What Do We Lose When Languages Die?

21.10.22
What Happens Next?
What Do We Lose When Languages Die? | 70

When we travel through Europe, we expect to experience a wide array of culture and customs – in each country, different foods, different views, and different languages.

That’s not the expectation visitors to Australia have, but perhaps they should. Before British colonisation, this land was home to nearly 300 distinct Indigenous languages.

But frontier violence, years of harmful policies, and entrenched, systemic racism against the Traditional Owners of the land stamped many of those languages out entirely, and those remaining have struggled to survive, spoken in secret or kept alive only in the memories of Elders. Today, just 10 Indigenous Australian languages are considered strong.

In a new episode of Monash University’s podcast, “What Happens Next?”, linguists and Indigenous human rights advocates discuss how we lost these languages, what it means when a language is sleeping, and the lengths communities are going to to wake them up again.

Host Dr Susan Carland is joined this week by Associate Professor John Bradley, Acting Deputy Director of Monash University’s Indigenous Studies Centre; Associate Professor Alice Gaby, Deputy Chair of the Board of Living Languages; and Monash alumna Inala Cooper, Director of Murrup Barak, the Melbourne Institute for Indigenous Development at the University of Melbourne.

A full transcript of this episode is available on Monash Lens.

Learn more:

Saving language: The power of ancient Indigenous oral traditions Our history, our nation: Why the National Archives must be preserved The Uluru Statement from the Heart Directory of language apps

“What Happens Next?” will be back next week with part two of this series, “Can We Save Endangered Languages?”.

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