‘More than words’: Australia urged to lift its game in preserving Indigenous languages

Many more languages could soon be lost globally, with Australia falling behind in education and preservation.

Australia has fallen behind other countries in preserving Indigenous language and risks losing even more in the coming decades, experts have cautioned.

The warning comes as a new report from the Australian National University revealed as many as 1500 more languages could be lost globally by the end of the century.

“Australia has the dubious distinction of having one of the highest rates of language loss worldwide,” report co-author Professor Felicity Meakins from the University of Queensland said.

Of the roughly 250 languages spoken in Australia prior to European arrival, only 40 are still being used and just 12 are being taught to children.

Australia spends just $20.89 annually per capita of the Indigenous population on supporting languages, compared with $69.30 in Canada and $296.44 by New Zealand, according to Professor Meakins.

Australia spends a fraction of the amount New Zealand does per person on supporting native language. Picture: Dylan Robinson

It’s not just Australia facing irreversible losses – around half of the world’s 7000 recognised languages are considered endangered.

“We found that without immediate intervention, language loss could triple in the next 40 years. And by the end of this century, 1500 languages could cease to be spoken,” report co-author Professor Lindell Bromham said.

The study looked into a list of 51 factors placing pressure on endangered languages, with one unexpectedly high result being the impact of road density.

“Contact with other local languages is not the problem. In fact, languages in contact with many other Indigenous languages tend to be less endangered,” Bromham explained.

“But we found that the more roads there are, connecting country to city, and villages to towns, the higher the risk of languages being endangered. It’s as if roads are helping dominant languages ‘steam roll’ smaller languages.”

Adelaide High School offers Indigenous languages Pitjantjatjara and Kaurna to their Year 8 students to study. Kaurna instructor and university student Bianca Sebben (c) spent 18 months learning the language with Aboriginal elder Jack Buckskin (back). Students pictured are George Petrescu and Ebony Solomann.

Keeping languages alive requires both funding and support and Australia could learn from overseas examples as to the best way of going about it.

“Maori is now spoken in New Zealand’s parliament, they have school programs, they have bilingual schools, they have tertiary-level education in Maori,” Professor Meakins said.

Australia does have some programs in schools and high schools, and even in some universities, but the programs are few and far between and have had to contend with what was until recently, intense pressure for these languages not to be spoken.

“In Australia, the current state of languages and the way that they‘re endangered, really relates a lot to pretty brutal colonial policies, where people were actively punished for speaking language and children were placed in dormitory, so that intergenerational transmission has really been affected.”

Originally published as ‘More than words’: Australia urged to lift its game in preserving Indigenous languages