By GreenMag
What do you do with a classroom full of children who all speak Kunwinjku? Greg Dickson looks at how the NT Government is treating Aboriginal languages and English teaching in remote schools.
The traditional languages of Aboriginal and Islander Australians have had a rough trot ever since Europeans arrived and decided to stay for good. Long the subject of ridicule, denigration and oppression, the original languages of Australia are now known to be amazingly complex, diverse and, well, just plain clever. In his book Dying Words, linguist Nick Evans tells how in Kunwinjku, a language currently spoken by a few thousand people in the Kakadu region, there are not only distinct words for each species of kangaroo but there are different verbs describing various hopping styles of different macropods – thus a male antilopine wallaby kamawudme (renderable only as “it hops” in English) while the female of the species kadjalwahme (English: “hops”). A wallaroo, on the other hand, kanjedjme (again, “hops”) and an agile wallaby doesn’t move in any of these ways but rather kalurlhlurlme (hmm… “hops”?).
Whereas an enlightened government might choose to celebrate a language like Kunwinjku and linguistic diversity in general, the Northern Territory government’s Education Department has gone the other way. Given the task of operating classrooms full of schoolchildren who speak excellent Kunwinjku or other Aboriginal languages, the NT Government created a policy in 2008 excluding these languages from being used as the language of instruction for the first four hours of every school day in every NT school.
- This article originally appears at:
- http://greens.org.au/node/5683
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