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Australia must make the protection and restoration of Indigenous languages a national responsibility before it's too late.
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BLACKCURRENT: The last fighting words
Issue 194 - 05 Feb 2010
ISSUE 194, February 4, 2010: Australia is one of the world's "hot spots" for endangered languages. We must act before it's too late, writes AMY MCQUIRE*.
What do you call someone who can speak two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who can speak three or more languages? Multilingual.
What do you call someone who can only speak one language? Australian.
Of course, in an age of multiculturalism and a Prime Minister fluent in Mandarin, this joke is not quite as accurate as it once was.
Australians are increasingly becoming aware of the importance of languages other than English.
Not only have we begun to take to heart the romantic words of French and Spanish, but also that of the more geographically significant - the languages of China and Indonesia.
We must undoubtedly look beyond the seas and take part in the international conversation. But we must also concentrate our attentions within our own borders.
Although we are commonly lumped with the unfortunate tag of being monolingual, the fact is, this country is grounded on a rich foundation of languages and dialects.
According to Tom Calma in his last Social Justice Report as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commissioner, there were 250 distinct languages that "expanded out to 600 dialects".
But how many are left today? Only 18 fully intact, with about 100 more existing in some form - many of which are highly endangered.
That is a horrifying indictment on Australia's position on Aboriginal culture and heritage.
And the world is watching.
In 2007, linguists working on the Enduring Voices project, backed by National Geographic, named Australia as one of the five "hot spots" for disappearing languages.
Northern Australia joined regions from central South America - in areas like Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia - as places where Indigenous dialects were being swallowed by the dominant language.
The co-director of the project - David Harrison from Swarthmore College - said that the loss of languages had a far-reaching impact.
"We're going to lose an immense storehouse of knowledge," he said, adding that valuable information was often contained within Indigenous languages, information that could not be directly translated into the colonising lingua franca.
This was a sentiment reiterated by Mr Calma's report.
"The 2006 Garnaut Review into climate change reported that the Torres Strait Islander people had noticed changes in animal and plant behaviour and different patterns in seasonal temperatures," Mr Calma wrote.
"Indigenous cultural knowledge about the seasons and the corresponding plant and animal behaviour dates back thousands of years.
"Traditional languages have vast vocabularies for naming species and describing their ecology which are little known to Western science. This is an endangered area of knowledge, and the loss of it would disadvantage all Australians."
Language and culture are intrinsically tied to each other. Mr Calma's report states that language is "the medium through which culture is transmitted".
By presiding over the extinction of so many Indigenous languages, Australia is effectively turning its back on the formidable 60,000 years of culture within the Aboriginal tribes of this nation.
Re-claiming back our languages, that were victim to massacres and racist assimilation policies, was always going to be a challenge.
So just how much effort is the government that said sorry willing to invest in revitalising and restoring Indigenous languages?
The ALP claimed that it would make the "protection, preservation and revitalisation of Indigenous languages a major priority" in its 2007 National Platform.
The party's Northern Territory branch then effectively scrapped bilingual education in the NT, with a policy that meant English would predominately be taught over Indigenous languages.
The great myth that Aboriginal kids should "learn English" was spit out in opinion columns and on talkback radio all around the nation.
But they did not realise Aboriginal kids were losing a far greater treasure - their Indigenous tongues.
When the ALP re-drafted its National Platform, this promise to revitalise Indigenous languages was nowhere to be seen. To keep it in would have been hypocrisy of the grandest order.
But to its credit, the ALP did announce a national Indigenous languages approach in August last year, to which it had already allocated funds totalling $8.8 million in the 2008-2009 budget.
This approach includes:
• Increasing information about Indigenous languages in all spheres of Australian life;
• Improving coordination of language centre activity;
• Supporting language programs in schools; and
• Undertaking a feasibility study to develop a National Indigenous Languages Centre.
Funding is available under the Maintenance of Indigenous Languages and Records program (MILR), which forms a central role in the Rudd government's approach.
But as Mr Calma's report shows, there are several problems with this. For one, MILR funds do not go to schools where Indigenous languages are still spoken - proving problematic particularly in the NT, which scrapped bilingual education.
The fact that MILR funding is given out through a grants process also means that language grants are not always given based on the "language requirements" of a particular area, but rather are a result of the advocacy for these grants.
Mr Calma's report also shows that state and territory government language policy often conflicts with the Commonwealth's.
In addition, state and territory governments differ considerably in levels of commitment to Indigenous languages.
The report makes seven recommendations to help preserve and restore Indigenous languages:
1. Immediately fund a national working group with the task of establishing a national Indigenous languages body as per the commitment of Indigenous Languages - A National Approach.
2. Commit to the development of a national Indigenous languages body with functions and responsibilities similar to those of the Maori Language Commission.
3. Utilise the expertise of the national body to assess the required resources for critically endangered languages and commit these resources immediately.
4. Agree to resource an ongoing plan of action for the preservation and promotion of Indigenous languages as recommended by the national Indigenous languages body.
5 Become a signatory to the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003).
6 Through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), develop agreements with all governments to ensure consistency and compliance with Australia's Indigenous Languages - A National Approach.
7. Commence a process to recognise Indigenous languages in the preamble of Australia's Constitution with a view to recognising Indigenous languages in the body of the Constitution in future.
The report also recommends that revitalising our Indigenous languages becomes a national responsibility, pointing out that language movements have been most successful when this occurs.
But can we expect Australia to understand just how much of a responsibility we have in preserving Indigenous languages and cultures?
They may not have as wide an audience as that of languages like Chinese, but if we continue to let Indigenous languages perish, we lose a thousand libraries worth of knowledge.
We have to make our Indigenous languages a national responsibility.
They are words worth fighting for.
blackcurrent@nit.com.au
*Amy McQuire is editor of the National Indigenous Times. She is of Darumbal, South Sea Islander and European heritage.
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