‘What Happens Next?’: Can We Save Endangered Languages?

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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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Inala Cooper: The language that young leaders choose to use should be respected because it's their world.

John Bradley: The average Australian punter knows nothing about Indigenous languages, end of story.

Karen Yin: Language… What it does is evolve. A language that does not evolve is, by definition, dead.

Dr Susan Carland: In our last episode, we spoke to our experts on the importance of preserving Indigenous languages to ensure the protection of cultural identity.

In this episode, we find out some of the work that is being done to help save some languages from extinction. We'll also explore the way languages evolve to better reflect the society we live in.

All this and more coming up on What Happens Next?.

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Inala Cooper: Hi, my name's Inala Cooper. I'm a Yawuru woman from the Kimberley. I'm director of Murrup Barak, the Melbourne Institute for Indigenous Development at the University of Melbourne.

Dr Susan Carland: Inala, thank you for joining us. Inala Cooper: Thanks, Susan. Good to be with you. Dr Susan Carland: How does, or how can, Indigenous languages be used in shaping a narrative of protest?

Inala Cooper: Language is... it's almost sacred when it comes to protest, I think. There are slogans that have been part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander protest for decades. “Always was, always will be” is a good example.

It's important that those slogans, or the language that we use in our protest, are honoured, and not appropriated in ways that they shouldn't be.

And it's important – and I think in the context of this new phase that we're going through, or going into in Australia around a Voice to Parliament – it's really important not just in that context, but all contexts in our lives, that we stop and think, and respect whose voice should be amplified at any given time. And that the language that First Nations people choose, or any other minority chooses, should be respected. It doesn't need to be tweaked and corrected by non-Indigenous people, in this case.

Dr Susan Carland: I wonder if that would feel like yet another incursion of the coloniser on the voice and speech and language of Indigenous people. When that happens again and again, it's just another little paper cut in that history of incursion on language.

Inala Cooper: Absolutely. And everyone in what is now known as Australia feels the effects of colonisation, whether we’re conscious of it or not. And that includes many... well, all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people, but…

Having a practice of healing and decolonising our minds is really important so that strength can continue to grow within our communities. And that is where we look to our Elders, and we look to knowledge-holders and leaders.

And leaders are not always older people. One of the great things that I see in my work with university students is there is leadership among young people already. You can call it emerging, or you can call it whatever you like, but the leadership skills, and qualities, and power that we see among young people at the university is mighty, and I love that.

The language that young leaders choose to use should be respected, because it's their world that they'll go on to lead and inherit.

Dr Susan Carland: For the non-Indigenous people who are listening to this podcast, who might want to know, what can they do to help preserve and protect Indigenous languages? Any advice?

Inala Cooper: Hmm. Be curious. Use the device in your hand as a starting point.

Not all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people have the knowledge of what their first language is, or their First Nation language is.

There's a terrific website called 50 Words, Five zero W-O-R-D-S. 50 Words is, when you open the website, it's a map of the country, and when you hover your mouse over different parts of the country, it will highlight what the traditional language is, and it will give you 50 words, which are audible, so you can hear how those words are pronounced.

Dr Susan Carland: That's awesome!

Inala Cooper: That's a great start.

Dr Susan Carland: Yeah.

Inala Cooper: Be curious and use the device that you already have as a starting point, because sometimes straight out asking a First Nations person, “Can you speak your language?” may be coming from a good place, but may be received in a clumsy or a complex way.

Dr Susan Carland: Yeah.

Inala Cooper: So acknowledging the impact of colonisation, not only… not just 200 years ago, but the continuing impact is really important.

And making space and giving resources and platforms to First Nations people is really important, too. So sharing that, or really acquiescing and giving over space, and privilege, and power is really important, too.

Dr Susan Carland: Acting Director of the Monash Indigenous Study Centre Associate Professor John Bradley has teamed up with animators from the Faculty of Information Technology to preserve the heritage of the Yanyuwa people, and help save critical knowledge.

Do you think AI and technology could help or hinder the work that you are trying to do? The languages you're trying to preserve?

John Bradley: Look, this is a big question, and it's a huge question and it's an ongoing question, and it's one that's revealing itself.

I know for my case, in terms of Wunungu Awara and the animations we're working on, we have never been so busy, Australia-wide, working with mostly endangered or sleeping languages and bringing them back.

But what we are finding – and there's only been a few reports written about this – is that people that get involved with us to do this also experience a sense of wellbeing. A sense of “Wow”, of… a breakaway from disease to a sense of wholeness.

I remember when we were working with Taungurung, which is one of the Victorian Kulin Nation languages, a young lass came up to me and she said, “This is amazing, but I want to sing in it. I want to sing in this language now.” She wasn’t a… This is the first time she'd ever engaged with this language. And watching the force at which she engaged, she never looked back.

One of the big animations we're working on now, we dramaturged a whole group of young men to do the voices for all the characters in the animation. They walked out of that room 10 miles high because they'd... Maybe they don't have the words for it, but they had sensed something that they felt… that gave them that added impetus. I know the proofing we've been doing with these same young men, every time they just get so excited.

Dr Susan Carland: Tell us about these animations that you're creating. What's your intention behind them?

John Bradley: Look, the intention is, we animate for any community that thinks they have a story to tell. We use very advanced... It's not like a Disney thing. It's not like that kind of stuff.

People when we started said, “We want our Country to look like our Country. We want our material culture to look like our material culture. We want things to look like our Country.” That's what we operate on. This means trips to museums, trips to archives, trips all over the place. People provide the story they want, and then we go to animating it.

We have a team of 1.5 animators who are just the most amazing people in all the world. They just do amazing things.

And so we've animated everything from a Koori Elder here in Victoria who wanted to tell the story of the Stolen Generation, but he wanted to do it through metaphor. An incredibly powerful story, working with the animator to create this story.

We've animated Makassan working songs, you know, from the Makasssn trepangers coming across to Australia. That's actually just gone back to Makassar.

Dr Susan Carland: Wow.

John Bradley: And they're just going, “Oh my goodness me!” so we've actually put Indonesian subtitles on that one. These things are just starting to creep out of Australia, too.

But we've animated songs. We've animated, look, all sorts of... whatever people want to animate. Emu hunters, all sorts of things.

Dr Susan Carland: And is the intention, it's animated to bring in children? Who is your intended audience?

John Bradley: This is the one I fight in the institution all the time.

You know, people say, “Oh, you're just making cartoons for little children.” These are not for children. These are for whole communities. These are for the adults, for the grandparents, the parents, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren. They’re not… We do not function at the level of making nice things for children.

I think more recently, Indigenous people have actually been getting in touch with us and saying, “We have funding. We want to do an animation, but we'd also like some booklets for the school to go with these animations.” So they're thinking as well as to what purpose these things serve.

Dr Susan Carland: Is the intended audience, though, the local Indigenous community?

John Bradley: Oh yeah.

Dr Susan Carland: Or, would it be anybody –

John Bradley: Anybody.

Dr Susan Carland: – like me. Could I watch it and enjoy it?

John Bradley: You! Well, they're all there online. We've never been actually knocked back. Every community we work with, we say, “Can we put it on the Wunungu Awara website?” People say, “Sure, we're happy to share this.”

And they get used in different ways. I know the Gunditjmara, for example, are using one of their animations every time they speak at a public conference, whether that's with scientists, whether that's with the general public, whether it's with whoever, that's how they introduce themselves.

Dr Susan Carland: That's great.

John Bradley: So, you know, they own the IP. We just make them. We give them back. What they choose to do with them, that's their world.

Dr Susan Carland: Hmm. We were talking about AI, and I wondered if you think… Does the human need to be part of this language exchange?

And by that I mean, Google Translate's pretty good now. I can be travelling, and I don't know how to ask, “What time is the bus?” or, “Can I please have a coffee?” in whatever language I'm in. I type it in, it says it.

Is that going to be useful for preserving Indigenous languages?

John Bradley: Look, this is a… it's a good point, and it's something Indigenous people are exploring.

But one of the things perhaps is different from all these other languages is, Indigenous people own these languages. They own their property. So language as property is something we haven't really got our head around.

And that leads to a whole conversation about language as property. It belongs to a propertied group of people who have Country. How do you… Is it permissible? What kind of negotiations need to take place to send a language out into the world, onto an app?

And there's some people saying no, There are other people saying, “Yeah, we'll put it on an app.” This is the point of conversation at the moment.

Dr Susan Carland: Which leads to my next and final question, which is, for the average person – non-Indigenous person – listening at home to this, who wonders, “What can I do to assist in this preservation of language or learning about Indigenous languages?” If language is the property of Indigenous communities, how can they assist, learn, preserve without taking something?

John Bradley: Alright, I'm going to come at this in a really different way.

One of the things where I work in other Indigenous communities is people often say, “We just want…” and they use the term “whitefellas”. “We just want whitefellas to grow ears.” Now, growing ears, you think, “Oh, that just means to listen.” But it's a direct translation from a number of Indigenous languages. It means “to have intelligence”.

If you don't know something, don't say anything. Just learn. Listen, grow some intelligence about what you don't know about before you make some crazy comment about these things. And a bit by bit, maybe you won't say anything that's negative, just learn.

Look, the average Australian punter knows nothing about Indigenous languages, end of story. And that's the big job.

Dr Susan Carland: So what should they do to start?

John Bradley: Just listen. Grow intelligence. When it comes up on the news, when it comes up in the media, if the government says, “We are going to donate $5 million to whoever to work on language,” don't decry it. Say, “Yeah, about time, because enough has happened.”

Dr Susan Carland: So far, we've explored the need to preserve language. However, before we finish up on this series, I wanted to investigate how languages can evolve. Is language constantly updating itself to reflect the society we live in?

Our next guest, Karen Yin, coined the term “conscious language”. This refers to a more compassionate style of language. Karen has helped catapult conscious writing, editing, and design practises into the mainstream.

Here's author Karen Yin.

Karen Yin: Language… What it does is evolve. A language that does not evolve is, by definition, dead.

So right now, talking to you, we are participating in the evolution of language. When I'm by myself, writing my book, I am participating in the evolution of language. So we all have a say in the direction of language, which is also to say, not one person can control the direction of language.

Dr Susan Carland: How quickly does language evolve? Have you seen language actually evolve throughout your career as a copywriter and as an editor, or is it something that takes place much more slowly?

Karen Yin: I'm not a linguist, but I have been an editor for many years. And I’ve also… I'm a writer, and I also am a user of language, a lover of words.

So from my perspective, I sometimes see words be adopted really quickly. And for me, that's more like the memes, or the funny trends. That just takes off.

There are some things which take a while to be adopted and… Such as a few decades ago, people introduced the honorific for women, “Ms.”, one that's free of marital status. And then recently we saw the people trying to have, in the mainstream, the honorific “Mx.”, M-X, which is gender-neutral.

The fact that we are using those terms and engaging in them means that there was success in very consciously introducing these terms and saying, “This is what it means. This is why it promotes equity, and, you know, please use it.”

With Mx. – just like with Ms. – there's a lot of misunderstanding, like how do you pronounce it? Who uses it? There will always be perhaps even an extended period where people kind of explore, “Does this word make sense for me to use? If I'm writing for an audience, do I have to explain this word?”

So that's one situation where the language adoption has been fairly successful.

Dr Susan Carland: Tell us about your Conscious Style Guide. How does it work? Why did you start it? How has it been received?

Karen Yin: As an editor over many years, I found all these little community style guides, such as, written by Black journalists or Asian American journalists, and then also disability guides, and also GLAAD's media guide. They were all spread out.

And I thought, “The first moment I have time to do this, I'm going to put them all on one website. So people can just go right here, and they can access these really precious style guides, written by the communities that they cover, saying, ‘This is how we would like you to talk about us. This is how we would like you to frame things. Here's a little bit of history on why that word is not cool.’” So I did it!

So in 2015, after I quit my long job in advertising, I had the space to actually put together, not just all these style guides, but also links to articles, such as ones on person-first language versus identity-first language, which is what you were just talking about.

From the beginning, it was really important for me to present several points of view, and not just say, “Do this.” The reason why I've always done that is because context matters so much. We don't wear the same outfit to work that we wear to a dinner party. It helps to be really conscious about how you want to present yourself, your words, your writing, your speech for the occasion.

Sometimes you might want to use identity-first language, and sometimes not.

Dr Susan Carland: What sort of response have you had to the Conscious Style Guide?

Karen Yin: I'm still really touched by the response that I've gotten because it isn't just... I did it for editors and writers, initially, but the last time I counted, over a thousand websites linked to Conscious Style Guide.

They are educational institutions, they are museums, they're coaching and judging organisations. It's really just caught on.

I feel like there was a gap in guidance from the other style guides, so Conscious Style Guide was there to say, “Hey, let's also think about these things.”

One of the biggest differences with Conscious Style Guide, back then, is that it was online, so I could very easily make changes and help it evolve along with society. And as new ideas came out, I could swap out old ones that no longer made sense. So it was always a living document.

Dr Susan Carland: For the people who were listening to this podcast at home that maybe want to improve their own language choices to be more conscious or considerate, what advice would you give them?

Karen Yin: I think that when people think of conscious language, it might feel overwhelming. Kind of like, “Oh, I'm going to learn Spanish now.” It seems like a lot.

But actually, conscious language is made up of all these elements that we already do. When your vegetarian friend comes over, are you going to have something vegetarian for them to eat? We're already thinking in kind, and conscious, and inclusive ways.

With conscious language, I recommend that people begin by making those kind of connections and thinking, “How am I already being considerate of people? How am I already thinking about context when I talk to people?”

One thing that people can do to start off with is think, “Where can I make the biggest difference if I began to use conscious language?” Is it at work? Do you write for a publication? Do you circulate material somehow? Can you use your language to include a broader audience? Not so broad that you're losing your niche group, but what… Are you using words that are actually not unnecessarily limiting?

Or maybe the strongest impact you could have with conscious language is with your trans child, or with your queer sister-in-law. It's up to you! I really hesitate in telling people exactly how to go about learning and developing their own conscious language practice because telling people what to do does not make them want to do it. [Laughter]

I want people to find your own connection, find your own why. Whether it's work and you're doing it because you want more money, fine. If you want to do it because you want to make friends, and you don't want to offend your friends and turn them off, great. Whatever… However conscious language can matter to you, wherever you can find a home for it in your heart, I want you to start there. And then after you begin, then you can build on it.

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Dr Susan Carland: As our society progresses, so does our language.

Also, the preservation of language is essential to the wellbeing and identity of Indigenous cultures, and is integral to passing on generational knowledge. So much can be lost if we don't protect it.

Thank you to all our guests on this series, Associate Professor John Bradley, Inala Cooper, Karen Yin, and Associate Professor Alice Gaby. Visit our show notes for more information about their work and links to the resources they mentioned today.

And thank you for joining us for our series on language. We'll be back next week with an all-new topic.

If you’re enjoying What Happens Next?, don't forget to give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and share the show with your friends.