![]() It doesn't take very long to get a language going again, but people need to be supported to do that."Īnd Professor Troy is doing what she can to help this along. She's doing it herself. "I can now sing a snow increase ceremony song in my language, I greet people in my language, I can introduce myself in my language. That could be languages used for every purpose every day by every age group or individuals wanting to work with the community to speak language again. She'd like to see Indigenous people worldwide encouraged and supported by their governments to speak their languages. ![]() "Our language is not a language that has no future," she says. ( Supplied )īut that is beginning to change, she adds, and her community is starting to use their language again. Professor Jakelin Troy is working to save Indigenous Australian languages. "Sharing the language was seen to be something that if you passed your language on to the next generation, it was going to cause them the same kind of horror that these older people had been through," she says. Professor Troy says older generations were scared into not speaking their language. "It really shows that we need to build curriculums that support bilingual education and wonderful language nests programs so that both Indigenous language proficiency and English language proficiency is supported," she says. These traumatic experiences had lasting consequences on many First Nations people's ability to pass on languages. "People were punished for speaking their language, children were placed in dormitories and we have the Stolen Generations, which really changed that ability to pass languages onto kids." "For instance, in Australia, languages have been silenced as the result of brutal colonial policies," she says. The study also illuminated the socio-political history of many countries. "Most of those languages that are endangered are spoken by marginalised minority communities, so Indigenous languages are really the focus of this study," Professor Meakins says. That's equivalent to losing a language per month for the rest of the century. She says, without further action, language loss could triple in the next forty years. Professor Felicity Meakins is a linguist at the University of Queensland and one of the authors of the recent study. ![]() do speak it but they don't share it." Losing a language per month "There are a few people who know a little bit about the language and. "From a First Nations point of view, as an Aboriginal person, a Ngarigu person in Australia, my own language is not spoken by my community, " she tells ABC RN Breakfast. "It's very depressing," says Professor Jakelin Troy, a Ngarigu woman and linguist at the University of Sydney. Of those, only about 12 are relatively strong and being taught to children. There are more than 250 Indigenous languages in Australia but, according to a AIATSIS 2018–19 survey, only 123 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages are still in use. Unfortunately Australia has one of the worst records in the world when it comes to language loss. Without immediate intervention, over 1,500 of these languages could be lost by the end of the century. Almost half of the world's 6,511 languages are now endangered, according to a recent study published in the scientific journal Nature.
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