A Living Language

Where do the names for animals and things come from? Someone at some stage made a decision: we’re going to call this animal a platypus. Actually is was during the late 18th century: from Greek platupous ‘flatfooted,’ from platus ‘flat’ + pous ‘foot.’

So being that it’s an Australian animal, what was it called in Aboriginal Languages?

Many of the languages along the coast of NSW were lost when Aboriginal people were punished and even gaoled for speaking their own languages in the Missions.

So much so that the Elders wouldn’t teach it to their children for fear of what may happen to them if they were caught speaking it. Even today some Elders are scared to learn their own language.
The Dhanggati language is one that has miraculously survived through a stroke of good luck or cruel irony.

Dhanggati was spoken right up until the sixties because of the work camps up in the Valley, where people were left alone to get on with working for white landowners, far away from the Mission where language was actively discouraged.

While in the 30s the Aboriginal Protection Board decided to move the Bellbrook Mission to Forster, this didn’t happen, apparently due to objections from the white landowners, who relied on their Dhanggati workforce. Thus the language survived and Dhanggati people from Bellbrook have kept that connection with country.

By the 60s the work conditions had changed and social pressures discouraged bilingualism in favour of English.

Over that last 20 years, Dhanggati Elder Aunty Esther Quinlin from Bellbrook and Caroline Bradshaw from Kempsey have been working with Muurrbay linguist Amanda Lissarrague (all three pictured above), to revive what was left of their language from old recordings and work done by amateur collectors and other linguists from the 19th and 20th centuries, combined with knowledge remembered by today’s Elders.

Some 1500 words and suffixes and a wide range of grammatical structures remain and have been described in a grammar dictionary and used in learning resources with the support of the Dhanggati Language Group consisting of Elders from the Aboriginal community of the Macleay Valley in NSW.

But there were no records of animal names such platypus. They have had to use their understanding of word building in Dhanggati to make up their own name. This is the creative licence they must take if a language is to be a living thing.
They had a word for duck ‘guwali’ and the suffix for resemble is ‘-gawayi’ so the new word for platypus in Dhanggati is now ‘guwaligawayi … like a duck’.