In the Australian Western Desert Aboriginal people use a rich repertoire of special speech styles incorporating speech, song, sign language, gesture and drawing. These speech styles, used in secular and ceremonial contexts, are a highly valued yet endangered part of the traditions of desert people. This project will take a multidisciplinary approach to the documentation of verbal art forms from the Western Desert family of languages – specifically Ngaanyatjarra, Ngaatjatjarra and Pitjantjatjara – spoken by approximately 2000 people in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands region of south-east Western Australia. It will provide a significant record of these oral practices and provide rich data sets for analyses that will enhance our understandings of how multimodal communication systems work across Australian desert communities. It will also shed light on the relationship between traditional multimodal communication forms and multimodal computer mediated communication. ng Primary investigator: Inge Kral