Language Death and Language Maintenance: Action Needed to Save Aboriginal Languages

Extract

Language death can occur naturally, and in different ways, or it can be caused by deliberate policy. This is how deliberate practices and policies brought it about in Australia.

• • Diverse linguistic groups of Aborigines were forced into small missions or reserves to live together; consequently languages that were numerically stronger squeezed the others out of use.

• • Anxious to ‘Christianise’ the Aborigines, missionaries enforced harsh penalties on users of Aboriginal languages, even to the point of snatching babies from their mothers and institutionalising them, so they would not hear their parental languages.

• • Aboriginal religious ceremonies were banned; initiations did not take place, and so liturgical, ceremonial and secret languages were unable to be passed on. As old people died, their languages died with them.

• • Assimilationist/integrationist policies were enforced which required Aborigines to attend schools where English-only was the medium of instruction.

• • Finally, denigration of the Aboriginal languages set the seal on their fate in Victoria (within forty years of white settlement, all Gippsland languages had become extinct), most of New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland. Labelling the languages “rubbish”, “heathen jargon”, “primitive jibberish”, and so on, made Aboriginal people reluctant to use their normal means of communication.