Australian Indigenous languages dying - and fast

by Tara Ravens

from news.com.au

AUSTRALIA is losing more indigenous languages than anywhere else in the world and it's happening at a faster rate, a researcher says. 

Jeanie Bell, a lecturer at the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education's Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics, said as few as 20 of the 230 Aboriginal languages spoken 200 years ago were still alive today. 

"Recent figures show that we're in a worse situation than anywhere else at the moment," she said. 

"We're losing more language than anywhere else in the world at a faster rate, and the decline across the globe is pretty dramatic." 

Last month, the UN's cultural agency UNESCO said some 2,500 of the 6,900 languages spoken in the world were endangered. 

There are now 199 languages in the world spoken by fewer than a dozen people. 

Ms Bell, who presented her findings at the 1st International Conference on Language documentation and Conservation in Hawaii, said that prior to British settlement there were about 230 languages, with between 500 and 600 dialects spoken throughout Australia. 

Now as few as 20 to 30 languages are considered to be healthy, most of which come from remote areas such as the Kimberleys, Arnhem Land and Central Australia. 

Even more alarming is the fact that for some of these languages there remain only 40 to 50 speakers, most of whom are well into middle age. 

"You would get some groups that would have 300 to 500 speakers, then there would be other groups that have 100 perhaps and then there would be some where there would be only 50 language speakers or less," Ms Bell said. 

"We have to be honest about the problems facing Aboriginal people trying to rescue languages on the brink of extinction and do everything we can to help them."

In order to improve efforts to preserve indigenous languages, Ms Bell's paper identified a need to improve the relationship between the community and linguists. 

"There are concerns about the usefulness of this work to the community if the linguist involved does not understand the needs of the language community," the paper said. 

But, Ms Bell admitted, efforts to preserve language were complicated and challenging. 

"You have to rely on people who still speak or know the language to be willing to participate in the process. There has to be a lot of recording," she told ABC radio. 

"It's about documenting the language and also putting it into a form they can access easily."

Fellow Batchelor Institute lecturer Gail Woods, who also presented at the conference, said a "community-based collaborative approach" was needed to the documentation of language using art and media. 

"Yes, we need the linguists to keep doing the work they are doing, but we also need the language speakers to have more confidence and skills of their own to establish their own language documentation processes," she said. 

Ms Bell said culture was lost when a language died. 

"When you lose a language your are losing the whole connection to cultural practices,'"she said.

"It's the knowledge that comes with the cultural practices that is passed on through the language that becomes weakened."