AUSTRALIA – A Language Extinction Hotspot

Language is central to the identity of Australian Aboriginal people. They believe that the their language is connected with the landscape and their ancestors. According to Dr Rachel Nordlinger, languages are a conceptual way of looking at the world. Dr Nordlinger is an Associate Professor and Reader of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at The University of Melbourne, Australia. Due to the decline in Indigenous languages here in Australia, and many other parts of the world, we have lost the worldview of many peoples and will continue to do so.

Dr Nordlinger stated in an interview with Up Close – research, opinion and analysis podcast from The University of Melbourne, that a staggering 95% of people speak only 5% of the world’s languages. Many thousands of languages may become extinct over the next 100 years and Australia is considered to be an extinction ‘Hotspot’.

At the time of European settlement here in Australia, Nordlinger estimated there were around 800 to 900 varieties of Aboriginal language spoken. Of the varieties, at least 250 of those were thought to be completely distinct languages, the others were dialects derived from those languages. From those 250 distinct languages Nordlinger suggests that 100 to 120 of those now have fluent speakers, another 80 to 100 are only spoken by a small number of older indigenous people and as little as 20 to 25 are still identified as being ‘healthy’ or ‘strong’ (meaning a language that is actively transmitted to and used by children) and spoken by most members of the community.

Australia has suffered the largest and most rapid loss of languages known to history. There are many factors that contribute to this. One being that the indigenous languages of Australia were all oral. Therefore when a language no longer had any fluent speakers a part of the language was lost in the area the language was connected to. This not only meant a loss of language in that area, but a partial loss of their culture. Another main accelerator of the loss of these languages is the government’s decision to allocate reserves of land commonly known as stations, missions or reserves on which Aboriginal people could live.

While the government ran some Aboriginal stations, others were in the control of missionaries such as those of the Anglican, Lutheran and Moravian Churches. Regardless of their secular or religious management, life on Aboriginal stations revolved around efforts to control and ‘civilise’ Aboriginal people. As time progressed Aboriginal people started to encourage their children to speak English when they attended school in order to avoid being punished for speaking an indigenous language. This was still happening to children in the 1960?s.

Today the only strong Aboriginal languages still spoken are located in some of the most remote and least populated areas of the continent. These areas include the Kimberley (Western Australia), Arnhamland (Northern Territory), far north Queensland and Central Australia.

The three main languages that are spoken in Central Australia are Walpiri, Pitjantjatjara and Arrernte. Walpiri is spoken in the northern parts of Central Australia, Pitjantjatjara the south west of Central Australia where Uluru is, and Arrernte which is spoken in Alice Springs and the areas that surround it. This includes Santa Teresa east of Alice Springs and Hermansberg to the west.

Australian Aboriginal languages are known worldwide for having kinship categories. Murrinh-Patha is a language spoken by over 2,000 people, most of whom live in Wadeye in the Northern Territory. It is one of the languages that has kinship categories encoded grammatically.

Nordlinger said that the Murrinh-Patha grammatical structure forces you to encode whether or not the people involved in a group are related to each other as siblings. Murrinh-Patha is the only language known to encode a sibling category in this way. Murrinh-Patha is also one of the few indigenous languages that may have increased its speakers since European settlement.

According to Nordlinger one way to preserve the extant indigenous languages in Australia is to document them. To go to the communities and start at the beginning. Then get into the grammar, followed by the creation stories and begin to create dictionaries. The only problem is that so much of the language is extrinsically connected with the culture that it may never be documented. Secret men’s and women’s business is only passed on through proper initiation practices and therefore can only survive if it is passed on to future generations.