Celebrating Aboriginal Language Survival

On this 26 January here at Superlinguo we want to recognise and celebrate the survival of Australian Aboriginal languages, despite the killing of people and cultures, and the widespread dispossession that white settlement caused.

For those reading from across the seas, some context: today is ‘Australia Day’, which is our national public holiday to mark the the settlement invasion of this land by white colonists in 1788. It’s meant to be a national day and a celebration. But for many Aboriginal people it is a day of trauma, and for many non-Aboriginal people it’s a day of deep shame. For some, it’s known as Survival Day, and for some Invasion Day.

Here on the blog today, by focusing on Aboriginal languages, we celebrate the continuity of many Aboriginal languages, despite deliberate efforts to assimilate them with English. For example, members of the Stolen Generations were often forbidden to speak their languages after being taken from their families and put into various forms of institutional or foster care run by white people. That is just one example of the policies of cultural and linguistic assimilation imposed upon Aboriginal people.

It’s estimated that, pre-white settlement, there were around 250 Aboriginal languages spoken on the continent now known as Australia. As the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages’s website notes, some of these had several varieties, and there were altogether about 500 language varieties used across Australia. It was usual that an Aboriginal person could speak multiple languages, often between 3 and 5, facilitating contact between language groups across many regions.

Now, more than three-quarters of Aboriginal languages have been lost and most of those remaining are considered threatened.

Here at Superlinguo, as white Australians authoring this blog, we are always seeking to learn more and grow our understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and of various language communities’ approaches to their languages.

In the spirit of continuing to educate ourselves as white Australians and supporting great projects in language revitalisation, today we’ve gathered a quick set of links to further reading and viewing, to grow our understanding and share knowledge:

• The Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages – a digital archive of endangered literature in Australian Indigenous languages from around the Northern Territory
• The Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages (VACL) – working to retrieve, revive and strengthen Indigenous Languages for Victorian Aboriginal people.
• Maintaining Indigenous languages: revering a distant past or contributing to a better future? (via Crikey’s Fully(Sic) blog)
• Indigenous languages won’t survive if kids are learning only English – on bilingual teaching & learning in Australian schools (via The Conversation)
• Buckskin – the film: Jack Buckskin is on a mission to renew Kaurna, a language once almost extinct, and through that and dance, inspire a new generation to connect with the land and culture of his ancestors.
• Australian federal parliamentary inquiry (2012) into language learning in Indigenous communities – final report

Email us superlinguo[at]gmail.com, or tweet to @superlinguo?.

Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.