case, though, unfortunately, it often turns out that way. Because of how much of a "bully language" English has been around the world, many people are bilingual (or multilingual) with English and their native tongue(s). In fact, the United States may be one of the few countries where a majority of people only speak one language; this has manifested due to English being the only language they need to speak to find a job, buy a house, raise a family, etc.

Many other countries have found the sweet balance between learning English and keeping their native tongue, but for Aboriginal people in Australia, the fight to find a common ground was hard. Because of the political, societal, and economic oppression the Aboriginal people constantly faced, they seemed to think that sacrificing their own culture was the only way their children would be accepted into an English-speaking society.

Because of activists like Chris Rainier and Liz Thompson, though, this mindset is beginning to change--and the endangered languages of Aboriginal Australia are now here to stay (as they always should have been).