‘What Happens Next?’: What Do We Lose When Languages Die?

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Dr Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world, and asks the experts what will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future?

I'm Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

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Dr Susan Carland: Before European contact, Australia was home to over 265 Indigenous languages and 600 dialects. Now, fewer than 10 of those languages are considered strong. How can we preserve disappearing languages? Why does language evolve, and where’s it headed? Let’s find out as we take a look at language on What Happens Next?.

Inala Cooper: Our languages were taken away from us at the commencement of colonisation, really.

Karen Yin: In my work, I do see a lot of language that promotes equity. Alice Gaby: Connection to Country, a connection to family, a connection to culture. It’s an identity.

John Bradley: Any group that has been heavily colonised, where the languages are asleep, the journey is amazing.

Dr Susan Carland: Associate Professor John Bradley is Acting Deputy Director of the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. He’s worked alongside Indigenous communities in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory for over 30 years. John Bradley, it’s an absolute delight to have you joining us on the podcast.

John Bradley: Thank you, Susan.

Dr Susan Carland: How many languages do you speak?

John Bradley: Three Indigenous languages: Yanyuwa, Garawa, and Kriol. I have a working knowledge of Hebrew, and a working knowledge of German, and a working knowledge of Tibetan.

Dr Susan Carland: That’s a broad suite of languages.

John Bradley: I’ve always loved languages, ever since I was a little kid.

Dr Susan Carland: Right. And is that what prompted you to become interested in Indigenous languages?

John Bradley: Well, I got thrown into a community when I was 19 years old.

I’d graduated with a degree in primary school teaching. Victoria said I was too young to teach in a Victorian school, so I got sent to the Northern Territory, and I arrived in a place where there was a lot going on, and language was one of them. And I thought, “Wow, Okay.”

Dr Susan Carland: So you speak three Indigenous languages?

John Bradley: Yeah.

Dr Susan Carland: How many Indigenous languages do we still have living in Australia today?

John Bradley: OK, so of the … what we think of about 265 at the time of colonisation, there’s probably about a hundred being spoken, but of that hundred, 10 are considered strong. That means that all generations in a community are speaking them.

Then to a side of that, there are the Kriol dialects, which are contact languages. And we actually don’t know how many dialects of Kriol there are, but they are the fastest-growing Indigenous languages in Australia at the moment.

Dr Susan Carland: Right, but there’s not a lot left.

John Bradley: No, there’s not. And some are by name only.

So for example, where I worked, there’s a language next to Yanyuwa, which is one of the languages I speak, there was a language there called Wilangarra. It was completely extinct due to frontier violence by 1901.

Dr Susan Carland: Wow. And I’ve heard that some Indigenous languages are described as “sleeping”. What does that mean?

John Bradley: “Sleeping” is a term used more often in Southern Australia. So it means a language that has not been spoken for generations because of colonial welfare policies, all these kinds of things, where people were forbidden to speak languages.

So a lot of those languages are either documented, or partially documented, or there may be some very, very old people who have a few words left. And what it means, is you have to wake it up.

You have to do a mammoth amount of research to try and bring a language back into the public world. And with Wunungu Awara here at Monash, we’ve actually worked with some of those sleeping languages, and it’s quite extraordinary the lengths that Indigenous people are going to wake up these languages.

Dr Susan Carland: You say “go to extraordinary lengths”. What do you have to do if, as you said, if there’s maybe some Elders who speak only a few words, how do you find the rest of it?

John Bradley: You dig through the dusty old archive, and you find the words of old white men, in most instances, and you then have to – it’s like a detective. It’s forensics. Because you’ll get words that have all the same meaning, but they’ll be all written in different ways. So then you’ve got to try and find out, “What was the original source of this?”.

So there's linguistic specialists who actually try and work all that out. It's a huge task.

Dr Susan Carland: Someone who knows just how much of a huge task it is to examine, document and preserve Indigenous languages is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Monash University, Alice Gaby. Her research looks at the relationship between language, culture and cognition, particularly in Australian aboriginal languages.

Alice, welcome.

Alice Gaby: Thank you.

Dr Susan Carland: Unlike animals, languages don’t leave fossils. So how were you able to dig up some of that history?

Alice Gaby: Yeah, so I started really thinking about this deeply in 2019 when we ran the Paper and Talk Institute, which was an institute designed to bring people…

So I talked about the master-apprentice model, where you have some Elders still speaking language, but there are so many communities around Australia – and particularly in Victoria, obviously – where the language has been silent for, sometimes, many generations. And in those cases where people want to reconnect with their language, they don’t have the option of asking an Elder in the community.

And so this institute was designed to bring people from communities like that to the National Archives in Canberra. So we have the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, which was one of the partner institutions, and the host of it, but we also went to the National Library of Australia, and the Australian archives, and would work with…

So each community research group would have a partner linguist, and together we'd trawl through the archives, try and dig up everything that we could possibly find.

And in some cases this would be a word list written by a surveyor, or a pastoralist, or a policeman might have written down a few words. Sometimes we have quite extensive grammatical analysis by linguists or anthropologists. So it was really quite a wide range of materials that we’d find.

But, speaking of challenges, often the hardest thing was just to work out which language, because people wouldn’t even write down a language name, or the person they were working with, or the location. There'd just be a bunch of words and you’d have to …

Dr Susan Carland: Hmm. A travel diary. You’re like, “Where was that?”

Alice Gaby: [Laughter] Exactly.

Dr Susan Carland: Yeah.

Alice Gaby: So you have to be a historian. You have to look at the person, where they were likely to have been at that particular time. You sort of do all this forensic linguistics to try and detect, from the forms of the words, whether it’s the language you’re looking for. So there were many challenges.

And then, even once you know that you are looking at the right language, most of these people weren’t trained in linguistics, and even trained linguists in the 19th century, 18th century, they didn’t have the international phonetic alphabet. So they were mostly just using, either – if they were German speakers or English speakers – their own script, which is not well-suited to transcribing entirely different sounds.

So trying to figure out, “OK, if they were writing it with an A, was it an “ah” sound? Was it… Or maybe it was an “eh” sound, or…” So figuring all of that out.

But also, heartbreakingly, there’s just so much that has been lost just through lack of care and respect. So we find… finally track down this audio tape and think, “Hooray, we’ve got it. We're going to hear it.” And then someone’s recorded the radio over the top [laughter], and it’s just heartbreaking.

And you hear these stories all the time of people… deceased estates, people finding these shoe boxes of notes on language and just chucking them out, because they don’t know what to do with them.

Dr Susan Carland: Colonisation has led to the displacement of many Indigenous Australians, and through government policies, the suppression of languages has had a deleterious effect when it comes to keeping their histories alive.

Inala Cooper: Our languages were taken away from us at the commencement of colonisation, really.

Dr Susan Carland: Inala Cooper, a Yawuru woman from the Kimberley, is Director of Murrup Barak, the Melbourne Institute for Indigenous Development at the University of Melbourne.

Inala Cooper: So language really is a part of how we as individuals and communities identify. So using Woiwurrung language to describe who we are, because we are located in Naarm on Wurundjeri Country, is incredibly important.

And it sends a signal not only to our students, but to the broader university community and the public that we value the place that we are. We value our relationships with Traditional Owners. We acknowledge the support that they give us to do our work. And we need to be constantly challenging and changing the colonial environments that we are in by putting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language and culture first.

Dr Susan Carland: Mm. What is lost when an Indigenous language is essentially murdered, really? What is lost to, not just the Indigenous community, but to Australia at large?

Inala Cooper: Well, I didn’t grow up speaking my Yawuru language. I’m only just learning bits and pieces of it now, thanks to my niece who speaks our language and actually teaches Yawuru language in some of the schools in Broome.

And also, thanks to the amazing power of technology, there’s also an app. So having an app is wonderful, because we can hear how the words sound, and then practise and mimic the words in learning it.

The thing that is taken away fundamentally is a sense of identity, and literally people’s identities. So that is probably the quickest, harshest, and most cruel aspect of an attempted genocide of peoples and a colonisation of a country.

So it’s important to remember, when thinking and talking about First Nations languages here on this Country, that it’s not the simple fact that they have all died, because they haven’t. We know through our Elders that... Many of our Elders continue to secretly speak Language, and remember Language, even though they were horribly punished for speaking it. So often languages are described as being sleeping or quiet.

Dr Susan Carland: Associate Professor John Bradley believes a lack of respect through successive policies in education are also to blame for the extinction of many local languages.

John Bradley: When The Intervention came in, and this is in the 1990s, 2000s, the first policy was, “Get rid of the bilingual schools and we will install English as the language of instruction”, to the point where they said, “For the first four hours of every morning, in every school, English is the language of instruction.”

OK, 1980, 19 years old, I arrive at Borroloola. The principal and his wife had been there for 11 years. The policy of that school was to hit any child that spoke Language.

Dr Susan Carland: Ugh.

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John Bradley: So we’re not talking about the dim, dark days of colonisation, we're talking about an ongoing coloniality that really speaks to issues of two things, really – lack of respect for Indigenous languages, but secondly, that lack of respect being driven by people who have no idea what an Indigenous language is.

Dr Susan Carland: Right. So tell us actually about that. How… Are there uniform structures that you would find throughout Australian Indigenous languages? Or are they really varied?

John Bradley: Go to France, go to Irish-speaking Ireland. That's the differences we're dealing with.

Dr Susan Carland: Wow.

John Bradley: We've got 265 different languages.

Except Europe – if we want to travel to Europe, we expect we’re going to go to Germany, we’re going to go to Holland, we’re going to go to Belgium, we’re going to go to France, Portugal. And we say, “This is wonderful! Language, culture, this is what we expect!” And you need a passport to do it. In Australia, most people have no idea.

And I know personally, people will hear about the languages I’m interested in, and will say upfront, “What use are those languages?” when they hear about Indigenous languages. “They’re no use to you.”

And yet, if you really want to know Australia, it’s these languages that tell us about this country. This is when you realise English is a foreign language that came from a foreign country, and has just usurped all meaning. And yet Indigenous languages are grounded in the country to which they belong. And you learn so much.

And interestingly enough, botanists, scientists, zoologists, all the “-ologists” are just now starting to realise that they’ve nearly missed the chance of uncovering just what Indigenous languages can actually tell them.

Dr Susan Carland: So what does the future look like if we don’t try to preserve Indigenous languages? Here’s Inala Cooper again.

Inala Cooper: I hope that the future includes treaties with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We’re seeing huge steps being made in Victoria and Queensland. Things I think have paused a bit in South Australia, or Northern Territory, and other jurisdictions.

Treaties are not always perfect, they’re not always adhered to, but treaty is part of what the Uluru Statement from the Heart calls for. And it’s something that I think is desperately needed, along with truth-telling.

So, 50 years ahead, I hope there are treaties and that they are respected and interpreted in the right way, and upheld with a lens of human rights so that languages can re-emerge and be honoured and celebrated, as well as all the other rights that we as First Nations people are owed.

Dr Susan Carland: Here’s John Bradley.

How would you respond if someone said, “Look, this is just the natural life cycle of languages. We see throughout history languages are born, they live, they die as people move away, or people die in wars, or whatever. This is just how it is.”

John Bradley: Look, yes. Nobody speaks Ancient Egyptian anymore. Fine. Sumerian, no. But there’s trace elements of those languages still alive, in Coptic, in all sorts of things.

But I think any colonised country is in a different position. Because any colonised country, basically the Indigenous population was seen wanting. They weren’t as good as Englishmen, or Spaniards, or Dutch. So anything they had was not worthy.

So we actually have to go, “Well, that’s not an argument that really carries much water.” When you see children punished for speaking their language, when you meet Stolen Generation people who are punished for not speaking their language. When you see policemen who arrest women – five years ago, in my experience – for using Language to urge on a group of people during a dispute-solving mechanism, you just go, “Who's actually creating this story about language death?”

This is structural racism for me. I think this is structural racism. Racism is never far away from this conversation.

Dr Susan Carland: English-speaking people are happy to preserve languages that they see as useful, like Latin. No one speaks Latin anymore. But that’s still taught in schools, and it’s still preserved because it's seen as a part of knowledge.

John Bradley: But whose knowledge? This is this whole …

Dr Susan Carland: Exactly!

John Bradley: … debate that we can even have in the academy. That somehow Western knowledge is the only way to know. And yet, academies, in some respects, are a bastion of colonial authority.

So whose knowledge, what knowledge? And when we get to Indigenous Australian stuff, we've got to talk knowledges. If we use the big words, you know, multiple epistemologies, multiple ontologies, multiple axiologies. We've got to get our head around that.

Dr Susan Carland: Mm. And it was like you were saying before, about the way you need the language to understand the place. That would be the same argument that people would use about Latin. They go, “Well, you cannot understand the genus, family, kingdom, whatever, whatever, whatever, because it's embedded in the Latin. So it tells the story within it.”

John Bradley: You know, it’s interesting…

Dr Susan Carland: So why can we…? John Bradley: … I love the way you rigged this up. Indigenous people I worked with when we were writing one of the dictionaries for Yanyuwa, they said, “That's just secret, sacred white fella language. How many white fellas actually speak Latin?” And it's a good point!

I get ecology students in my class, and you bring that up with them, and they say, “Well, we just use it. We don't know what they mean.”

So these are languages for a single purpose – for experts. They're not generic knowledge. So I think we’ve just got to take a step back, and look at what we enshrine as knowledge. And allow a space for other knowledges to come in that don't necessarily need all that.

Dr Susan Carland: For our final word on this episode, here’s linguist Alice Gaby.

If we don’t do what we can to resurrect or breathe new life into sleeping or disappearing Indigenous languages, what do we lose as a nation?

Alice Gaby: Yeah, so much. I mean, every language is an encyclopaedia. You have so much botanical, ecological, astronomical, cultural knowledge that’s stored in these languages. So much history.

But more than that, I think … The linguist – Batchelor linguist – Jeanie Bell said once that she thinks it's hard for non-Indigenous people to understand what language means to Indigenous people.

And I think beyond the obvious facts and information that the language can store, it’s really a connection to Country, a connection to family, a connection to culture. It’s an identity.

And I think it can be … Well, I’ve witnessed the power of people reconnecting with their heritage language when they’ve been dispossessed of it, and it’s pretty powerful.

Dr Susan Carland: And also, I guess it would also contain within it philosophy as well...

Alice Gaby: Absolutely.

Dr Susan Carland: … ways of understanding what it means to be a human, and engage with the world, that so many of us could learn from as well.

Alice Gaby: Yeah.

Dr Susan Carland: Alice, it’s been absolutely fascinating. Thank you for your time.

Alice Gaby: Pleasure.

Dr Susan Carland: Language is not just a means of communication. It’s a connection to country, history, identity, and so much more. It's an integral part of a culture that passes on generational knowledge.

Thanks to all our guests: Associate Professor John Bradley, Associate Professor Alice Gaby, and Inala Cooper.

In our next episode, we’ll look at some of the ways our experts are preserving Indigenous languages, and we’ll also look at how language can evolve over time. Is language becoming more inclusive? Stay tuned next week for part two of Language on What Happens Next?.

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