Learning an Australian Aboriginal Language - some tips

I've mentioned earlier that I considered learning an Aboriginal  language (take it as read from now on that I'm referring to an indigenous Australian language when I say "Aboriginal"). I have made a good start for the year on Latin and Chinese so I don't want to divert my attention too much just yet, but I have recently found a very good site for learning a group of related dialects which I would like to share with you.

The site is called "Bininj Gunwok". The name is an umbrella term for a collection of mutually intelligible dialects in western Arnhem Land. Some preliminary description of the language group can be found on wikipedia.

I'm really attracted to the idea of learning a native Australian language; a language that was born in my home country! However, the available material is often very old, and native speakers are hard to come by, living as I do in Sydney which, as the sight of first white colonisation in Australia, has seen pretty much the complete destruction of all its native languages. There's really not even much recorded in them, which is a real shame.

The larger aboriginal languages do have some material for learners (as opposed to linguists) available for them, although I don't know much about its quality. Languages like Pitjantjatjara and Warlpiri spring to mind. However, when you look into what's available for free online, you don't see much. There aren't even many youtube videos in Aboriginal languages. What I have found several times over is websites which have been started and promise to produce a lot of material for learning some particular Aboriginal language, but then that's about it. I suspect that a lot of what happens is that an enthusiastic community elder or new teacher comes up with an idea, they get funding, things get started and then either the funding isn't renewed due to extremely frequent changes of government policy at all levels (Australian governments like to play political games with indigenous issues, much like renewable energy policy) and/or the enthusiastic outsider moves on.

In any case, the Bininj Gunwok seems different. It has been regularly updated since February last year and they seem to be still actively adding audio content with translations. They also respond quite quickly to comments, as I found out recently, so the site, like the associated language, is definitely not moribund!

Once upon a time, in a lifetime far, far away, I travelled to Kakadu National Park in Australia. I love the Australian bush, but I really fell in love with the unique landscape of the Northern Territory. One of the big highlights for me was the bush tucker tour with Animal Tracks. I really encourage any readers to check out their website and one day visit them if you can. At the end of the day the tour guide jokingly offered me a job with me, and I seriously wanted to accept. Unfortunately, despite my enthusiasm, it really was only a joke, so I went back to my "normal" life of sitting in an air-conditioned box staring at a screen all day, but I've always hoped that one day, somehow, I would be able to do something like those tours as a job, if only for a few months a year. Alas, with a growing family and a mortgage, my priorities have had to change, but perhaps I'll get a chance to go again with the whole family one day :-)

What's my point in all this nostalgia? Well, one of the main language groups still widely spoken in the Kakadu National Park area (and further east into Arnhem Land) is, you guessed it, Bininj Gunwok.

Then, after all these years, I found the Bininj Gunwok website, which appears to be just about the best resource you could find for free to get started in an Aboriginal language. If you've ever had an interest to learn one of the original Australian languages, what better time than now with this amazing website only getting better all the time!

Australians consider learning another language to be such a massive task that they should never start, but learning at least a little of the language of one of the groups of First Australians would go a long way to showing a genuine interest in bridging the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Several years of an Aboriginal language should be compulsory for Australian schoolkids I think. There are already 1+ billion people speaking Mandarin - the world doesn't need more ;-)

To kick off your learning on the website, the site admin pointed me to the following links:

1) Start with the first blog post here: http://bininjgunwok.org.au/2012/ma-garri-wokdi-gundjeihmi/
2) Some introductory grammar explanations can be found here: http://bininjgunwok.org.au/2012/07/ with detailed related audio here: http://bininjgunwok.org.au/audio/
3) Sign up to the email vocab lesson which sends out a new word and describes it about twice a week.
4) Read the rest of the blog! There's plenty of audio there to get you started.

There's also a free e-book available through scribd and embedded here. I've been unable to download it as a PDF due to not being a premium member of scribd, but I'm trying to find out now if I can get access to the book without this. The book apparently has accompanying cassette tapes, though I don't know if the audio's been digitized yet. It'd be good if it could be made available too, I imagine.

Of course, what would be really awesome would be if someone could produce an Assimil-style course from zero to B2 level, but I don't see that happening any time soon!

One final note on this topic, there's also seems to be some decent material available for the Yolngu languages, including a radio program and, of course, the movie "Ten Canoes", but I don't think there's the same level of introductory material for beginners available for free on the internet.

To finish with a topic change, my own quick update is that my listening practice on Hitler's rant scene from "Downfall" ("Der Untergang") has been going pretty well and I plan on finding another scene soon to stretch myself. Probably from another war movie at first, but then I'll find something new. I haven't read too much more of my current German novel "Das Todeskreuz" - I'm up to about page 160. I have made some OK progress with Chinese with Ease - I just finished lesson 35! - and Le Latin, while slower, is up to lesson 32. I really haven't been adding much from these to my Anki lists of late. In fact, I've been struggling just to keep up with Anki at all ever since the website stopped working so well (due to the big "upgrade" kind of downgrading many features). I can now only do these updates at a computer, which sucks :-) I have also recently watched a movie in Mandarin, but with subtitles of course, but I didn't get a lot out of it because I had to have the volume quite low due to not wanting to wake up my daughters in the next room! But it was fun. And no, no conversations in Mandarin yet. I'll see what I can do soon.

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