Indigenous Australia: Contemporary Issues - Essay Example

Standard Australian English is only one of a number of other languages that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people use. It is important to examine the geographical and historical contexts of these languages to demonstrate the diversity of Australian culture, apart from the more recent arrival of European culture to the continent. This paper will examine the languages and alternative forms of expression used by the Aboriginal and Torres Islander people. It will examine the languages of the Indigenous Australian people and the sad nature of their decline in use. It will look at other forms of communication such as Sign language and the role this language has played in the complex pattern of the culture. Finally it will touch on the distinct nature of Aboriginal English and how this needs to be respected as unique form of expression. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are distinct groups in many ways. The Torres Strait Islanders occupy the area between Coastal Queensland and Papua, New Guinea. Ethnically they have more in common with the Melanesians and the people of New Guinea. The Aboriginal people are from continental Australia. Both groups are believed to have migrated to Australia 40, 000 years ago across the ocean at the time of the land bridge.(McLeod ,1963, p.10) Over the millenia cultures developed on the available land and its resources. The Aboriginal people living on the land did not exploit agriculture and lived as Hunters and Gatherers. Typical of such a society there was no typical central focus of power. Each member of the group had specific duties and obligations based on elaborate levels of Kinship relationships. The Torres Islanders had a similar egalitarian structure based on kinship ties but differed in that they were predominantly a maritime community that survived on fishing. Before the arrival of Europeans there were believed to be about a million indigenous inhabitants in Australia composed of about 700 self described tribes.(Dixon, 2002, p. 1) The tribes were extensions of bands which in themselves were moving groups of extended families of individuals. The tribes were orgnanized usually on the basis of the geographical areas that defined them. There were believed to be about 250 languages in use at this time, and as many as 600 regional dialects.(Dixon, 2002, p. 1) Tribes did communicate with each other. There were ritualized confrontations that reduced inter tribal conflicts. There were marriages and bonds formed between neighboring tribes. In essence there was a steady cultural exchange between the neighboring groups. The Aboriginal languages classified as the Proto-Australoid languages, are not to be confused with any negative suggestion of primitive. These languages while large in number share common traits such that certain rules can be observed. “Most have a word like “ngayu”, “ngaju”, or “ngay” for 'I', and many have “ngali” for 'we two'. There are also widespread words including jina 'foot', kumbu 'piss', kuna 'shit', pina 'ear', and others. “ (Mcgregor, 2004, p. 2) The similarities are also seen in the same repeated pattern of vowel sounds, “i”, “a” , and “u”. There is no use of the equivalent of the article “the” in Aboriginal languages. Questions are asked by inflection at the end of words. Extensive use of prefixes are used to designate prepositional statements such as direction of movement as in “to” and “from”. (Mcgregor, 2004, p. 2) . There are no rules on word order in Aboriginal languages and meaning can be surmised from the use of tone and context in a most economical way. The vocabulary does not include many words of a European context but this does not in any way diminish the subtlety of the language in describing their environment. For example, there are a large number of words used to describe fauna and wild life in various ways that do not have any English equivalents. The language is based on the particular environment of the Australian landscape and reflects the social organization of the indigenous population. In some cases there is a pattern of understanding of languages across a large territory: “The Western Desert language is currently in use, by Aborigines and non-Aborigines, to describe a chain of dialects, each mutually intelligible with its neighbors, which extends over one and a quarter million square kilometers (one-sixth of the area of Australia). (Dixon, 2002, p. 5) The Torres Islander traditional languages are of two distinct types based on regional distinctions, and there is third language which is a more recent phenomenon, Creole. Pama-Nyungan is the family of languages which characterizes the broad category of languages from central to western Australia This classification includes four generally recognized dialects: Kawalgau Ya, Kalau Kawau, Kulkalgau Ya and Kalaw Lagaw Ya. (Mcgregor, 2004, p. 37) The other major language of the Torrres Islander is related to Papuan languages that is used mostly on the Eastern coast of the Torres Strait. A third language and the most commonly used is Creole. This is a language that has developed from a hybrid pattern among new generations that use a combination of English and aspects of Torres Islander languages. This subject will be considered later in conjunction with Aboriginal English. Before moving to that subject it is important to consider the role of sign language in Australian Indigenous culture. The use of Sign language among Indigenous Australians is a cultural norm. It is a very sophisticated form as Schembri has outlined: "Australian Sign Language (Auslan) has a category of polycomponential (or “classifier”) verbs of motion, location, handling and visual-geometric description (Schembri, 1996)." (Schembri, 2003, p. 3) In Aboriginal cultures the use of such languages serves an important purpose at times when verbal communication is taboo between certain members of the group or on solemn occasions of ritual ceremony such as funerals. For example, verbal communication does not take place traditionally between a husband and his mother-in-law. This proscribed behavior is present because it is a form of pre-emptive control over the tensions that will inevitably develop when families live in close quarters. There is also extensive use of sign language during male initiation rites where quiet is part of the method of the rite of passage into manhood. There has been an interrelationship between sign language and the established sign language used in Australian mainstream society, Auslan. In the pattern of adapting languages to particular inflections of a particular area Auslan has been adapted and exists in dialects in the western Aboriginal groups and among the Torres Islanders. This process of amalgamating indigenous languages with other languages is occurring more and more all the time. Aboriginal English and Creole are the adaptations of the indigenous languages in Australia to the widespread use of English that occurred as a consequence of the European expansion in the area. As Dixon has described the contact between European and Indigenous culture has often been to the great detriment of indigenous culture: Contact with White civilization has led to the speedy extinction of Australian languages; in almost every instance, there are no longer any children learning the language within one hundred years of first contact (and often much sooner than that). As a result we have no time depth on any language. There are some reasonable grammars of languages of New South Wales from the 1840s and 1850s but these languages are no longer extant. (Dixon, 2002, p. 2) This sad outcome of the colonization of Australia has led to the extinction of a large number of languages as Dixon describes because they are no longer taught to young people. In their place have sprung up the adaptations. Aboriginal English grew out of the necessity of Aboriginal peoples who had to learn English in order to communicate with the the European inhabitants. At the time of early contact there was no evidence of the some of the enlightened attitude to Indigenous cultures that exists today. The early English of the Aboriginal peoples reflected the preconceived notions about indigenous cultures and hence it was often labeled as bad English or Pidgin English. This early attitude of smug superiority failed to recognize how Aboriginal English adapted English to the inflections of Aboriginal languages and made it unique. It was not until the 1960s that Aboriginal English started to be recognized in its own respect. In spite of the negative associations Aboriginal English served a most useful purpose in uniting many of the disparate tribes on the Australian continent that were separated by larger distances where languages differed too much for mutual communication. There are many features of Aboriginal English that characterize it has a true variation on the English language rather than the corruption that has been implied in the past, and in the present in some close minded cirlcles. Diana Eades describes these well in her article Aboriginal English , how Aboriginal English uses native language words interspersed with adaptations of English words to create unique forms. For example, the word Balanda is used to denote man in the Northern Territories and Wajala carries the same meaning in Western Australia; And similarly the English equivalents used in Aboriginal English for a large group is mob and that for home is camp, reflecting realities of a different perspective.(Eades,2003,p.1) The pronunciations of words also reflect the inherent differences. In Aboriginal English there is the tendency not to pronounce certain vowels such as the initial “h” in a word or to generalize the pronunciation of “there” so it becomes “dere”.(Eades,2003,p.2) This perhaps has added to the sense that the language is inferior but this view is rooted in prejudice and not in the reality that the accent arises from learning English from the base of another language group. In grammar, constructs of the grammar of Indigenous languages make their way into the usage of Aboriginal English. Questions are made principally by rising intonation and phrases that indicate relation are often made with composite noun phrases where two nouns are placed close together. This unique use of grammar takes into account what Eades calls Pragmatics wherein the meaning of the exchange is gathered from context and other cues including silence in ways that is not common in English. A similar amalgamation of English and the Indigenous language has taken place with the Creole language. This language is in extensive use and has names such as Blaikman Tok and Broken; it exists in a number of dialects, Cape York Western-Central, Papuan ,and Eastern, TI. (Mcgregor, 2004, p. 65) This language also has grown out of its ability to facilitate communication between groups that were previously separated by language barriers. Along with the development of the language there is a growing sense of political awareness associated with the language. Islanders now see the language as an expression of their uniqueness from the European culture and from Aboriginal culture. The use of Standard Australian English is but one option for the indigenous peoples of Australia. There has been a sad legacy of cultural domination which has led to the loss of some of the the old languages. But language is a living thing as this paper has attempted to delineate. Language reflects the unique preoccupations of an indigenous culture. In this way the growing cultural importance of Indigenous adaptations of Standard Australian English have much relevance today. Languages such as the those of Australian Aboriginals and Torres Islanders take into account their cultural heritage and also use of language in different ways, within contextual reference with alternative non-verbal expression such as sign language and with a body of grammar and vocabulary that reflects the realities of their lives. References Dixon, R. M. (2002). Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved May 18, 2006, from Questia database: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107599236 Dunbar-Hall, P. (2004). "Alive and Deadly": A Sociolinguistic Reading of Rock Songs by Australian Aboriginal Musicians. Popular Music and Society, 27(1), 41+. 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