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Digital technology: a lifeline for indigenous languages
By Tricia Fitzgerald
Australia's Indigenous communities are increasingly turning to digital technology to save and strengthen their languages.
There were around 250 native languages being spoken when Europeans arrived in Australia but past practices aimed at stamping them out have had a dramatic impact.
Hundreds of languages and dialects have died out and now only around 80 languages are still being spoken. Many of them are in danger of dying out altogether.
With elders passing on, and written and taped language records getting damaged or lost over time, many communities believe digital recordings will help them take their languages into the future.
Daryn McKenny of the Arwarbukarl Cultural Resource Association in the Newcastle-Lake Macquarie region in New South Wales is reviving the area's Awabakal language through an easy-to-use interactive computer program.
The software program he has developed links local Awabakal language word lists and sentences with spoken word audio recordings.
‘The Awabakal language was still known around town in bits and pieces in place and street names, but it is around 100 years since there have been fiuent Awabakal speakers,' Daryn said.
‘The surviving Awabakal descendents had no language passed on to them.'
Daryn and colleague Abie Wright believed that as long as the language was missing it would be impossible for Awabakal people to reclaim their heritage.
They hunted down the written records of one of Australia's first Aboriginal missionaries, Lancelot Threlkeld, who translated the gospel of Saint Luke into Awabakal with the help of an Awabakal leader in the 1830s.
They then needed to find a way to get the Awabakal language recorded and to make it available to people who wanted to learn it.
‘We turned to computers to start the work … the language was taken away from us and we had to learn how to get it back again,' Daryn said.
For Daryn, computers and digital technology have been a bridge between his culture and the world.
‘At school back in the 1970s and 80s nothing I was being taught touched on my Aboriginal identity.'
‘I sat at the back of the class looking out the window when they talked about history.
‘When I dropped out of high school I decided to look into computers and learn something about them … I've been attached to computers ever since.
I'm not qualified with certificates or anything; I'm just all self-taught.'
Daryn recently met Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates in Sydney to discuss several pioneering Gates funded multimedia projects for Indigenous people in New South Wales.
‘The Awabakal language software was donated by Microsoft and we hope to push the relationship with the company so they provide software donations to other communities for language revival activities,' Daryn said.
‘Internationally, every two weeks at least one Indigenous language is disappearing, and digitisation is the quickest way to get a record of a language to stop that trend.'
‘If our languages disappear everything else about us disappears … the Aboriginal people of Australia are the oldest living race, we have the oldest religion, the oldest traditions, the oldest languages and we are not going to let that go.'
Awabakal country
Awabakal country stretches from the Hunter River to near Wollimbi in the Hunter Valley and takes in the Wattagan Mountains and Lake Macquarie in New South Wales.
The Awabakal digitisation project is funded through the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Maintenance of Indigenous Languages and Records program.
Visit www.dcita.gov.au/indig to find out more about the program.