How do we preserve a language? Linguistics expert Alan Dench explores Indigenous languages in Australia and the impact of preservation on reconciliation.
2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages. A few years ago, the United Nations reported that of the six-and-a-half-thousand languages spoken around the world, about 40 per cent are in danger of dying out.
Professor Alan Dench is Professor of Linguistics at Curtin University, and author of several books on the topic of Aboriginal languages.
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You can read the full transcript for the episode here.
Jess: This is The Future Of, where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better. I'm Jessica Morrison.
David: And I'm David Blayney.
Jess: 2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages. A few years ago, the United Nations reported that of the six-and-a-half-thousand languages spoken around the world, about 40 per cent are in danger of dying out.
With us today to discuss the future of Australian Indigenous languages is Alan Dench, Professor of Linguistics and Pro Vice Chancellor of the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University, and author of several books on the topic of Aboriginal languages. Alan, what does it mean to preserve a language?
Professor Alan Dench: That's a good question. What does it mean to preserve a language? I think most people tend to think that preserving a language means keeping the language as it always was and always will be pretty much used for all of the things that it was always used for. But think of some samples, like, well, take Latin: We tend to think of Latin as a dead language, but Latin has been preserved and it's still used as a spoken language – in the Vatican, for example – but used for very specific purposes.
So if we take that example and think, okay, languages are used in different contexts for different things, by different people to achieve different ends, and they're very complex. So when you say preserve a language, you might think, well, I'll preserve this language or this bit of a language for these purposes, but a lot of it we won't necessarily keep.
Jess: Is it possible though to preserve them all? There's so many. There's, as we heard, you know, six-and-a-half-thousand languages spoken around the world.
Professor Alan Dench: Probably not, no. Not only can't we, I then think, but should we? There are questions around whether that's even a good thing to be thinking about. I mean, languages are ultimately there for a reason. Speakers use languages to achieve particular ends. And the world has changed a lot. And we used to live in kind of small agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies where there were a few hundred people who were interacting with each other and they had their own language.
Now we don't live like that so much anymore, at least in most of the world we don't. And so we're living in much larger organisations and communities with much broader reach, and it makes sense that our languages have that broader reach and quite a function.
David: What strategies are being used to preserve Australian Indigenous languages?
Professor Alan Dench: First of all, we recognise that Australia has already lost a lot of languages. So not only is Australia one of the hotspots for losing species, we're also a hotspot for losing language and culture as well, unfortunately. We've lost a lot of the originally 250 or Australian Aboriginal languages. And those that do remain, there's only a handful that are really being learned naturally and organically by children in those communities.
David: So, we started with 250 ... how many do we have left?
Professor Alan Dench: Depends how you count and what your counting. It also depends, if I take the Latin example again, how much of a language is there before you say it's not, it's gone or is still there, and those kinds of questions. I'd say we're down below a hundred, certainly; some would argue we're down below 10, if you're looking at languages that are being transmitted to the next generation in the way that kids normally learn languages.
But having said that, and to come back to your earlier question, there are interventions. People are intervening by deliberately teaching languages at school in, say, kindergartens, and then adults are learning languages as well.
Jess: There's now Aussie hip-hop artists like Baker Boy, Electric Fields, that are incorporating Indigenous language into their lyrics. Do you think that popular culture is going to be a powerful way to keep these languages alive? Talking just sort of Australian Indigenous language?
Professor Alan Dench: Absolutely, yeah. I think languages are ultimately really a great badge of identity for their speakers. By speaking a particular language, I mark myself out as a member of a community and I make myself as a member of that and exclude other communities. So it makes sense then that if we want younger people to be learning a language than the language has to mean something to their identity, has to fit in with their other markers of identity, has to be something that they can identify with. Certainly seeing language used in popular music is an obvious way of it connecting to people and to their interests.
David: So, does the preservation of Indigenous languages play a broader role in reconciliation?
Professor Alan Dench: Yeah, it certainly does. Again, it comes to that point of identity. Languages identify communities and by recognising the languages we are recognising those communities, and putting them on an equal footing with all the other communities that we would recognise who have their own languages and have their own cultures. So, a real step towards saying, "Yes, we understand that you speak a different language, that you have this very rich linguistic heritage that has been inherited over thousands of years" – we're saying, "We think you're important, and you've got something that's special".
Jess: You talked before about school children learning languages in kindergarten. Do you think that Australian school children should have the option to learn an Indigenous language as their second language, as opposed to perhaps Asian or European languages?
Professor Alan Dench: Yes, certainly, and many of them do. There are plenty of opportunities. It varies from area to area, from state to state, but lots of kids do have that opportunity.
David: Which States have been doing this the most the most?
Professor Alan Dench: I can't tell you exactly the most, but there are language revival programs in Adelaide for example, there's quite a bit in New South Wales where there are languages being used and being brought back in schools. And depending on the school you're in, across Western Australia there are schools where Indigenous languages are being presented to kids as well.
Jess: We continue to see new land developments, given Anglo names. We've had the newly established Cygnia Cove nearby, and the city of Cockburn recently named a new suburb Treeby, after early colonists – despite calls for an Indigenous name. So how important is it our suburbs and landmarks ...
David: Plus, we had Elizabeth Quay.
Jess: Exactly.
David: She's got quite a bit named after her already, dare I say.
Jess: (Laughs). How important is it that these places are given Indigenous names, in terms of that making it more, not in popular culture, but just more recognisable.
Professor Alan Dench: I think it's very important. I think the first point to make is that it's not as if these places don't already have names.
Jess: Very true.
Professor Alan Dench: It's very much the case that there are places across the Australian landscape that have a rich history of naming. And we often haven't recorded all of that, necessarily, and some of the knowledge of it's been lost. But in most of the parts of the continent, people do remember the names of the old places. So why not use those names?
Jess: It's a little bit like with the dual naming of Fremantle – that already had an Indigenous name. We're just now recognising it.
Professor Alan Dench: That's right. But there are many suburbs across Perth that are named for the original Indigenous names. I live in Carine – that's an Aboriginal name. Karrinyup's the same name basically, but it's in two adjacent suburbs. Yokine is a local ... Mount Yokine. 'Yokkyne' probably – the word for dingo, I suspect. It's named for probably lots of dingos howling on the hill; I don't know for certain. So there are quite a lot of names that we have. Balga is the ...
David: Quite a lot of towns, as well. Like Kojonup, for example.
Professor Alan Dench: Yeah. So there's plenty of names we already have; there's no reason why we shouldn't continue to do that – extend it.
Jess: So maybe it's more around education or awareness, because I didn't know that those names – the well-known suburbs to me in in Perth – have an Indigenous background or that's the Indigenous word.
Professor Alan Dench: That's right. I think there's quite a lot that people don't recognise that these things are there. I remember working at Onslow in the Northwest and the name of the place was Beadon Creek – B-E-A-D-O-N. I thought it must have been an early European explorer. And then I learned enough of the local language to realise that 'burdunn' was the local word for quartz and white sand. So it was named after the white beaches that were nearby the creek mouth, and it had been written down in something that looked like it was a Western name.
Jess: Wow. We mentioned at the introduction, that this year is the International Year of Indigenous Languages. Is there anything being done at a higher national level to preserve Australian Indigenous languages?
Professor Alan Dench: There's certainly a heightened awareness this year and that that's true I think especially amongst Aboriginal communities, Indigenous communities around the country, who are doing things themselves. They're doing a whole lot of celebrations around about recognising their languages. They're taking the opportunity to apply for funding support to introduce language programs, and there's a wider recognition across government and education departments, et cetera, to promote the programs they're already engaged in. So I think there's been quite a raised level of interest because of this. And what we can hope is that that momentum will continue.
Jess: What are some of the things happening in the Indigenous communities you mentioned? what are some examples of what they're trying to do to preserve these languages, because they would be the keepers of the language.
Professor Alan Dench: Okay, to give you an example I'm involved in: When I was an honours student, way back in the late seventies, I had my first experience of working on Australian Aboriginal language in Carnarvon, which happened to be the town I grew up in. I went back with my teacher, who'd just finished a PhD, and while he was working on a number of other languages, he suggested to me that I speak with some speakers of Yingkarta, which is the language of Carnarvon.
So I collected some material in Yingkarta at the time, and over the next three or four years I was doing work on other languages, collected more Yingkarta, wrote up a grammar and a short word list. Now, by that time, the community was already losing the language, so there were only a handful of speakers.
Jess: How long a time period are we talking about?
Professor Alan Dench: Well that was in the mid eighties by then.
Jess: It's not very long, really.
Professor Alan Dench: No, so that was almost gone then, I guess. My colleague Peter, who's at the University of London, was contacted by the community saying – because he'd been in touch with them – and they said, "Well, could you come back and make a dictionary for us?" So, he's retired, he's come back to Australia for different periods of time, and he and I are working now on putting together a dictionary of Yingkarta to go with the grammar that I wrote some years ago. The community are very keen, and Peter's been in Carnarvon running workshops with the local community asking how would they like this presented, what form of dictionary would best suit them for their needs and so on.
These are the kinds of things that are happening. That, I think, was a grassroots thing that had probably been there thinking about it for some years, but this International Year of Indigenous Languages gave them the impetus to say, "Let's get on and do something now".
Jess: And that's amazing that that's happening in that community. Is it widespread, though, are around communities around Australia?
Professor Alan Dench: Yeah, I think a lot of communities are doing the same sorts of things. They're doing it in different ways, they're contacting different people. It's very much a grassroots thing I think. But there's also some assistance from funding bodies to be working on this.
Jess: Do you think it has to be grassroots for it to be able to take off?
Professor Alan Dench: If you want to preserve a language then it has to come from the speakers themselves. There's nothing that I can do as a linguist that says here's the materials, bang, bang, bang, it's all there. If there's not the drive from the community to do something, and not the direction from the community about what they think is going to best work for them, then really it's not going to work. It really has to have that motivation from the community as speakers themselves.
David: Other than the names of flora and fauna, there aren't all that many Indigenous words that have made its way into everyday vocabulary. So we got 'billabong', for example. How can we encourage broader use of Indigenous languages among the whole community?
Professor Alan Dench: I'll answer that with the points you made earlier, which was that education about what you already have isn't a bad start. Our local language Noongar has given more words to the English language than any other Aboriginal language, other than the Sydney language.
Jess: Really?
Professor Alan Dench: Think about all of the animals and plants that we have around here that we recognised. There's the jarrah tree, karri tree; our local state animal emblem, numbat, is a Noongar word, 'noombyat'. And we have chuditch, we have a whole range of things. Quendas – you know what a quenda is, right? Little bandicoots, or quoondi/quenda, depending on the dialect. So we have lots of local words for fauna and flora that are borrowed directly from Noongar. Tuart trees, if you don't know those – so, all kinds of things.
We're not necessarily aware that we already have a rich legacy of the local languages in the English that we speak in Western Australia. So maybe the first step, in terms of this, is recognising that, celebrating that and maybe saying, well, what other words can we introduce? So instead of talking about grass trees, we can talk about balgas, and we have that as a name of a suburb. So we can have that also as the way we talk about the very common tree we find around town.
Jess: Where do you think that drive needs to come from? Or not drive, but how do we make that happen? where does, how does that start that awareness? who's responsibility is it?
Professor Alan Dench: I guess it's everyone's responsibility. I don't think we want to say it's the responsibility of the Aboriginal community alone. It shouldn't be. Why should it be their responsibility to overcome the lack of our understanding and awareness? It's our business and our responsibility to do that. It can start through education; it can start through telling kids that these things that you use every day, are Noongar words.
Jess: I think that brings us to the end of our discussion. Thank you very much Alan for coming in and sharing your expert knowledge on this very interesting topic.
Professor Alan Dench: Absolute pleasure.
David: You've been listening to The Future Of – a podcast powered by Curtin University. If you have any questions about today's topic, please get in touch by following the links. Bye for now.