“Australia is amazing because humans have been there for 50,000 years and they represent an unbroken link to the past in a way that the other places on earth don’t,” said David Harrison, linguistics professor at Swarthmore College, to BBC News. For thousands of years, Aborigines controlled the continent through geographically specific nations. At the time of English colonization in 1778, there were almost 700 distinct nations. Within those nations, at least 200 tribal languages were spoken – but now they are rapidly disappearing.
Of the several hundred languages, only 20 are now in common use. This drastic decrease in language diversity garnered Australia National Geographic’s label of “most endangered language zone.”
While there is a constant ebb and flow of language usage with the quantity of speakers always changing, colonization was a catalyst for the disappearance of Aboriginal languages.
“Such great language loss is proof of the overwhelming affect of colonization,” said junior and Native American Club President Marshall Jeffries.
“Colonizers did all that they could to wipe out indigenous cultures,” said Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology Tom Guthrie. “This had a huge effect on language loss.”
The Aborigines Protection Board was established in 1883 to assimilate Aborigines into English culture. The Board forced Aborigines onto reservations, rationed food and supplies, and banned the speaking of native tongues.
Young children were separated from their parents and put into white “training homes” where boys were taught how to be field hands and girls were raised as servants.
Sally Morgan, raised in a training home, said to BBC News, “The children were taught to be ashamed of their Aboriginality . Some never knew they were Aboriginal.”
This separation caused a schism within Aboriginal cultures where older generations spoke the traditional languages but children only spoke English. This halted communication between elders and youth and led to Aboriginal deculturation and isolation.
“A language is a way of viewing the world, because it is how you describe it, which is culturally specific,” Jeffries said.
Without a way to describe experiences in a tongue that was personal to themselves, their homelands or histories, many Aborigines felt isolated.
“The local history for Aboriginal people is one of dispossession,” said Iris Lovett-Gardiner, who was raised in one of the Board’s mission houses, to BBC News. “This has resulted in the total loss of our language and the loss, by most of those in our community, of a sense of belonging to a family.”
Such disappearance of language and its subsequent effects are not limited to Aboriginal groups.
Globally, one language becomes extinct every two weeks and two of National Geographic’s five “hotspots” for language loss are in the United States. The Northwest Pacific Plateau and Oklahoma are designated as at risk for language extinction.
“Most of the world’s indigenous populations were and are severely oppressed,” Jeffries said.
Language and cultural loss of the American Indian occurred in a similar fashion to that of the Aborigines, including federally funded assimilation programs and legislation banning religious practices.
Although such laws and programs are defunct, the effects are evident as many languages are now limited to one elderly generation of speakers. Thus, revitalization efforts are urgent.
Only one state in Australia, New South Wales, has a comprehensive language restoration program, but revitalization is occurring on a local scale.
Regional Aboriginal Language Centers (RALCs) are community-based organizations that offer translation, tutoring and education.
Revitalization efforts within the United States are also following a similar route as in Australia. In North Carolina, home to eight American Indian tribes, tribal schools have been created to teach children traditional tongues and practices.
While any restorative effort is helpful, many are coming from outside the indigenous community, which can be sociologically problematic.
“Why are white Australians, or Americans for that matter, so concerned?” Guthrie said. “Why after centuries of wiping out everything indigenous do they suddenly want to go looking for it?”
The answer could be imperialistic nostalgia. The term refers to colonizers who feel nostalgia for the culture they helped to exterminate.
“They think, ‘if we can help preserve them, then imperialism wasn’t so bad,'” Guthrie said.
Although such controversial issues swirl around the extinction of indigenous languages, around the world there is hope.
With efforts from local tribal schools to elderly speakers teaching their great-grandchildren vocabulary to concerned outsiders, there is a possibility that the languages of the Aborigines and countless other indigenous cultures will stand the test of time.
Related Link: “Old Man” Patrick Nanudjul speaking Magati Ke
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/langhotspots/hotspots/NCA/resources/Magati_ke.wav