Breathing new life into Indigenous languages
Alice Gaby, Associate Professor in Linguistics, Monash University.
Paper & Talk was run in partnership between AIATSIS, Living Languages and Monash University from September 2-16, 2019. It was made possible by funding from the Federal Government’s Indigenous Languages and Arts program, the Yitpi Foundation, and the support of volunteers.
Participants at the Paper & Talk institute, AIATSIS 2019.
Daniel Walding/AIATSIS, Author provided (No reuse).
In archives around Australia lie pages upon pages of words that have not been uttered for generations.
Many of us are familiar with the dire statistics: of the 250-700 languages spoken in Australia two centuries ago, just 13 are still being passed down from parents to children. Globally, it has been estimated that 80% of the world’s languages will not be spoken next century.
The statistics are discouraging. But they only tell part of the story: there are people committed to turning these numbers around, retrieving what has been lost (or imperilled) and sharing their re- emerging language with the next generation. So, is it actually possible to bring a language back to speech?
Around the country, communities are building apps, writing dictionaries, developing school programs among other strategies to bring languages back and/or keep language strong. The Paper and Talk institute–run for the first time this year–is a new method to help Indigenous people access and make use of language materials stored in the nation’s archives. Inspired by a workshop held at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in 1993, and the Breath of Life institutes held in the US, this powerful workshop brought together 13 community researchers from five language groups across the eastern states, allowing them to access materials pertaining to their languages, and training to interpret and use those materials.
Over two weeks, the community researchers (and their linguist partners) made many important discoveries and breakthroughs in understanding their languages. However, they also faced disappointment, trauma and heartbreak.
Vanishing words
In the first days of the institute, researchers sat at archive catalogues to hunt for materials on their language. This is a harder task than it might sound, as the early surveyors, missionaries and researchers who created many of the language records often did not include the language name in their notes, or used a name that is not in current usage. Tracking down a wordlist–or even better, an audio recording–is therefore cause for celebration. But a catalogue entry does not always lead to a resource.
Some community researchers were unable to view records of their language because of access restrictions placed by the collector who deposited the materials in the archive. In one heartbreaking case, researchers were overjoyed when the catalogue told them the archive held reel-to-reel tape recordings of their language made in the early 1960s – the only known recordings and long thought to be missing. After several false leads, the researchers were finally handed a USB stick with the digitised sound files of the last missing tape side, which was determined to contain the most informative of the last speakers. Joy quickly turned to heartbreak, however, when it was discovered that–at some point after the recording had been transcribed but before it had been archived–somebody had taped over it with snippets from the radio, including pop songs such as Pat Boone’s “Johnny Will”. There is no good way for cultural heritage to be erased but this surely must be one of the least dignified.
This is just one of many tragedies of materials being treated carelessly. Many wordlists and recordings are never archived in the first place, instead kept in the personal collections of researchers or collectors whose descendants don’t know what to do with the materials when they pass away. We may never know how many such materials have ended up in dumpsters, taking with them knowledge passed from generation to generation for thousands of years.
Callum Clayton-Dixon and Gabi Briggs search the archive catalogue for traces of their language, Anaiwan/Ambeyang.
Daniel Walding, AIATSIS.
Horrifying discoveries
Not every archival find is a gem, though. The fragments of precious language and knowledge shared by ancestors and preserved in archival stacks are buried amongst horrifying relics of the racist attitudes of collectors and institutions. Any Indigenous archival researcher grows
used to encountering the racist and dehumanising language that has been directed towards their families (both in the past and into the present). But there is no immunization against the trauma this inflicts, especially when these materials record injustices with personal consequences.
Ebony Joachim is a trainer with Living Languages, but also a teacher and researcher of Yorta Yorta who attended Paper and Talk in the hopes of finding new sources of language information to bring back to her community. As Joachim describes;
One thing most people don’t realise is the some of the work done with old documentation continues the intergenerational trauma of past wrongs that have happened – the very few language workers communities have are the ones that are subjected to this material and readings the most. They do this part of the work so their whole community isn’t directly subjected to the trauma and the language used by the people that have written about them in derogatory ways.
Ebony Joachim explains the interpretation of archival records of Yorta Yorta.
Daniel Walding, AIATSIS.
The community researcher groups at Paper and Talk unfortunately had to contend with more than derogatory language. For example, one group uncovered an anthropologist’s report to the government on assimilation plans for their community, including the description of individuals’ and family groups’ behaviours and interactions with the white community. Having followed these individuals and families over a couple of decades, the anthropologist recommended those he thought would be ideal for assimilation into the white community. Such findings are not only hurtful to the researchers who encounter them, but can perpetuate harm within their communities.
Inaccessible language
For many sleeping Aboriginal languages, past generations of speakers shared their knowledge with linguists, who wrote grammars and/or dictionaries to record the words and structures. But just as we can’t save endangered species with taxidermy, we can’t save languages with books. A language only lives in the hearts, mouths and/or hands of the people it belongs to, and returning the knowledge encapsulated in grammars and dictionaries is no trivial matter. Even in the cases where detailed documentation of the language can be found, most grammars, dictionaries and other linguistic analyses are couched in the formalisms and technical vocabulary of the field, making them impenetrable to anyone without linguistic training.
Sharon Edgar-Jones, a language consultant at Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Cooperative, described acquiring the grammar of her family’s language as like receiving her inheritance in “a treasure chest covered in concrete, tied up in chains”. But these chains can be broken. Programs like Paper & Talk help community researchers to develop jargon “bolt cutters”, to help them cut through to the knowledge that underlies linguistic analysis. ANU PhD candidate, Lesley Woods, ran training sessions at Paper & Talk on how to translate the linguistic concepts and terminology of academic grammars into plain language. This is a process she is intimately familiar with; her PhD project involves developing a plain language grammar of her family’s language, Ngiyampaa. Woods describes the importance of plain language descriptions as follows:
It has taken me many years of linguistic study to get to the point where I could take up a PhD and begin the work of unlocking my language from turgid technical language of linguistics. Linguistics itself, is not a complicated field per se; it is only the way in which it is presented, couched in tediously pompous language that makes it hard to comprehend. I would recommend that linguistics move to a plain language model as can be seen in the legal profession in the United States.
Hidden treasure
We have so far focused on the challenges, disappointments and traumas lurking in archives. But the researchers at Paper & Talk were steadfast in their mission to unearth every remaining trace of the language knowledge their elders shared and to return this knowledge to their community. So they persevered, and were rewarded with exciting discoveries.
As the traditional owners of the land the national archives are situated on, Ngunnawal researchers have spent years poring over catalogues, seizing upon every available word. Yet through their work in the Paper & Talk institute, researchers dramatically expanded the known Ngunnawal vocabulary, with a number of important breakthroughs and discoveries.
As Ngunnawal researcher Caroline Hughes put it, this was “like finding a treasure chest we didn’t even know was hidden.”
At the Paper & Talk institute, researchers worked intensively for two weeks, visiting the National Archives of Australia, the National Library of Australia and AIATSIS collections, as well as undertaking linguistic training and project work. But the real work begins now that they have returned to their communities, bringing with them materials (such as teaching aids, apps, stories, pronunciation guides, family photos), skills in archival and linguistic research, and most importantly the language knowledge of their people and the fire to bring that knowledge back to the voices of their community.
This article was written in collaboration with Caroline Hughes, Ebony Joachim, Emma Murphy, Andrew Tanner.