If this promise is found to be false, I understand that I will be subject to penalties up to and including the forfeiture of the degree earned by my dissertation. Sometimes entire communities were wiped out and therefore there was no one left to pass on the knowledge of the language. In fact, the introduction of smaller or larger changes in a language is inevitable if we want to keep up with the development of the world and the rapid progress of society.
There were and still are nations that lost a lot due to British colonization and interference in traditional life and culture, and languages that lost a lot due to the influence of English. Since the establishment of the first colony, the native languages have undergone many changes.
Historical background
The colonization of Australia is said to have begun with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. Under the leadership of Arthur Phillip, eleven ships arrived with over a thousand people on board and established a settlement at Port Jackson (Sharp 183). As the population dwindled, so did the languages, but the few that remained today received adequate attention: researchers collected traditional narratives, and many dictionaries were produced in various Aboriginal languages.
How has the number of languages and population changed?
This was the point when Arthur Phillip realized that not just one but a number of languages were spoken in Australia. It is difficult to calculate how many Aborigines lived in Australia and how many languages they spoke, as most of the population and linguistic heritage had already been lost by the time historians began to take the subject seriously. There are various theories about the number of Aboriginal people living in Australia before and after colonization and the number of languages spoken today.
Arthur says that at the time of colonization, beginning in 1788, about two hundred languages were spoken by Aboriginal people throughout Australia, and within them there were many dialects. Due to European influence, the number of languages has steadily declined, and until now, out of two hundred languages, only about eighty remain that are spoken by the elderly, and there are even fewer that are spoken by entire communities (Arthur 1 ). There are about a hundred languages still spoken, but only by an insignificant number of people (5).
The number of languages still in use today among Aboriginal people is relatively small, researchers estimate it at several dozen (Dixon et al. 5). The number of full-blooded Aboriginal Australians on the continent is approximately forty-six thousand, but many of them do not speak an Aboriginal language at all, or only partially speak it. Vászolyi writes of a theory that at the beginning of colonization, the number of indigenous people exceeded 300,000.
They lived in five hundred tribes, and they spoke about the same number of languages.
What are the reasons for the loss of Aboriginal languages?
There was also a desire to integrate into the new society, so some Aboriginal families themselves decided to learn and use English instead of their own languages. Since the children only heard English at home and at school, the knowledge of native languages began to disappear. The media through newspapers, radio and television programs also contributed to the spread of English, which continued to assume the power of the first language over Aboriginal languages.
By killing the population of a certain area, the whites also killed the language spoken by that community. Due to the cruelty of the settlers and the diseases they brought with them, from which the natives could not be protected by medicine or vaccination, the number of Aboriginal people living there was halved every year. Finally, the three hundred people who remained in 1830 moved to an island in Bass Strait.
The population began to die out even faster, with the last full-blooded Tasmanian dying in 1876. Other groups were not treated as brutally, but a decline in population has been observed in each tribe. However, the trend of population decline was reversed in the 1950s by the development of medical care.
The Aboriginals also got used to the new way of life, and they hoped that they could regain their old population (Dixon 79).
Changes in Aboriginal languages
- Pronunciation and writing
- Changes in meaning
- Borrowing words
- Creating new languages
- Pidgin
- Creole
- Missionaries
Although Aboriginal languages have suffered much disrespect since the arrival of settlers, the presence of whites did something appropriate: they introduced writing. Vászolyi says that the English alphabet brought with them by the colonizers had to be used from the beginning to write Aboriginal words because legal and administrative cases required the recording of names and other details of persons (49). According to Vászolyi, polysemy was a feature of Aboriginal languages even before the British invasion, but this event contributed to the expansion of the meaning of many words (167).
One possible way of expanding the meaning comes from the fact that through colonization, the indigenous world was constantly expanding, so that old words were used to refer to newly known objects, so that the same word "tyina" became used for ". shoe, boot, which was also used for 'foot, leg' inside. The natives who did not speak English picked up some words from the English language and began to use them. Borrowing was a linguistic necessity of the settlers, but there were times when changes in form and function occurred, allowing words to adapt more easily to the demands of the language itself.
As the conquest of lands and tribes continued northward, pidgin remained the contact language. It spread across much of the country and many regional varieties formed, including Sydney-pidgin, "Top End" Kriol, Cape York Creole, and Broken or Blaikman Tok of the Torres Strait Islands (Austin 81). In Aboriginal English, the definite article and the indefinite article have disappeared, as has much of the morphology of nominals, such as the indication of the plural form.
If the purposes of the newly formed language were limited, the language remained in limited use, but at certain times there was a greater need for a common language, which is how pidgins could evolve into creoles.
Pama-Nyungan languages
Western Australia
- Western Desert language
- Nyungar
- Nhanta
- Languages of the Pilbara region
- Yindjibarndi and Panyjima
- Martuthunira
- Jiwarli
Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara are neighboring dialects that are both part of the Western Desert language. With about 2500 people speaking this language and it still being learned by children, 'Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara counts as one of the less endangered Australian languages' (Goddard 871). After the arrival of the British, a dual economy was created which was based on hunting and gathering, then the traditional lifestyle of the indigenous people and the use of European goods (Dixon, Ramson and Thomas 36).
Another part of the traditional culture was also disappearing from 1880 to 1920 because social organizations began to cease and fewer and fewer ceremonial practices were performed (Dixon et al. 36). In the Perth area the dialect maintained an older form of the language, but further south languages underwent an interesting change whereby the last two sounds of a word appear to have been converted to metathesis. Yindjibarndi and Panyjima are both languages of the Pilbara region located in the western part of Australia.
We don't know much about these languages, but according to Douglas, Europeans came to the area in the 1860s, and the arrival of the whites was followed by fifty years of bloody conflict. Their decline is part of a general pattern that has seen the inhabitants of the Pilbara and Ashburton River coastal areas almost completely wiped out. The decline of the language began in 1860, when the region was opened to European settlement.
It has been observed that 80 percent of the vocabulary of these languages is identical, and they also have almost the same grammatical system (Austin 570).
Dharuk
Yagara
Revival movements
Bilingual education
The government decided that Aboriginal children should be taught in schools in their own languages, but in addition they should also learn arts, crafts and other skills, so that they would not feel so disconnected from their traditional way of life. Among many others, Manyjiljarra and Nyangumarta is taught in Strelley, Walmajarri is taught in Noonkanbah since 1980 and children can learn Kukatja and English in Bango Hills since 1987 in bilingual education (Black 210). Support for education is also reflected in the action of the New South Wales government.
Despite the fact that Australian English is threatening indigenous languages, one can detect a desire for the revival of Aboriginal languages and cultures. This is why in 2003 the government provided funding for the promotion of Aboriginal languages and their inclusion in the school system. The Dyaabugay language in Queensland has been revived, thanks to bilingual education programs (Blake 91).
Learning an Aboriginal language
Another reason why it is unusual is that it distinguishes different genders, and the pronunciation of stressed syllables - unlike other Aboriginal languages - is similar to that of English. There are many dialects of the language; glossaries and descriptive grammars on some of them were published in the late 19th-early 20th century (Sharpe 75). Second, non-Aboriginals learn because they are interested in the language as many place names in the area come from this language.
Thirdly, there was a teacher in a Victorian school who wanted to teach an Aboriginal language that does not have many speakers, hoping that the children would be interested in reviving not only that but also other Aboriginal languages. For this reason, Aboriginal-run language centers have sprung up in the new millennium across the country. A large part of the research was carried out on the aboriginal languages of Australia, which pointed out that the number of spoken languages is gradually decreasing.
After the colonization of the land, the introduction of diseases to which the Aborigines were not immune and the massacres of the natives were among the main causes of the decline of the population and thus of the language. The loss of most Aboriginal languages resulted from battles over where the colonists prevailed and where the Aborigines lost. Despite minor or major changes in the vocabulary, grammar and phonetics of the indigenous languages, not all has been lost as far as the traditional heritage is concerned.
For most of the languages it is already too late to be saved; the twenty or thirty that remain today are trying to bring back a part of the culture that was thought to be condemned to death.
