Compensation For Lost Languages

Israeli-born Ghil’ad Zuckermann, a professor of linguistics and endangered languages at Adelaide University, said of the 250 known Aboriginal languages, only 15 were widely spoken or used by all age groups within a community.

”Nearly 95 per cent of Aboriginal languages are either dead or about to die,” Professor Zuckermann said. ”These languages were killed by colonisation. There were many cases where the languages weren’t allowed to be spoken or children were taken away, and other reasons.”

Professor Zuckermann, an Australian Research Council Discovery Fellow, said a person’s cultural connection to their language was more significant than their connection to the land and compensation for lost languages should take precedence over native title payments.

”Why not have native tongue title? Why is it that Aboriginal people get compensated for loss of land and not loss of language?” he said. ”In my opinion, your language is much more important. If you want to bean count, you could quantify a language at $100 million or so.”

The Oxford and Cambridge-educated academic moved to Adelaide last month to take up the chair in linguistics after teaching in the UK, China, Israel, Singapore and Slovakia.

His views on the need for international languages to evolve and adapt have often angered purists, who believe dialects need to be preserved in their original forms.

Professor Zuckermann said it was valid to question the millions of dollars to revive languages, but he said the economic benefits outweighed the cost. ”In the process of language revival in schools, Aboriginal people learn literacy and computer skills, that is a happy byproduct and they become more employable,” he added.

”When you revive a language you can give people who have lost their way in life their pride. These people are less likely to need mental health support, they’re less likely to be alcohol addicts.”

Professor Zuckermann said the nation faced huge problems because it had a monolingual mindset which could impede its ability to revive languages.

”People don’t see the advantage of different languages,” he said. ”They say Aboriginal people should learn English to solve a lot of their problems. But bilingual people tend to speak English better.”