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Raising an Aboriginal language from the dead

By Malcolm King - posted Monday, 15 September 2008


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.

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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.

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“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.

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First published in The Age on September 6, 2008.



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About the Author

Malcolm King is a journalist and professional writer. He was an associate director at DEEWR Labour Market Strategy in Canberra and the senior communications strategist at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide. He runs a writing business called Republic.

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