Aboriginal languages are not simple

but they are different.

One of the regular readers of this blog left me an email yesterday and asked what I know about them. The answer has to be "not a lot". 

I have only worked on one communication board in Pitjantjatjara, one of the languages spoken in this state. It is considered "vulnerable" even though it is taught at university level.  

Look at any list of aboriginal languages in Downunder and you will see words like not just "vulnerable" but "endangered", "severely endangerd" and "critically endangered".  You will also see "dormant", "moribund" and "extinct". 

Realistically most aboriginal languages will not survive. Even if massive amounts of money and time were spent on them they would not survive.  In order to survive as a living, every day language then that language has at very least to be (a) used every day, (b) be fit for purpose in the modern world and (c) able to be preserved in some permanent form.

Aboriginal languages were obviously used every day. They reflected the world in which they were used. Their vocabulary reflected the needs of that world. They had a rich vocabulary relating to the natural world and the relationship those using it had with that world. Those languages were used to communicate in the "here and now", the present. There were stories told to try and explain natural phenomena but the idea of "time" is not linear. It might be circular or not even exist beyond the immediate day. Ideas about counting differ too. There might be just two words to express numbers - a word for "one" and another for "more than one". This is not "primitive". It is simply that there was no need for anything more than that. In the modern world there is also a need for vocabulary that simply does not exist at all in a dying aboriginal language. Even apparently universal concepts like counting and colour, body parts and transport, cannot be expressed without importing words.

Written language was unknown. Without written language there is no means of preserving the past. Yes, you can pass stories down by word of mouth but they will change and evolve over the years and almost all of it will be lost. 

There are those who are now trying to "preserve" aboriginal languages, to teach children in remote communities "in their own language". It is understandable. Losing a language means losing a way of thinking, a way of relating to the world. We all lose when that happens.

But it will happen. It is unrealistic to believe that attempts to "save" some of these languages will work. All languages have to change and develop or die.

My ancestors spoke Gaelic. My paternal great-grandparents however were bilingual and, for their time, well educated. My grandfather knew no more than a few words of Gaelic. His children knew almost none. I have a few words. I live in a country where it is not spoken at all but I know it has a rich literary heritage and that some of that has been preserved in writing over hundreds of years. In Scotland there is some chance it will survive - and it should because we can learn much from it.

We could perhaps have done the same here if the languages had been there in any written form. They were not and the attempts to "save" them, while well meaning, have failed to take into account the need for a written form that has come from within rather than an attempt to externally impose it. 

But aboriginal languages were not "primitive". They were simply fit for purpose and they survived for thousands of years.