Talking books for children's home use in a minority Indigenous Australian language context

Abstract

Members of the Kunibídji community are the traditional owners of the lands and seas around Maningrida, a remote community in Northern Australia. Most of the 200 members of the Kunibídji Community speak Ndjébbana as their first language. This study reports on the complexities of transforming technology to provide Kunibídji children with access to digital texts at home. The printed Ndjébbana texts that were kept at school were transformed to Ndjébbana talking books displayed on touch screen computers in the children's homes. Some results of the children's interaction around these touch screens are presented as well as some quantitative results of the computer viewing in the homes. The processes of rejecting technological determinism, upholding linguistic human rights of speakers of minority languages and viewing technology as practice rather than a set of artefacts are discussed in this paper. The results of this study hightlight the need for speakers of minority Indigenous Australian languages to have access to texts in their threatened languages on technologies at home.