h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

While I agree that the loss of any minority language is 'A Bad Thing'...I feel I must play Devil's Avocado for a moment.

Australian languages in particular are highly localised and tied to limited geographic areas. Much of the effort in ensuring languages' survival is directed towards ensuring the the myths and legends relevant to a particular area - which, in accordance with Aboriginal culture, generally relate directly to geographic features - can continue to be told.

But what is the effect of maintaining this culture? Is it not to tie a people down to one area, *irrespective of whether so doing provides them with the economic and cultural opportunities available to others*?

Let's take me as an example. I live a reasonable distance from my place of birth. Were I in Australia, this distance would likely cross several linguistic boundaries. And I'm not ties to my native culture: I have been able to assimilate many cultural artefacts which would have been alien even to my parents' generation.

So...is effort being devoted to maintaining Australian Aborinal cultures as living museums for the edification of a small population of professional linguists and anthropologists? Should the priority not be to provide such things as decent healthcare, access to jobs, and access to the rich world culture available to immigrant Australians? The Aboriginal peoples have been notably short-changed in these areas.

As I say, I'm (partly) playing Devil's Avocado...but what would the consequences of losing Aboriginal culture *really* be? Might not some gain more than thay lose?

Plus...I'm afraid I have to pick up on a piece of nonsense from the Entry:

"Before European settlement in 1788, perhaps the oldest culture in the world remained fundamentally untouched for tens of thousands of years."

Firstly, it was not untouched. Torres Strait Islanders are known to have traded with Papua New Guineans. In some - but not all - areas there was cross-fairtilsation of linguistic elements and sharing of technology and agricultural species.

More fundamentally, though...I'm at a loss to understand what is meant by "...the oldest culture in the world". Yes, it's likely to have remained *relatively* uninfluenced for a long period. But we have no way of knowing, for example, the extent to which its language, say, or its myths and legends remained unchanged. Further...all cultures evolve from a previous culture. Both white and aboriginal australians can be certain that their cultures have developed over the same length of time, albeit that one was almost certainly in greater flux than the other, at least over the last 3000 years or so.

I'll have a drop of that advocaat.

There are a whole lot of issues caught up in this. I know a little more about Canada than Australia, but would not be at all surprised if the situation were much the same in both countries.

In Canada, children were put into boarding schools and taught English; their own languages were suppressed. After school, they were expected to live in reservations with little arable land and little chance of employment. They now have high rates of suicide and alcoholism - are these really attributable solely to the suppression of language? Of course not.

Whatever the argument in favour of preserving the languages, I fear there's not a lot anybody can do. From the entry: "Today, only [100 Aboriginal languages] survive in any given form and only 20 are in common use. The largest community is the Yolugu tribe of north-east Arnhem Land, whose language has nearly 6,000 speakers." On those figures, I'd have to say it's probably already too late to save most of those languages, other than as museum exhibits. Even 6,000 sounds like an awfully small community to sustain a living language. If that's the most popular one, I doubt if many of the others are viable.

Although...over the millenia they will have been sustained by similarly small linguistic communities.

The real change know is that the *culture* is dying out. Indeed, it is already dead. Whether this is a bad thing is irrelevant. The point is that the environments and economies have changed. Surely now the issue is how to ensure that Aboriginal peoples are given their full share of the culture that has usurped theirs?

Yes, pride in one's language, culture and history are fine things. But I suggest that they're relatively minor issues when compared with the current gross disparities in wealth, employment, incarceration rates, healthcare, etc.

Very true, but it's easy to get emotional over symbols. I remember being disgusted when I read about the Taleban destroying a couple of irreplaceable statues (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1242856.stm ), then being ashamed when I realised they'd done a lot worse.

Edward, isn't every culture that existed 20 years ago, 'already dead' in a sense? The culture may be changing, but I'd be very doubtful that it no longer exists.

I don't see why the question should be as binary as you paint it - why make a choice between A and B - A) being preserving languages and ignoring questions of healthcare, mortality rates incarceration, B) being eradicating poverty and eradicating the language at the same time.

I don't see why, in this instance, it's impossible to 'have the cake and eat it'.

You're right insofar as the Aborinal peoples should be given full access to society and its products *and* have their culture and language celebrated. What I'm more sceptical about is whether an emphasis on the latter necessarily delivers the former.

Another problem that Australian Aborigines have is that they are marked out by their poor English. Because over the last few generations they have been transplanted, many of the indidigenous languages have been supplanted by creolised versions of English. This limits their employment prospects...and educational resources simply aren't being provided to advance them. This is the state of the overwhelming majority. In that context...isn't promoting a languages spoken by a mere 6000 max mere piddling in the wind? Who are the real winners? The people themselves? Or linguists, anthropologists and other cultural tourists?

(And remember...I am *partly* playing Devil's Avocado.)

A language spoken by a community of 6000 people might be viable, but only if they are isolated. I think we all agree that indigenous peoples "should be given full access to society and its products", but if that includes television, their languages are doomed.

No, language is not the main course of this situation, but it is a part of it. The entry wasn’t meant to examine the entire problem; it just looked at the issue of language and culture. I didn’t mean to suggest it is the fundamental reason for all ills. I should read over it again find what exactly gave this impression.

Perhaps the entry is a little emotive on some points, pushing issues of prison populations and suicide as they relate to cultural identity. Of course there are other pressing causes of these things.


Thanks for the feed back people. I know i should have responded some months ago.

In the 1950s a serious attempt was made by Her Majesty's Government to wipe out Cymraeg (Welsh). I think they thought that the Welsh speakers of North Wales were a potential threat to the hard won status quo - read the poetry of R S Thomas for an idea of this perception. Strange that his Nobel Prize nomination didn't get all the way some would say.
When I went to school one day I was informed by our teacher that 'from now on' we all have to 'speak English in the classroom'!
Anyway, the attempt by the authorities was an abysmal failure and now the Welsh, the nation who roofed the world, ("people who are not Saxon" the Old English word means) have their own dual language road signs and an Assembly called the Dosbarth.
The lesson is that situation is never hopeless if you are prepared stand up to 'THEM'!
Thankfully I live today in a multi-language paradise and hear German, Italian, French, English, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Japanese and many other languages, on a daily basis. It's wonderful!

Just because a language has only 6000 speakers does not make it endangered. As long as the language is taught to child then the language will survive. There are amazonian languages with only a few hundred speakers but they are perfectly healthy and there are no signs of the language dying out because children learn them as their first language.

That is true. And I mentioned (a couple of years ago now ) that Australian Aboriginal languages have long been supported by small communities.

But this was because individual groups - just as Amazonian groups - were isolated. The languages *may* survive - but only if the groups remain tight-knit and confined to a small area. Is this sustainable - or even desirable - if speakers also want to engage in a modern society and receive their just share within it?

I would *love* to see all these languages survive. But not at the expense of limiting the cultural and economic opportunities of speakers by tieing them to their small ancestral homelands in the middle of nowhere.

Indeed, its trade off that must be thought of carefully.

I still think that the trade-off is a bit of a false dichotomy, though. There is no reason why having access to a modern society means the language of a given group should die out. In fact a lot of the modern technology that comes with that can be a means of preserving languages - and indeed making them more widely used and known. I'm thinking in particular of the Irish language and of Romani when I say that - CDs, CD ROMs, mp3s, television, radio and the internet have all had a role in keeping both of them as living languages, rather than wiping them out.