When we started planning the special issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics in honour of Barbara F. Kelly, I immediately knew that this was the work I wanted to submit to the collection. This is a project that I had been tinkering on with my collaborators for a while, but this was the perfect venue that got me to pull it together.
This project draws together two research interests that Barb and I shared: Tibeto-Burman languages and the use of gesture. It was also great to work on this with Kristine Hildebrandt, who was Barb’s close grad school friend, and Suzy Styles, who contributed an excellent illustrative figure as well as her expertise in cross-sensory representation.
Abstract
This paper examines onomatopoeia and gesture in the description of earthquakes, to better understand how people produce complex multimodal representations of experiences. We use narratives from New Zealand English speakers (2010/2011 earthquakes around Christchurch), and from Nubri and Syuba (Tibeto-Burman) speakers (2015 earthquakes in Nepal). We selected 16 narratives from each event. Between the two datasets there were distinct preferences regarding onomatopoeia; no English speakers used onomatopoeia, while seven participants across the Nepal narratives did, using distinct onomatopoeic tokens, which conformed to similar phonetic shapes. Speakers across all groups used gesture to iconically represent the earthquake, with similarities across groups regarding a preference for two hands and repetition of movement. New Zealand participants consistently used vertical gesture trajectory, while the Nepali participants used horizontal-trajectory gestures. We argue that this is likely a result of cultural context but also the interaction of housing types with the motion of an earthquake, and represents iconic information in the gestural channel that is not captured in the spoken channel. This paper illustrates the importance of considering the multimodal iconic representation of events in narrative to build an understanding of the sensory experience of an event that is shared in the retelling.
Citation
Gawne, Lauren, Kristine A. Hildebrandt, and Suzy Styles. (2025). ‘Natural disasters elicit spontaneous multimodal iconicity in onomatopoeia and gesture: Earthquake narratives from Nepal and New Zealand’, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 45/3: 448–65. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2025.2506628
Two beautiful documentary shorts made from my Syuba archive collections
The ELAR archive teamed up with Anna and Remy Sowa at Chouette Films to make shorts from the open access materials in the collection. These two films was created from footage from my Kagate (Syuba) deposit at ELAR.
The video above shows Dawa Lama harvesting honey and talking about the process. The video below features people talking about their experiences of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal. It was an interesting experience working with other people on my data, but it’s made me all the more happy that it’s open access and available for people to use. I’ve also been blown away by how beautiful the archive footage looks when it’s left in the hands of professional editors!
The ELAR blog will be featuring other videos made by Chouette over the coming weeks. It’s also just a great blog about language documentation.
Today marks the first anniversary of the first massive earthquake that devastated Nepal. It marks the end of what has been a long and horrible year for many Nepalis. Although the quakes made international headlines, the subsequent challenges have not received the same attention.
Earthquakes cause immediate destruction, but they also lead to ongoing
problems. The water table in many parts of the country has vanished into
the shaken earth, leading to a water shortage in many place.
There have also been continuing aftershocks, which not only continue to
put pressure on houses that remain standing, but also on peoples’
fragile nerves.
After Parliament finally promulgated a constitution that has been 7 years in the drafting, people in the Madhesh on the Indian border took offense at several key features and protested, resulting in a five
month shutdown of Nepal’s most vital trade route. For five months there was a shortage of medication, and fuel and gas, if available at all, was purchased at
inflated prices “on the black” (market).
Overall, the communities I work with in Lamjung and Ramechhap have been doing ok. Many whose houses were damaged have not waited for any government assistance, but have started to rebuild on their own. Their farms have meant that they have not faced the same degree of shortages as people in urban centres.
One community that suffered acutely over this past year have been the Langtangpa , who live in the Langtang region up near the Tibetan border. The earthquakes triggered huge landslides that obliterated their village. With a population of fewer than a thousand, they loss of 187 people.
In the face of all that has happened this community have started to return to their land after the winter cold to begin the process of rebuilding their homes and their lives. I’ve come to know about the Langtangpa through helping a language documentation project with archiving their materials. I’ll hopefully have more about that to share with you soon!
Another initiative has been the Langtang Memory Project. This project aims to provide a web space as well as a physical site in Langtang where the traditions, culture, language and future of the Langtangpa can be shared with everyone. One particularly poignant collection is the display of photographs found amongst the rubble of people’s homes.
If you have ever been trekking in Langtang and have photos or other items that can be shared you can contact the Memory Centre team.
Langtang before the earthquake. Image taken by Pasang Tamang, from the Langtang Memory Project.
