Calls for urgent protection of Indigenous languages
June 21, 2024 9:44 PM Subscribe
Historic gathering in remote Western Australia calls for urgent protection of Indigenous languages. Aboriginal language experts say the survival and preservation of Indigenous languages needs to be treated as importantly as art and storytelling.
Yep. The Indigenous language resources in Australia suck.
There are, generously, a handful of university diplomas that include an Indigenous language component within broader course work but if you just want to learn a language by itself without committing to the time/cost/pressure of a full diploma then you're largely on your own.
The publicly available resources that do exist are scant and poorly maintained. For instance I found a pretty glaring error in an online dictionary, submitted a correction and months later the error remains. I have since found more errors which make me sceptical of the quality of the course as a whole.
And this is for the best preserved, studied and resourced Australian Indigenous language.
It's a pitiful state.
posted by neonamber at 11:41 PM on June 21 [3 favorites]
There are, generously, a handful of university diplomas that include an Indigenous language component within broader course work but if you just want to learn a language by itself without committing to the time/cost/pressure of a full diploma then you're largely on your own.
The publicly available resources that do exist are scant and poorly maintained. For instance I found a pretty glaring error in an online dictionary, submitted a correction and months later the error remains. I have since found more errors which make me sceptical of the quality of the course as a whole.
And this is for the best preserved, studied and resourced Australian Indigenous language.
It's a pitiful state.
posted by neonamber at 11:41 PM on June 21 [3 favorites]
We've been happy to diss Wade Davis here; but when it comes to TEDoratory he can be kinda stirring: When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:08 AM on June 22 [2 favorites]
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:08 AM on June 22 [2 favorites]
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