Mark their word, two new languages

As the world's languages disappear - and with half of the planet's about 6,000 spoken tongues facing extinction - there is one place which has stunned experts by resisting the trend.

In the remote parts of Australia, two new languages have sprung to life in recent decades.

The languages emerged in Aboriginal communities and are mainly spoken by young people. They are a mix of English and existing Aboriginal languages as well as creole dialects, but have been officially identified as new languages by linguists, who say each possesses its own unique grammatical structure.

The newest language to be identified is called Light Warlpiri and is spoken by about 300 people in a village in northern Australia. The oldest speaker is believed to be about 35 years old.

The other newly-identified language is known as Gurindji Kriol and is spoken by about 1,000 people, also in northern Australia. Linguists believe it began to emerge from the 1970s and is spoken by people aged about 50 and under.

A linguistics expert who has documented the emergence of Gurindji Kriol, Dr Felicity Meakins, said the creation of the new Aboriginal languages was a "radical" development and took place exclusively among young people in the community.

"These languages have totally gone under the radar," she told ABC News last week.

"(Gurindji Kriol) is not something spoken by older populations. It is not something spoken outside the community," she added. The creation of the languages comes amid growing concerns about the wipe-out of Australia's indigenous languages.

When British settlers first arrived in the late 1700s, there were believed to be about 250 distinct languages - and more than 500 dialects - spoken by the Aboriginal population. Today, there are just 18 languages which have survived and which are still being spoken by young children.

The trend mirrors a global development as communities around the world abandon their tongues in favour of English, Spanish and Mandarin. Experts estimate that 94 per cent of the world's population now speak just 6 per cent of the world's languages.

Though there are no official figures, the most commonly spoken languages are believed to be Mandarin, spoken by more than one billion people; Spanish, with about 470 million speakers; and English, with about 360 million speakers. Other top 10 spoken languages include Hindi, Arabic, Portugese, Bengali and Russian.

In Australia, some communities have sought to save their tongues, including through projects to record people speaking them or efforts to create computer programs and smartphone apps that document the language.

Earlier this month, the Kaurnas, a community near the city of Adelaide, held a celebration to commemorate their language, Kaurna, which had been effectively out of use for a century.

The Kaurnas used historical records to piece together the language and have begun holding the first conversations in their native tongue. A senior community member, Dr Alitya Wallara Rigney, said she believed the language would help her children and others develop their cultural identities. "I wanted them to learn identity from it too, you know, be strong in their Kaurna identity," she told ABC News. "Culture and language go together."

But experts say such efforts typically come too late to prevent the drift towards using English, the national language.

For this reason, says Dr John Henderson, an expert on Aboriginal languages, the recent creation of two new Aboriginal languages marks a fascinating development. "When you think about what is happening with so many other languages, it is amazing," he told The Straits Times. He said speakers of Light Warlpiri have "unconsciously" developed a new language rather than shift directly towards English. "What these kids have done is take in things from English and Warlpiri, but they have done something new with it."

Noting that Aboriginal languages have died out because English came in as "the language of power, the language of economy", he added: "Clearly, these kids have been happy in some unconscious way to not just accept English more and more.

"They are not being totally dominated by English. It is such a subtle psychological effect."

Classified as ‘distinct’

The new languages that have been identified in Australia are not merely dialects or colloquial offshoots of mother tongues.

Unlike say, Singlish, which mixes English with words from other languages and dialects such as Malay and Hokkien, the two Aboriginal languages have been classified as distinct languages. This is because they do not merely mix elements of existing languages while keeping those elements in their original form.

Instead, the speakers of the new languages have adopted new grammatical properties that did not exist in the source languages. A key feature of Light Warlpiri was that it uses a new type of auxiliary verb not found in the underlying languages of English, Warlpiri and creole.

Auxiliary verbs - the most common in English are be, do and have - accompany the main verb and give a sentence grammatical meaning. For example, the word "Yu-m" is an auxiliary used in Light Warlpiri only. It means "you" but can refer to either past or present tense. None of the source languages have such a "non-future" verb form.

The auxiliary appears in the following sentence, which was translated by linguist Carmel O'Shannessy from the University of Michigan, who discovered Light Warlpiri: "Yu-m winjirn-im hap one kuja-ng". The first two words mean "you spilled" and are new to Light Walpiri; the next two derive from English or creole and mean "half of it" and the final word is from Warlpiri and means "like that". So the sentence translates as: "You spilled half of it, like that."

jonathanmpearlman@gmail.com

This article was first published on Nov 8, 2014.
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