THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND TECHNOLOGY
“Digital technologies hold the potential for Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to record, revive, maintain, celebrate and share languages today and with future generations.” Senator Mitch Fifield, Minister for the Arts. Foreword to the 2018 National Indigenous Lan guages Convention, Gold Coast, 23 February, 2018.
I recently attended the first National Indigenous Languages Convention on the Gold Coast, a forum for language workers and others to share innovative ideas “to inspire and motivate” and showcase “digital approaches that work.” The event was part of the Commonwealth Government’s additional $10 million commitment over four years for protecting, preserving and celebrating Indigenous languages.
The invitation list for the event was a source of much conjecture and discussion. Was it just for Indigenous people and bureaucrats? I’d heard an early request to “keep the academics out,” and comments about linguists “stealing our words.” I’d had to argue for my invitation, as a non-Indigenous linguist and PhD student researching digital language resources for Aboriginal languages, so tried to keep my head down and observe the dynamics, as bureaucrats, policy officers, language authorities, and Indigenous leaders grappled with the affordances and challenges of technology for Australian languages.
The program itself was also a contested space, with a lack of transparency about which language projects were showcased and why. What I noticed about the presentations by language workers was firstly the range of attitudes to the affordances of digital technologies, from “we need to use mobile technologies because they’re the new campfire where kids are sharing stories,” to “not every language group wants a website.” Secondly, the presenters didn’t focus on the technologies themselves, but on what they facilitated for people—attention was always on how people can be equipped and enabled to record, revive, maintain, celebrate, and share languages. This often involves using digital technologies, but the tools are enablers, not agents. As one young participant said from the stage, “You don’t revive language with an app, you revive language with people.”
Yet the government had already decided to spend this additional funding on technologies. There is something alluring about the narrative of modern technologies ‘saving’ ancient traditional tongues. It makes for good headlines and photo opportunities, but vastly oversimplifies a complex story. Indigenous Australians have a long history of adapting new technologies to suit their own purposes, from trading implements with Macassans, to using colonial tools such as guns, 4WDs, and mobile phones. Those Indigenous Australian languages which have survived the ravages of colonisation have also adapted to the modern world, incorporating new words, and even new varieties to enable the continuing transmission of knowledge, maintenance of relationships, and caring for country.
But the aspirations of many of those working in the area of Indigenous languages expressed at this event were not to create the new technology that would ‘save’ their language. Again, the focus was on people, lobbying for more support for training language professionals, more career paths, ongoing support for language centres, and recognition of the less tangible outcomes of language maintenance and revival—issues of empowerment, identity, and well-being that are harder to match to key deliverables.
One of the Indigenous language workers at this event commented, “We need to frame ‘language’ differently—the word doesn’t express what we mean.” For many Australians, especially those who subscribe to the ‘monolingual mindset,’ language is simply a means of communication, a form of technology in itself that facilitates other things. This implies that languages other than English are either a luxury (akin to doing ballet classes) or a problem (that reduces NAPLAN scores, and requires interpreting and translating services). But when Indigenous people talk about languages, they’re actually talking about land, law, health, wellbeing, relationships, justice, identity, culture, and connection to country. When language is gone, it’s like having the land stolen all over again.
The narrative of those who consider language as something to be ‘captured’ crossed paths at this event with those who consider it something to be ‘enlivened.’ Like technologies, languages are not the end in themselves, but rather what they enable for people. There was a concern that shifting the agency in language maintenance and revival to digital technologies could bypass people altogether—why invest in teachers or language authorities when an app can preserve language for longer and share it further than any individual?
These tensions over the role and power of technologies and languages created an interesting dynamic, keeping everyone agreeing and disagreeing. While the program was set up to create conversations on particular topics in particular ways, the really interesting and productive work was happening completely in parallel to those structures, including the gossiping and grumbling as much as the networking and schmoozing.
The whole process reminded me of the First Nations National Constitutional Convention held at Uluru in 2017, where the government invited key Indigenous representatives to meet together to discuss and agree on an approach to constitutional reform to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The clear message that came out of that meeting, known as the Uluru Statement, was then summarily rejected by the government with a very Aussie response of, “Yeah, nah.” The message that came out of this language convention was that digital technologies are an important component in the work of language maintenance and revival, but they are not the solution. Was this message heard, or is it another case of consultation being performed without actually changing practice?
Cathy Bow is a PhD student at CDU in the College of Indigenous Futures, Arts, and Society, jointly enrolled at the Australian National University.
