Raising an Aboriginal language from the dead

Much has been written about the need for ecological diversity to maintain a balanced ecosystem. Yet in Adelaide, in the UNESCO Year of Indigenous Languages, an equally profound revolution is taking place which has linguists all over the world talking - the resurrection of a dead Aboriginal language.

Ninna marni? Are you good? Marniai. I’m good. Wanti ninna? Where are you going? Wodlianna. Going home.

That’s Kaurna (pronounced garma) the language of the original inhabitants of the Adelaide Plain, the Kaurna People. It was effectively dead by 1860. It suffered the fate of many Aboriginal people: dispersal, disease, in-fighting and assimilation. English buried their tongue.

The Kaurna people lived to the rhythm of the seasonal changes. They lived on the coast in summer months, living off berries and sea life, including turtles. In the colder months they moved to the foothills, which had better shelter and firewood.

When Europeans arrived in Australia, linguists estimate that there were more than 250 Aboriginal languages. Today no more than 25 Aboriginal languages are spoken daily.

Enshrined in a language is the whole of a community’s history and a large part of its cultural identity. We think in language. It is the code through which we make sense of the world. It makes us self-aware. All of our art, culture and scientific discoveries come to us through language.

The only record of the Kaurna language was a tiny dictionary and some song sheets compiled in 1840 by Kaurna Elders and two German missionaries, Clamor Schurmann and Christian Teichelmann, who ran a school for Aboriginal children in Adelaide.

Schurmann and Teichelmann were not cane wielding Bible bashers who sought to eradicate the local language. They were Christian linguists who meticulously recorded the Kaura language knowing that it faced extinction. They saved more than they knew.

The dictionary lay buried in an Adelaide library until it was unearthed in 1960.

And there it might have stayed until in the early 1990s, Dr Rob Amery, a linguist, and member of the Kaurna community, decided to “rebuild” the language and teach it to school children and adults.

This was an epic undertaking. Amery and the Kaurna community had been left a smattering of words but constructing the grammar was another matter.

“Back in 1990 Teichelmann’s dictionary was pretty much all we had of the Kaurna language. There were other materials around but they had not been produced or collated. Some were not reliable and didn’t tell us much about the grammar,” Dr Amery says.

Amery’s comprehensive research turned up some prayer books written in Kaurna back in the missionary days. By identifying the tunes, he could also translate some of the words in to English. The combination of having the songs and the dictionary was enough to build a “grammar spine”.

It took Amery and others10 years to get to a stage where they were confident enough to teach the resurrected language in schools.

“For the Kaurna people it was an act of identity. For me, I just got interested in the language for its own sake. I could also see what being involved in this language stuff was doing for some individuals. It changed their lives completely,” Dr Amery says.

Amery is aware that the reborn language is not identical as that spoken 300 years ago on the eastern shore of St Vincent’s Gulf.

“Of course it’s not a carbon copy of original language. We don’t know everything and some words have been lost forever but what we have is the grammar and a vocabulary of more than 2,000 words. That’s a start,” Dr Amery says.

Amery underplays his part in the rebuilding of the Kaurna language but this is an event of international importance. The renowned international linguist Professor David Crystal makes special mention of the Kaurna language project on his website and in his book Language Death.

There are approximately 6,000 global languages yet on average one language dies every two weeks, often as the last elderly speakers perish. Many of the 100s of languages of Papua New Guinea are already under threat.

In 2002, the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that there were fewer than 3,000 people who spoke an Indigenous language in New South Wales. In 2006 that figure had dropped to 800.

According to Professor Crystal about half of those 6,000 languages are going to die this century.

“We should care for dying languages for the very same reason that we care when a species of animal of plant dies. It reduces the diversity of our planet. I’m talking about the intellectual and cultural diversity of the planet now - not its biological diversity, but the issues are the same,” Professor Crystal says.

The Kaurna people are rebuilding their language from the grass roots and they’re now teaching it in schools throughout the northern suburbs of Adelaide.

Kaurna Elder Aunty Josie Agius agrees with Amery that the resurrection of the language “has changed their lives”. She said the rebirth of the language has given displaced or disenfranchised Aboriginals a polestar to follow to find their cultural identity.

“When you start researching a language you also have to go out and meet people. We’d sit down and start talking about families and we’d use some Kaurna words and they’d say, “How did you know that? That’s a word we use,” Aunty Josie says.

“You’ve got to understand just how dispersed some of us older people were. The Kaurna language is like a map not only of who your kin might be but also a spiritual map of who you are,” Auntie Josie says.

There are very few success stories of language resurrection. One of the most spectacular is Modern Hebrew, reborn to serve as the official language of Israel.

The Maori language in New Zealand has been maintained by “language nests”. These are organisations that provide children less than five years of age with a domestic setting where they are intensively exposed to the language. The staff are all Maori speakers from the local community.

What makes the resurrection of the Kaurna language so astonishing is that it flies in the face of a global trend of language death and diminishment.

“Most people have yet to develop a language conscience. But the extent of the ongoing loss in the world’s linguistic diversity is so cataclysmic that it makes the word ‘revolution’ look like an understatement,” Professor Crystal says.

The Kaurna language is a badge of present day identity that reaches far back in to the past, long before white settlement. It will evolve over time as long as people are prepared learn it and use it.

The Kaurna people have taught us an invaluable lesson. While we value ecological diversity - and none valued it more than the traditional Aboriginals - we need to apply the same precautionary principles of conservation to language.