Finding the right words

Learning a local Indigenous language might just change how you see the world.

The humanist and writer E.M Forster once mused, “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?” It beautifully sums up the intricate links between thinking and speaking, words and culture. These themes are explored in the latest ABC Open film in the ‘Mother Tongue’ series, focussing on the GunaiKurnai language of East Gippsland.

Dr Doris Paton and Lynnette Solomon-Dent have been involved in reviving the Gunai language for the past twenty years. Doris’ niece, Hollie Johnson, recently came on board as well. Hollie teaches songs and words in Gunai to children at the Woolum Bellum kindergarten in Morwell.

“Language isn’t just about speaking, it’s your whole way of life,” explained Lynnette Solomon-Dent. “It tells you what’s in the country, what the stories are, what your obligations are to each other.”

Unpack a single word and you can start to understand a system of kin relations and cultural obligations that are still alive and well. The word for ‘mother’ doubles as the word used for Lynnette’s sisters. If anything happened to Lynnette, her sisters would automatically become mothers to her children. It’s all there in the language.

Dr Doris Paton explains that there are plenty of words that literally have no English translation. There is no single word in Gunai for ‘tree’.

The word they use to name a tree will depend on the food it yields, what species it is and what cultural and medicinal function it might serve.
Born of some of the world’s greatest environmentalists, it makes sense that the Gunai language expresses the intimate knowledge its interlocutors share of their natural world.
The scope of words we have and use reveals a lot about what we care about, where our attention lies and what kind of world we live in.

In the Arrernte language of Central Australia, there is a single word for ‘the smell of rain’ and for ‘debris from trees floating, left over from a flood’.
The Yindiny language spoken south of Cairns has highly specialised terms for noises.
‘Ganga’ means ‘the sound of someone’s feet approaching’ and ‘yuyurungul’ means ‘the shushing noise of a snake sliding through the grass’.

Pitjantjatjara has no words for numbers beyond three, but like Gunai and countless other Indigenous languages, it contains extremely complex vocabulary surrounding kinship relations and natural phenomena – right down to describing types of lightening and the spectrum of colours in the sky.
A language can bring you into a community or it can keep you apart from one. Anybody who has travelled in a foreign country without a grasp of its language can attest to the bewildering sense of disconnection from the people, landscape and culture.

Words can help you see beyond your peripheral vision. Dr Doris Paton hopes that Australians will turn their heads to embrace the many different languages and countries we have on board our great big island, and all the little islands surrounding it.

“[Our languages] are quite distinct like in Europe, and that sharing of language also shares knowledge, as it does in European languages.”

The biggest difference is that unlike the majority of European languages, our Indigenous languages are vanishing at an alarming rate.

Across the country, people like Doris, Lynnette and Hollie are racing against the clock to revive their ancestral languages, protect over 40,000 years of knowledge and offer all of us the opportunity to better understand this country and its Indigenous caretakers, from the inside out.