Stop, Revive and Survive

LINGUICIDE (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating) have made Australia the unlucky country. With globalisation, homogenisation and Coca-colonisation there will be more and more groups added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples.

Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve wellbeing.

There are various ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival – for example, historical justice, diversity and employability, respectively. There is an urgent need to offer perspicacious insights relevant to language reclamation.

Revival linguistics is a new discipline, being established at Adelaide, studying comparatively and systematically the universal constraints, global mechanisms and local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world. Revival linguistics combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning. After all, language reclamation is the most extreme case of second-language learning.

Revival linguistics complements the established area of documentary linguistics, which records endangered languages before they fall asleep.

There is a need to revise the fields of grammaticography (writing grammars) and lexicography (writing dictionaries): grammars and dictionaries ought to be written for language reclamation in a user-friendly way, for communities, not only for linguists. For example, we should avoid highfalutin, often Latin-based grammatical terminology.

We should also offer communities a user-friendly spelling. Juxtapose Lutheran missionary Clamor Wilhelm Schurmann’s 1844 user-unfriendly spelling “nunyara” for the Barngarla (Parnkalla) word for “recovery”. Ignoring the English environment, this spelling resulted in the pronunciation nanYAra rather than NOONyara. While nunyara suits documentary linguistics, NOONyara would be preferred from a revival linguistic perspective.

For linguists, the first stage of any language revival must involve a long period of observation and careful listening while learning, mapping and characterising the specific needs, desires and potentials of an indigenous or minority or culturally endangered community. Only then can one inspire and assist.

That said, there are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would help revivalists and first nations’ leaders to work more efficiently. For example, it is easier to resurrect basic vocabulary and verbal conjugations than sounds and word order.

Revivalists should be realistic and abandon discouraging, counter-productive slogans such as “Give us authenticity or give us death!”

Closely related to contact linguistics, revival linguistics changes the field of historical linguistics by, for instance, weakening the family tree-model, which implies that a language has only one parent.

One day we may invent devices to “inject” a language into our brains. But until then, any attempt to reclaim a hibernating language will result in a hybrid that combines components from the revivalists’ and documenters’ mother tongues and, of course, the target sleeping language. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”

Native tongue title and language rights should be promoted. The government ought to define Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vernaculars as official languages of Australia. We must change the linguistic landscape of Whyalla and elsewhere. Signs should be in both English and the local indigenous language. We ought to acknowledge intellectual property of indigenous knowledge including language, music and dance.

Furthermore, in the future the very insights offered by revival linguistics will become part of Aboriginal intellectual property, when Slovenes or Estonians come to Australia to ask indigenous Australians to assist them in their own European language resurrection.

The punchline? One, if your language is endangered, do not allow it to fall asleep. Two, if your language falls asleep: stop, revive, survive! Three, if you revive a language, embrace the hybridity of the emerging tongue. Four, if your language is healthy, assist others in linguistic need