Ethnocentrism

#NewspaperAUOnlineWAtodayNathanHondros "Data released by the federal government this week on the causes of death for Australians between 2012 to 2016 has revealed a higher suicide rate in the Kimberley than in any other part of the nation. And in the Kimberley, which includes towns like Broome, Kununurra and Halls Creek, the suicide rates are higher than Sri Lanka, Guyana and Mongolia, the nations with the worst rates in the world, according to the World Health Organisation." https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/if-the-kimberley-was-a-country-it-would-have-the-worst-suicide-rate-in-the-world-20190207-p50wem.html #ToponymOceaniaAustraliaWAKimberley #OrgClassifPPAUSAustralianLaborPartyALPMarkMcGowan

Supplementary "Earlier this month, Australian politician Mark McGowan received harsh criticism for a video campaign ^[forum] intended to disseminate COVID-19-related information to Aboriginal people living in the state of Western Australia (WA). Several political commentators within and outside of Australia ridiculed the video, even deeming it racist, for including an interpreter to speak in Kriol, a language which shares much of its grammar and lexicon with English -- however, it's likely that the outrage comes from a deep misunderstanding of Australian Aboriginal people and their languages. MultiLingual spoke with Lawson Stapleton, an Australian language services professional who developed South Australia's first interpreting service for indigenous languages, about the video and why the outrage against it is largely unjustified. 'Kriol is widely unknown to the general Australian public and is often labeled as 'broken English' in a derogatory way,' Stapleton said. 'What's really important is that often critical words or adjectives in Kriol take an English word and change the meaning.' As its name suggests, Kriol is a creole language, which is derived from English and various Aboriginal languages spoken in Australia. It's quite mutually intelligible with English, a fact which likely contributed to commentators' misunderstanding and outrage surrounding McGowan's video. The video, developed with the Aboriginal Health Council of Western Australia, was created in order to share information about the pandemic with Aboriginal people groups living in WA, as a means of providing adequate language access services to the community. McGowan, the premier of WA, is seen side by side with an interpreter reading a message about COVID-19 vaccination efforts; after each line, the interpreter renders the message in Kriol. Because the message sounds so similar in both languages, it may sound like the interpreter is simply speaking English, especially to viewers who are only familiar with English. While the video was first published in Dec. 2021, critics like Matt Walsh began sharing the video earlier this month, ridiculing what they believed to be a racist and simplified version of English. There are several words in Kriol that are pronounced similarly to English words with similar meanings, but the words have different connotations. For example, Stapleton noted that the word 'deadly,' is often used in Kriol to mean 'awesome' or 'amazing' -- having a Kriol interpreter to render McGowan's message into Kriol ensures that there is no confusion when describing COVID-19 as 'deadly.'" (29 January 2022) https://multilingual.com/aboriginal-kriol-interpreter/ i.e. #EpistemologySociallyConstructedKnowledge #BrandTheDailyWirePolemicistMattWalsh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSFmZSNa-As i.e. #TauntArrogance / #TheoryInstrumentalism

"A more enlightened approach to journalism practice might explore ways of negotiating with indigenous public spheres in the same way as journalists learn to move easily within and between more familiar information networks as part of the everyday practice of newsgathering. It suggests the need to understand the impact of the omission and invisibility of indigenous people, stereotyping, notions of identity, and the use of derogatory and imposed labelling, the aim being to enable indigenous speaking positions, and to negotiate conflicts like the ownership of knowledge versus notions of editorial control. Sensitivity to such issues might invoke reporting strategies such as using an indirect approach in news interviews, consultation and negotiation over meaning, acknowledgment of the existence of indigenous English and local languages, and making use of translators or subtitles where appropriate - in other words, negotiating indigenous identity through dialogue with indigenous public spheres (Langton, 1993)" (Michael Meadows, 2005, p.39). Meadows, M. (2005). Journalism and indigenous public spheres. Pacific Journalism Review : Te Koakoa, 11. ^{[academic source]} ^{[academic source]} https://ojs.aut.ac.nz/pacific-journalism-review/article/download/828/1029/

Addendum the following statement: "Because it seems that the minister looks at the Aborginals as some 'uneducated folk who cannot understand plain Australian English'" is presumably a reference to criticism of the use of #IdentityFirstNationsAborigianalKriol ^[Wikipedia] to translate #PhenomnVirusCOVID19 information as explained in the #BrandMultiLingualMedia piece above. #IdentityFirstNationsAboriginalAndTorresStraitIslanderPeoples #TheoryLinguisticsContactPidgin ^[Wikipedia] #OtheringEthnocentrism ^[Wikipedia] #OrgBEUnionOfInternationalAssociationsUIAEncyclopediaOfWorldProblemsAndHumanPotential https://encyclopedia.uia.org/problem/cultural-arrogance