Aboriginal languages deserve revival | The Australian (original) (raw)

THE more languages we know, the more likely we are to embrace different perspectives. The intellectual gains of being bilingual have been scientifically demonstrated. Most recently, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2009) described the cognitive gains in seven-month-old bilingual infants.

In three eye-tracking studies, Agnes Melinda Kovacs and Jacques Mehler found that infants, reared with two languages from birth, display improved cognitive control abilities compared with matched monolinguals.

But even if one was not lucky enough to become multilingual within the crucial period of the first 12 years of one's life, there are various advantages of learning heritage languages as an adult too.

American children's writer Russell Hoban, born in 1925, once said that language is an archeological vehicle, full of the remnants of dead and living pasts, lost and buried civilisations and technologies. The language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Attempts to revive a no-longer-spoken tongue should be supported and celebrated.

As Nelson Mandela once said, "if you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."

But we should refrain from a purist's approach and be aware of the inevitable reality that any revival of a "sleeping beauty" - or "walking dead" - language is impossible without influence from the mother tongue(s) of those at the forefront of the revival.

Unfortunately, one of the main findings of the most recent National Indigenous Languages Survey Report (2005) was that the situation of Australia's languages is grave.

Of an original number of more than 250 known Australian indigenous languages, only 6 per cent are in a healthy condition, that is, they are spoken by all age groups.

Some Aboriginal communities show support for reclamation and heritage learning programs either for revival proper (for example, extensive courses similar to Israel's ulpanim) or for only post-vernacular maintenance (teaching Aborigines some words and concepts related to the dead language).

What lessons could be drawn from the famous Hebrew revival in the Promised Land to present attempts to resuscitate - as well as to post-vernacularly maintain - no-longer spoken Aboriginal languages?

Although they too encountered hostility and animosity, the fin-de-siecle Hebrew revivalists had several advantages compared with Australian revivalists: extensive documentation (for example, the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah); Hebrew was considered a most prestigious language (as opposed to Yiddish, for example); and Jews from all over the globe only had Hebrew in common, whereas there are dozens of sleeping Aboriginal languages to be revived and it would obviously be extremely hard to choose only one unifying tongue, unless one resorts to Aboriginal English. Yet the Hebrew revivalists who wished to speak pure Hebrew failed. The result is a fascinating and multifaceted Israeli language, which is not only multi-layered but also multi-sourced.

The revival of a clinically dead language is unlikely without cross-fertilisation from the revivalists' mother tongue(s). I therefore predict that any attempt to revive an Aboriginal language will result in a hybrid, combining components from Australian English, Aboriginal English and, of course, the Aboriginal target language.

That is not to say that we should not revive dormant languages and cultures. On the contrary. Revival activists should be encouraged to be more realistic, and less puristic, about their goals.

For example, they should not be discouraged by borrowed English words and pronunciation within the emergent language. Furthermore, crucial linguistic insights can be drawn from Israeli about what components of language are more revivable than others.

Words and conjugations, for instance, are easier to revitalise than intonation, associations, connotations and semantic networkings.

Some Aboriginal people distinguish between usership and ownership. I even have a friend who claimed that he owned a language although he only knew one single word in it, namely its name. Consequently, one could find indigenous Australians who do not find it necessary or important to revive their comatose tongue.

I, on the other hand, have always believed in Australia's very own roadside dictum: Stop, revive, survive!

Ghilad Zuckermann, DPhil (Oxford), PhD (titular) (Cambridge), MA (summa cum laude) (Tel Aviv), is associate professor and Australian Research Council Discovery fellow in linguistics at the University of Queensland.

The first Australian Workshop on Afro-Asiatic Linguistics, an international conference that he is organising, will take place in Brisbane on September 11-13, concurrently with the Brisbane Writers Festival and QBE Riverfire.