Professor Ghil‘ad Zuckermann (DPhil Oxford; PhD Cambridge, titular; MA Tel Aviv, summa cum laude) is Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide, Australia and the founder of Revivalistics, a global, trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation, revitalization and reinvigoration.
Explaining the genesis of this project, Professor Zuckermann writes, “When I arrived in Melbourne in 2004, I asked myself how I might contribute to the Australian society that was hosting me so graciously.
I identified two pressing issues facing Australian society: the exasperating bureaucracy; and the injustice done to the Aboriginal people.
I am a linguist specializing in the revival of Hebrew and the emergence of the Israeli language, a hybrid language based on Hebrew, Yiddish, and other languages spoken by revivalists/reclaimers. So, I found a fascinating niche: reclamation, revitalization, and reinvigoration of Aboriginal languages.
The situation of the Aboriginal tongues is dismal. I know of at least 330 different Aboriginal languages, but only 4 percent (13 languages) are “healthy,” meaning that they are spoken natively by the children. The remaining 96 per cent have either by now become what I call “Sleeping Beauty” tongues or are on the verge of imminent extinction. Nevertheless, the reclamation of languages in Australia began only in recent years.
Why revitalize Aboriginal languages? I can offer three reasons:
The first is ethical/moral: Aboriginal languages are worthy of reviving out of a desire for historic social justice. They deserve to be reclaimed in order to right the wrongs of the past. The English colonizers consciously wiped out these languages in a process that I call “linguicide” – language killing.
I believe in Native Tongue Title, which would be an extension of “Native Title”, ־ the recognition in Australian law that Indigenous people have rights to and interests in their land that derive from their traditional laws and customs.
The second reason for Aboriginal language revival is aesthetic: Diversity is beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. As Nelson Mandela said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
The third reason for Aboriginal language revival is utilitarian: Language reclamation empowers individuals who have lost their heritage and, at times, a reason to live. This empowerment can save a government millions of dollars that would otherwise need to be invested in mental health and incarceration, not to mention the various cognitive and health benefits of bilingualism.
Barngarla, the language I have been helping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people reclaim for the past few years, was spoken until 50 years ago in the Eyre Peninsula of South Australia. Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann lived in Port Lincoln, and in 1844, 172 years ago, he composed the Barngarla-English dictionary in order to convert the Aboriginal people to Christianity.
Because Schürmann was a missionary, not a linguist, his dictionary is not professional in today’s terms. Therefore, it is up to me to carry out reconstruction, for example, by means of comparing Barngarla to Aboriginal languages that are “genetically” close to Barngarla – for instance, Adnyamathanha, literally “rock people,” spoken on the Flinders ranges in South Australia. Think of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who was very fond of using Arabic and Aramaic in order to coin new words, in Israeli. Aramaic is very close to Hebrew.
I run workshops in which I support Aboriginal people in teaching the language of their ancestors. We write poems, learn new expressions, invent new words, and learn by heart the Barngarla “Welcome to Country”—several sentences that Barngarla people use to open official events in the Eyre Peninsula. We go about planning to transform what I call the “landscape,” the linguistic landscape of the region, for instance, by translating signs from English to Barngarla.
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The revival of Aboriginal languages shows signs very similar to the revival of Hebrew. Every successfully reclaimed language, regardless of whether or not it is written or only oral, is expected to end up as a hybrid.
My work with the Aboriginal people is voluntary. The satisfaction I derive from it is immense. Many of them would like to visit Israel, get to know more Israelis, and learn the Israeli language.”