A Queensland academic has come up with what's being termed the first online searchable and extendable dictionary for the Indigenous Yolngu languages.
Creator John Greatorex, from Charles Darwin University, said it was a way to make the languages accessible to students and researchers around the world.
John Greatorex speaks to SBS Radio:
The Yolngu come from remote north-east Arnhem Land in Australia's north.
Mr Greatorex said students and others interested in their languages would no longer need to buy CDs or apps to access them.
"Most people who are looking at languages and studying languages have computers, but often they don't have CD or DVD drives now," he said.
Mr Greatorex said up to 80 per cent of the students of the Yolngu languages were external, including large numbers of Japanese and German students.
"Particularly Japanese seem to have a relationship of understanding," he said, "a relationship with their environment where they're keen to learn from other peoples about their connection with the environment."
He said the Yolngu languages revealed a deep connection between the people and the environment.
"Not only are these old societies, but, also, from my perspective, very modern cultures and languages reflecting a profoundly rich connection with the environment," he said.
"And [it's in] a way in which, I would hope, Western cultures and many other cultures around the world could learn from the complex relationship that these languages have with the environment in a sustainable way."
Mr Greatorex said an important aspect of the dictionary was anybody who discovered a new word or new meaning of a word could send it to a temporary database for consideration. A team of Yolngu advisers to the university and Yolngu elders would then decide upon its entry into the dictionary.
