The 2011 Census shows that 83 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Islander people only speak English at home. About one in 10 speak an Australian Indigenous language. Melinda Holden is a Warrgamay and Goreng Goreng woman who works at the Central Queensland Language Centre. She says preserving and revitalising Indigenous languages is often a race against time.
“Our elders that know some of the language are passing on and there’s not enough time or resources to actually record them and save those languages so what we’re finding we have to do now is start from scratch.”
The Central Queensland Language Centre looks after a region comprising up to 50 Indigenous languages but with limited resources they can only focus on reviving 11 languages. Their mission is to get these languages to a standard where they can be taught in early childhood centres, pre-schools and state schools. “To describe your country, you really have to have your language because without language you cannot describe your culture, or your language or your country. You use your language for everything about your culture. And the sad thing is we only use the English language to describe our country at the moment and culture.”
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies states that over 250 Indigenous language groups existed prior to European settlement. Most of the remaining languages are critically endangered. Melinda Holden believes colonisation is the root cause of the significant decline of Australia’s traditional languages. “When invasion happened most of our language people weren’t allowed to speak their language. It was a no-no. They would get into trouble if they started talking language, so when you talk to a lot of people like my mother’s age they were never allowed to speak their language so it was lost.”
Western-Australia-based linguist Rosie Sitorus says the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from their traditional homelands during the Stolen Generations* era had a devastating impact on Indigenous languages. “The movement of people and the intermingling of groups that necessarily changes language. So when you take a language from where it was originally spoken - a small community and you take that language from the country and the reference point, I suppose from where it was spoken, and then you put those language all in a big group together, there’s going to be language change and in some cases language loss as well.”
Rosie Sitorus is a linguist based at the Irra Wangga Language Centre. The centre preserves and restores seven languages in the mid-west region of Western Australia. She says in some cases there may be only one speaker of a native language left from the community. "If you go back to a couple of generations, to the stolen generation they weren’t actually removed onto Missions, So just by the luck of the draw you find that there was a family that didn't get affected by the stolen generation. And so that family might have people now who are in their middle age who still speak language all the way through. They might have an extended family who don't because they were affected by the stolen generation.”
Sitorus says it’s natural for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to speak multiple dialects. “It’s still the case today. True it was the case in the past but still a bit in contemporary Australia in lots of places particularly in WA in the Kimberly region, you’ll find that there are kids who travel all around the Kimberly, all the different countries there. They’ll speak bits of language from all over and its great because these incredibly smart, incredibly linguistically agile kids and adults, who can speak all these different languages, and that's a really unrecognised talent.”
Melinda Holden has been working with a linguist and traditional owners from Central Queensland to help restore three native languages from the region – Yiiman [Ye-men], Byelle [Ba-Yee-Lee] and Taribelang [Tree-ber-lang]. “There has only been scattered bits around here and there so the linguist will help us to identify some of the word lists that may be theirs and work with us to enable them to borrow some of the languages from the appropriate neighbours so that's how hard that is.”
In a 2001 paper titled ‘State of Indigenous languages in Australia’, authors Patrick McConvell and Nicholas Thieberger found that the number of Indigenous languages spoken fluently and regularly by all age groups in Australia has decreased by 90% since 1800. They predict if this trend continues Australia could face the extinction of all of its native languages by as early as 2050.
Rosie Sitorus says with less than 20 traditional languages still in active use this assumption is entirely possible. She draws on the example of the seven native languages the Irra Wangga Language Centre supports – all of which are under threat of extinction. “Even for languagesthat there are no more fluent speakers people have reconnected and reclaimed those languages from old recordings that were done in the 60s and 70s and are now working to create resources from them. The language might not look like it looked pre 1788 but its doesn't necessarily mean that it’s a bad thing that existing in different way being reclaimed and regenerated by today and future generations can still really link that language with the culture identity of the people.”
Professor Gillian Wigglesworth is the director of the Research Unit for Indigenous Language at the University of Melbourne. She says the survival of Australia’s native languages lies in the hands of the younger generation. “There’s probably between 110 and 120 languages which still has speakers but they’re often older speakers and there’s only probably between 14 and 17 of those Indigenous languages that still being learnt by the children and the bottom line is that if the children aren’t learning the language its probably not going to survive.”
(*Stolen Generations - Between 1910-1970, many Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families as a result of various government policies. The generations of children removed under these policies became known as theStolen Generations.)
