Noel Pearson: Native tongues imperilled (fwd)

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Noel Pearson: Native tongues imperilled

The Australian
OPINION
Noel Pearson
March 10, 2007
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21352767-7583,00.html

IN 1973, a linguist doing field work on Aboriginal Australian languages
realised he had met the last speaker of Yaygir, a language once spoken
in present-day northeast NSW. The custodian of this invaluable piece of
Australian culture, Sandy Cameron, was living in obscurity and had not
spoken Yaygir for several years.

He was, however, eager to work with his university-educated guest to
record and preserve his ancestral language. The linguist decided to
return to Cameron's home in a couple of months to finish the recording
of this national treasure.

But Cameron died before the linguist returned. A region of Australia
lost a large part of its heritage.

Such tragedies happened in many parts of Australia in our lifetime, and
are still happening. Our nation's culture and history is needlessly
impoverished.

A few years ago my old friend, Urwunjin, died as the last speaker of his
people's language from Barrow Point on the southeastern coast of Cape
York Peninsula.

Urwunjin's knowledge was at least recorded to a large extent. In the
late 1960s and into the '70s an organised effort was made by many young
anthropologists and linguists, urged by an indefatigable sponsor, Peter
Ucko, then director of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra, to describe the country's
cultures and languages before it was too late. Their salvage operation
was dubbed Before It Is Too Late or BIITL. Many of today's senior
ethnographers of Australia were involved in this push.

The original BIITL preserved a large amount of information, now archived
in Canberra. Much of this record is inaccessible to laymen, however.
When I was a boy starting primary school, an American linguist, John
Haviland, came to live with a local family two doors away from us, and
in the following years he compiled a grammar and dictionary of Guugu
Yimithirr - the language that James Cook encountered in 1770 and which
gave the world the name kangaroo, after the Guugu Yimithirr word for a
species of wallaby called gangurru.

Haviland accomplished an astonishing feat in his mastery of classical
Guugu Yimithirr. His grammar is a great work of scholarship, that is a
necessary but by itself insufficient, foundation for the maintenance of
our language long into the future.

It is hard enough for privileged people to learn languages. It is near
impossible for dysfunctional people. Few of my people can learn
anything from Haviland's published grammar, though it is an invaluable
resource.

The social inaccessibility of the scientific work compiled through the
BIITL period has not been answered with effective language transmission
efforts such as has occurred in New Zealand through indigenous language
nests. The multitude of Australian languages compared with New Zealand
means that our challenge is so much more vast and complex, but we
should learn from the strategies adopted across the Tasman.

A new BIITL is urgently needed in Australia, because we risk losing our
country's languages as spoken tongues. Intergenerational transmission
of a large number of Australia's languages is declining or has ceased.
This is not the result of Aboriginal Australian's choice to abandon our
culture.

As almost everything else in our communities, it is a result of our
desperate disadvantage. Social dysfunction disables cultural and
linguistic transmission.

Our country must understand that a new BIITL effort is an indispensable
part of reconciliation. It will be difficult to save our languages if
the gap in transmission becomes much wider than it already is. Other
than the work undertaken by AIATSIS in Canberra, the single most
important (and more promising in terms of providing a solution to the
challenge of inter-generational transmission) effort has been
undertaken through the translations of the international subsidiary of
the Wycliffe Bible Society, the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Two
languages of Cape York Peninsula, Wik Mungkan and Kuku Yalanji, have
been the subject of magisterial translations of the New Testament by
SIL, along with a number of other languages across the country.

The SIL website (www.ethnologue.com) provides an estimation of the
vitality of each of Australia's remaining indigenous languages, and the
number of languages that are on the brink of extinction should be the
cause of national consternation and urgent response.

But, notwithstanding the richness of this country's linguistic heritage,
there is almost no public recognition of this national priority. To find
an eloquent expression of the preciousness of this heritage you would
need to go back to W.E.H. Stanner's Boyer lectures of 1967. Since
Stanner there have been no prominent voices, the last being that of the
American ethnographer and author, Jared Diamond, in his 2001 Centenary
of Federation address. Reading Diamond's lecture I was struck by how it
is that the only prominent advocate on behalf of Australia's original
languages is an American.

Let me make some points about language policy. A first step is that
Australia must recognise its languages. It is ridiculous that Australia
is behind Europe in this respect. The European states have signed the
European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The status of
minority languages varies greatly, but a large number of European
minority languages are now official in the provinces where they are
spoken. But Australia has not even adopted an official listing of its
languages.

Second, the purpose of preserving and maintaining Australia's indigenous
languages is not just that these languages serve a communication purpose
within indigenous societies (for many communities they often do not),
but because they are inherently valuable as part of the country's rich
heritage. And these languages comprise the identity of their custodians
and are the primary words by which the Australian land and seascape is
named and described. These languages are intimately related to the
nature and spirit of the country that all Australians now call home.

Third, indigenous people must understand that indigenous language
transmission must move decisively from orality to literacy if there is
to be long-term maintenance. This means that indigenous children must
be fully literate in the language of learning - English - in order to
be literate in their own languages. Reliance upon oral transmission
alone will not work in the long term.

Fourth, there must be a separate domain within indigenous communities
for cultural and linguistic education from the Western education
domain. Schools are not the places for cultural and linguistic
transmission, and we must stop looking to schools to save our
languages. This is because the primary purpose of schools is for our
children to obtain a mainstream, Western education, including full
fluency in English. Schools will never be adequately equipped to solve
the transmission imperative, and all we end up doing is compromising
our children's mainstream education achievement. Indeed, without full
English literacy our children are then illiterate in their traditional
language.

Fifth, language learning must start in earliest childhood, and this
means both English and traditional languages. Children must have access
to both domains from the start if they are going to become properly
bilingual. Communities that delay the learning of English to late in
primary school in favour of traditional languages in the early years,
end up disabling their children because they remain far behind in the
language required for them to obtain a mainstream education.

Sixth, a new generation BIITL must integrate the newest technology. It
is the information technologies that provide the bridge between the
scientific record and its application to the transmission imperative
between generations. There are many breakthrough demonstrations around
the countryside of how information technology provides solutions to
cultural transmission, and these need to be brought together as part of
a concerted program.

Finally, the basic infrastructure for this national project needs to be
developed and supplied as a national responsibility. There should be
room for a lot of regional and local adaptation, but there must be a
range of off-the-shelf technical solutions developed by people with
necessary expertise at a national government agency such as AIATSIS.

There needs to be a generous government funded campaign for the
maintenance of each indigenous language employing full-time linguists
and other expert staff. Private, not-for-profit and public
organisations should work together, but language policy and adequate
funding must be provided by the national Government.

Noel Pearson is director of the Cape York Institute for Policy and
Leadership