Maintaining a strong language
To stay strong, a language needs to be used in places other than the home. For example, people need to be able to access services in their language, such as medical care. Children need to be able to learn in both their mother tongue and Standard Australian English. Local news and broadcasting should be in local languages. If there are no opportunities to use the language outside of the home, people can start to feel it is not as valuable as English. If people need to switch to Standard Australian English all the time, there is a risk that they will stop using their language altogether.
One of the best ways to support language maintenance is to enable children to learn in their mother tongue. For most Indigenous children, Standard Australian English is not their first language. Their first language is Aboriginal English or another Indigenous language. When children learn in their first language, they have a better foundation to go on to learn Standard Australian English. This is the case both for Indigenous languages with no relationship to English (such as Warlpiri or Murrinh-Patha), and for Indigenous languages that have developed in contact with English (such as Kriol, Yumplatok and Aboriginal English).
New languages such as Kriol, Yumplatok and Aboriginal English have relationships to Standard Australian English in how they look and sound. They share many words with Standard Australian English, and parts of their grammars are similar. This has led to some educators assuming that these Indigenous languages are “slang” or “a lazy way of speaking” English (Department of Education 2002, p. 22). When educators shift their attitude and recognise that these new languages are different, rather than “bad”, students are more engaged in school.
When children learn in their first language, it is obvious how much they are engaged. As Noella Goevas, a teacher at Ngukurr School, writes:
“We are reading books about dogs. So looked for a Kriol one on the Living Archive website and found Angriwan Dotdot [Dotdot is Hungry]. Read it aloud…you should have seen my kids… They were at such ease… I was asking them to recount and they were recounting with 100% accuracy. Then they asked for more! “Naja Kriol one” [“Another Kriol one”]. So we read Bifo Langa Drimtaim [Long Ago in the Dreamtime]. Such a long story but they didn’t care… They were right into it. Such a crazy good feeling. I had kids who rarely speak answering questions.” (Noella Goevas in Bow 2014)
Revitalising an endangered language
If only Elders speak a language, then right now communities have the chance to keep the language fires burning. Language Nests and Master-Apprentice programs work by pairing older and younger people to try to re-start intergenerational transmission. It is also important to document language while Elders are still with us. This might involve holding Elders’ camps where language is audio or video recorded. If community want to reawaken their language, they can rebuild on this documentation’s solid foundation.
Documentation is not neutral. In the past, non-Indigenous linguists brought their own priorities to documentation. This resulted in documentation with a heavy focus on grammatical structures. There is often only limited documentation of language in everyday use, such as greetings, jokes, gestures, lullabies and expressions of emotion. Many community language researchers express frustration that this documentation now does not exist (Gaby & Woods 2020, p. e270). Records of this type of language use is often what communities who are reawakening their language want most. As such, communities must guide language documentation priorities.
Communities have different overall priorities regarding language revitalisation. Some communities might focus on documentation. Others may choose to focus on connecting younger with older speakers. By doing this, younger speakers gain exposure to traditional language. They also learn much other traditional knowledge from Elders. For example, the Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring language centre organises bush trips to connect younger Miriwoong people with Elders. These bush trips encourage language transmission as well as transmission of other cultural knowledge, including hunting and fishing skills and traditional music (Olawsky 2010, p. 164).
Language is intertwined with the knowledge of country and nature. Displaying an image of a specific area matches in no way the experience of being in touch with the land and simultaneously learning about the words related to it. (Olawsky 2010, p. 166)
Reawakening a sleeping language
Each language reawakening situation is unique. In all cases, it is the community’s decision when and how to reawaken the language. In some cases, there are language materials in libraries and archives. Elders might remember words and phrases in the language.
To reawaken a language, the community must put it back together again. Elders might remember words and phrases of the language. Other language reawakening communities have organised Elders’ camps to record language. Often Elders remember more language when they hear others remembering too.
Other language data are in historical documents, like wordlists. However, the non-Indigenous people who wrote these documents often wrote down words in confusing ways. They didn’t recognise some Indigenous language sounds, and they didn’t know how to write these down consistently. For example, many Indigenous languages allow words to begin with the sound “ng”. Non-Indigenous people often didn’t recognise this sound in this position and often wrote it as “n”, “ny”, or no sound at all.
Communities need linguistic training in order to be able to interpret these archival sources. Linguistic skills allow language owners to decipher what sounds the recorders heard. These skills also allow communities to break down words and phrases into parts, which can then be reused to form new words and phrases. For example, once verb endings are identified, whole sets of verbs can be inflected to express past, present or future.
The language revitalisation process also involves constructing new words to express new concepts, like for mobile phones and solar panels. Understanding the building blocks of words and grammar allows new words and phrases to be constructed along the lines of the grammar’s traditional patterns, if that is how the community wishes to proceed.
Many communities work with linguists to help them “crack the code” of the sleeping language. In all cases, the role of linguists is to give advice and to provide reasons for that advice. Once the community is fully informed, the community can choose to take the advice or not. Being fully informed means that the community can fully exercise their right to self-determination in relation to language (Stebbins, Eira & Couzens 2018, p. 48).
Show me grammatical way, give us those skills – but give us a choice. I might choose the other way. (Lynnette Solomon-Dent in Couzens, Eira & Stebbins 2014, pp. 178-179)
The next step is to put together reference materials, such as a dictionary or grammar. Often there is not enough information in Elders’ memories or historical records to express everything speakers want to say. The community may need to come up with new words and grammar to fill gaps in the language. A linguist can suggest ways to build new words and grammar, by looking at patterns in the language. Languages have relationships to each other, just like family members do. A linguist might also look at related languages and suggest similar patterns.
Following this comes the work of developing learning and teaching materials such as a learner’s guides, lesson plans and workbooks. They might include a learner’s grammar, which is a plain English manual on how the language works. They might also include apps. Educators can refer to dictionaries and grammars to produce these resources. These resources should only be made in collaboration with the language community.
Producing these resources is just part of the story. Communities then need opportunities to use the resources, like school or TAFE, or community-based programs. Communities also need training in how to teach language.
Language reawakening is hard work. Think about how easy it was to acquire your first language. If you’ve ever tried to learn another language as an adult, you know it can be tricky. It is much easier to speak and understand a language that you acquired as a child. This is why it is better to make sure languages aren’t put to sleep in the first place.
Even though language reawakening can be challenging, communities regularly express how important, meaningful and restorative it is for them. As Vicki Hartman, Ngarrindjeri woman, writes:
It wasn’t until I started to learn Ngarrindjeri that I felt this overwhelming sense of belonging. I had an identity, I was learning my culture, my Ngarrindjeri language. (Vicki Hartman in Gale 2020, p. 13).