Language shift and death of indigenous languages in Australia

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Language shift and language death
2.1 The situation of Aboriginal languages during colonisation
2.1.1 Pointed decimation of Aborigines
2.1.2 Slavery
2.1.3 Socialisation and Christianisation through education
2.1.4 The change in Aboriginal society
2.2 The contemporary situation of Aboriginal languages
2.2.1 Globalisation
2.2.2 The Media
2.2.3 Racism and prejudices

3. Conclusion

References

1. Introduction

As the sailor Captain Cook occupied the Eastern half of Australia in the name of the English King George III in 1770 the foundation for the language contact between English and Aboriginal languages has been laid. This occupation and the spread of British colonisation had a disastrous impact on the indigenous languages of Australia. After the English government had decided to found a penal colony in Botany Bay, Australia, in order to oppose the overcrowding in the British prisons, the First Fleet with 736 prisoners reached Australia on January 26th in 1788.

Up to the arrival of the first British people in 1788 about 300,000 native inhabitants, later called Aborigines, lived in Australia for more than 40,000 years and about 230 distinct languages as well as 500 to 600 dialects were once spoken by the native Australians. The characteristic in Australian languages is that due to the lack in influence from other languages, Aboriginal languages are mostly independent of other language families.

After about one century, however, the population of the Aboriginal Australians was reduced to 50,000 people. Moreover, after 200 years of British settlement only 90 indigenous languages were left. Approximately 70 out of these languages were threatened by extinction and only half of them still remained between ten and one hundred speakers.

2. Language shift and language death

2.1 The situation of Aboriginal languages during colonisation

After the arrival of the first British prisoners and settlers in Australia, the British considered Australia an “inhospitable land, an empty wasteland [… and a so-called] ‘terra nullius’” (Fesl 1993: 4) without a present society and landowners. But having recognized that several indigenous communities already existed, the British were forced to resort to drastic means in order to build up the colony.

2.1.1 Pointed decimation of Aborigines

As the British invaders wanted to take land from the Aborigines without paying for it, and use it for their purposes of cattle breeding and farming, they had to use methods that were suitable to ban the Aborigines from that land. One of these means was to kill the members of indigenous communities, which inhabited those territories. Two direct and one more indirect methods in killing Aboriginal people became common.

As many native Australians were at the brink of starvation because the settlers’ grazing animals destroyed Aboriginal vegetable foods, poisoning of food and water was an easy direct means to kill Aborigines and decimate the population of indigenous people.

The second direct method in killing Aborigines was shooting them. The indigenous people were rounded up or driven to a swamp or river and shot or drowned. The idea of forcing them to a swamp or river contained the advantage of getting rid of the corpses as “they [were] floated out to sea [or] if there were no sea, the bones sank in the mud and were buried” as Gilmore wrote in 1935 (quoted in Fesl 1993: 62). Like Fesl reported, studies were made to find out the times and sacred places of Aboriginal rituals in order to be able to kill as much people as possible at the same time (cf. Fesl 1993: 61-62). The common practice to keep this violence secret, allegiance was sworn by the participants. Due to this, occasions in which cases of killings were taken to court were very rare. But cases like the one of Myall Creek in 1838 where 28 Aborigines were shot, and the seven murderers were taken to court shows that the chances to charge the murderers for their acts of brutality were very small because the negative attitude towards indigenous people did not change. As Christie reports in 1979:

Despite weighty evidence of their guilt the jury acquitted the prisoners after fifteen minutes’ deliberation. One of the jurymen told the press after the trial: ‘I look on the blacks as a set of monkeys and the earlier they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better. I would never consent to hang a white man for a black one. I knew well they were guilty of murder, but I for one would never see a white man suffer for shooting a black’ (Fesl 1993: 64).

The third, but more indirect, method of killing Aboriginal people was to flog them. However, the numbers of people dying of this method are difficult to access, a few cases of victims beaten or whipped to death are reported.

These killing customs had a disastrous impact on indigenous languages. Several languages became extinct as whole communities speaking these languages died at the hands of the white colonists. Communities, where only few speakers survived often caused language shift by themselves as they joined other, numerically stronger groups and shifted to that language (cf. Fesl 1993: 61-63).

2.1.2 Slavery

Keeping Aborigines as slaves was a common custom in all Australian states, in some states even until the 1970s. Having taken land from the Aborigines, the settlers were in need of cheap workers for their farm or domestic matters. Not being willing to pay for workers, Aborigines seemed to be the perfect people for free labour.

For many Aborigines, being driven off their land, working for the settlers and receiving a place to stay or some food for wages was the only opportunity of protecting themselves from starvation, capture or being taken to reservations. Malnutrition, however, was still a consisting and severe problem as the food Aborigines received for their work was mostly not enough and of bad quality.

Aboriginal Australians, who worked for settlers as servants, were commonly not allowed to speak their own language and were therefore taught some basics in English in order to be able to understand a few commands.

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