SPOKEN
HERE

First published in the USA in 2003 by Houghton Mifflin
Published in the United Kingdom in 1960 by William Heinemann

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Mark Abley, 2003

Mark Abley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

The author is grateful to David Higham Associates for permission to reprint an extract from “Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed,” by Dylan Thomas, published in “Collected Poems 1934–1952” (J. M. Dent and Sons).

Lines from “Marsh Languages” are reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd., London, on behalf of Margaret Atwood © 1995.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

William Heinemann
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 434 01153 3

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1. Patrick’s Language

2. Dreamers: Languages in Northern Australia

3. Constructing the World

4. Unseen and Unheard: Yuchi

5. Dont Vori, Bi Khepi

6. Leaving the Grave: Manx

7. The Verbs of Boro

8. The Lion’s Tongue: Provençal

9. Melting at the Edges

10. The Words That Come Before All Else: Mohawk

11. Humboldt’s Parrot

12. Ways of Escape: Yiddish

13. Revival

14. The Iron of Language: Welsh

15. The Face of All the Earth

Sources

Acknowledgments

This book is for Annie

Hey now, you got me by the tongue

I feel like, there’s nowhere I belong.

—David Gray, Faster, Sooner, Now

The dark soft languages are being silenced:

Mothertongue Mothertongue Mothertongue

falling one by one back into the moon.

—Margaret Atwood, Marsh Languages

O felix peccatum Babel!

—J.R.R. Tolkien, “English and Welsh”

Patrick’s Language

AN OLD MAN watches a milky ocean roll in to the shore. High above the waterline, two children are skipping barefoot along an otherwise empty beach, its contours defined and guarded by a pair of mangrove swamps. A long, low island nudges the western horizon. This could be an afternoon scene on almost any tropical coast: the heat rising off the sand, a hawk scouring the sky. In fact, the surf is brushing a remote edge of northern Australia — remote, that is, except to the old man’s people, the Mati Ke, who may have lived in the area for tens of thousands of years.

One of the children pauses in her game. Among the fragments of driftwood and corrugated iron, the rusted fishing traps and crushed plastic bottles, she has found something different: a shell as long as her forearm. She looks up from the beach to the few scattered houses in the hamlet of Kuy. Then she calls to her grandmother, Mona, who is sitting as usual on a yellow foam mattress. Laid out on a verandah, the mattress gives a view of the sea.

The child uses her grandmother’s language, Murrinh-Patha. It’s also her own, and the daily language of a few thousand other people in the region. Most of its speakers live an hour’s rough ride away, in a town called Wadeye. The trip is possible only in a four-wheel-drive vehicle down a dirt trail that slithers inland through the silver-green bush, passing the corpse of a small airplane and fording the same creek twice before it links up with a gravel road that ends or begins in town.

Somewhere along that trail, as you skirt the treacherous pools of deep red sand or disturb a loud gathering of cockatoos, you pass a border. The border is no less real for its lack of fences, checkpoints, and customs officers. It marks the ancient division between the Murrinh-Patha land that includes the town of Wadeye and the Mati Ke land that includes the small outstation here at Kuy. In Aboriginal Australia, land and language are intimately related. Traditionally, the continent was defined and divided not only by its hills, creeks, and water holes but also by its hundreds of languages. Wadeye grew up in the 1930s as a Catholic mission, and the Mati Ke were one of several peoples who moved off their land and switched over — out of a mixture of respect, convenience, and necessity — to a daily use of Murrinh-Patha. They also learned English, so as to comprehend the noise of authority. At first, nobody realized that the Mati Ke language was slipping away.

From her home above a calm shore of the Timor Sea, Mona gives her granddaughter an encouraging shout. Then she turns to her husband, Patrick Nudjulu, to explain. Unless he is wearing his hearing aid, words are lost on Patrick. But as the old man of Kuy, he likes to know what’s going on. Besides, this is his land. Its stories belong to him.

Standing there on his verandah, his beard and flowing hair the color of the snow he has never seen, his skin as dark as wild grapes, Patrick has the gravitas of a biblical patriarch — a tall one, with a sly sense of humor. Some days he doesn’t bother to put on a shirt. But if there’s any chance that strangers might be present, he always wears long pants and shoes. That way, it won’t be obvious that one of his legs is false — the aftermath of leprosy in his youth. A slight film over his eyes betrays the arrival of cataracts. But he can still see down to the beach; he can dream; he can remember.

“I remember all,” he says in English, his fourth or fifth language. “I was born in my own bush here. Therefore I can’t forget.” He sips from a tin mug of tea that Mona has brewed up on the open fire pit at the far end of the verandah. “I dream in Mati Ke. See all the past.”

And maybe the future, too? “Yeah.” The old man is grinning. A few of his teeth are left. “Old future, and new future.”

In his dreams, the fruit of the peanut tree whose seeds are eaten raw in the wet season is mi warzu. That’s the name of the fruit in Mati Ke. But if he mentions the dream to Mona, he reverts to her more powerful language, Murrinh-Patha, and talks about mi kurl. The saltwater prawns that his grandchildren find among the mangroves are a dhan gi in his own tongue. But to Mona and the grandchildren, they are ku thapulinh. The delicious goanna lizard that roams the bush all year is a wayelh in Mati Ke. But to speak of it and make himself understood, Patrick has to call the lizard ku yagurr.

A wide-eyed boy about a year in age totters over from the mattress where Mona is sitting. Children no more than five or seven years old take turns looking after him, hauling him back to his grandmother for comfort if he falls. Patrick peels a mandarin orange and hands it, chunk by chunk, to the little boy. Conch shell in hand, the boy’s sister arrives beaming from the beach. Slumped beside Patrick’s bamboo fishing spear farther along the verandah, an older grandchild on the brink of adolescence looks on. He and his mother are visiting from their home in Wadeye. His shirt is army fatigue; his hair displays streaks of blond dye; his gaze is sullen.

Patrick too spent many years in town. His family began to give up the bush when he was a boy. Over the decades, he watched Wadeye evolve from a resting place of hunters and foragers to a sitdown community, dependent on the welfare subsidies that Australia’s government, possibly with noble intentions, has chosen to give Aboriginal people. Deprived of the old habits of life, unable to embrace the new, a host of men and women forfeited their pride. Patrick did not. Twelve or fifteen years ago, when the government was promoting the growth of outstations as a way for Aboriginal people to regain a spirit of independence and self-control, he led his wife and some of their extended family away from the frustrations of town and back to his own land, the place he knew by heart. Not that they were returning to the bark-and-bough shelters of his childhood. The government built bungalows at Kuy, and erected a small water tower, and hooked up electricity. Patrick’s house has solar panels in its corrugated roof. One of the other houses is equipped with a satellite dish, and the children of the outstation go there to watch TV.

The TV pours a quick, bubbling stream of English into their ears and minds; but primary school and family life take place in Murrinh-Patha. Sometimes Patrick speaks to his grandchildren in Mati Ke, and he claims they understand. Yet whether they grasp more than a few commands, a familiar phrase or two, is open to doubt. They answer him in Murrinh-Patha: the language of their parents, their friends, their doting grandmother. Words in their grandfather’s tongue trip haltingly, if at all, off their lips. What Patrick Nudjulu hears only in his dreams is another fluent speaker of Mati Ke.

The lone elder, the half-comprehending family, the stealthy invasion of other languages — this scene is not unique to Kuy, or Australia, or the Southern Hemisphere. It is happening all over the planet, from the snowpeaks of the Himalayas to the humid rivers of West Africa and the shantytowns of great cities in South America. The phenomenon is not new, for languages have always been in flux; languages have always died. No one alive today can hold a conversation in Hittite or Nubian. But the sheer pace of change is unprecedented. On every inhabited continent, languages keep falling silent. New replacements are rare. Linguists believe that about six thousand languages still flow into human ears: the exact total is a matter of debate. By some estimates, a maximum of three thousand are likely to be heard at the century’s end, and fewer than six hundred of those appear secure. Within our children’s lifetimes, thousands of human languages seem fated to dwindle away.

They are vanishing under similar pressures. A few languages of high prestige — English is the prime but not the sole example — dominate the media and the marketplace, school systems and bureaucracies. Almost anywhere you care to go — the Cayman Islands, the Andaman Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Galápagos Islands — young people are absorbing the same music and watching the same movies, most of them from Hollywood. Local cultures, less forceful, less alluring, are swept aside. At the same time, economic patterns of migration and displacement mean that fewer and fewer small languages still have a vibrant local base, a spoken homeland they can call their own. Cities provide new opportunities; they also blur and erase old identities. A minority language can quickly come to seem a hobby for the old — a quaint refuge from ambition, knowledge, progress. A minority language always depends on popular will. It dies as its voices fade in the midst of PalmPilots, cell phones, and Walkmans. It dies as its remaining speakers find they have less and less to talk about.

The price of that loss is beyond estimation. We have grown used to giving cultural artifacts a dollar figure: so many thousand for a Yeats manuscript, so many million for a Ming porcelain. But a language is more than any artifact. You can’t slap a price tag on a language, no matter how small and obscure, any more than you can pin down the financial value of an ivory-billed woodpecker or a bill of rights. Mati Ke lacks the ever burgeoning scientific terminology of English and Japanese, nor does it enjoy a written literature. But like all other human languages, it is a full and rich expression of a way of life, a culture, an identity. Whether or not it ever makes sense to use the term “primitive society,” the phrase “primitive language” is an absurdity.

Mati Ke, for example, arranges all the objects and beings in the world by means of a system of noun classes. You can’t speak of an object without also classifying it. There are ten of these classes, and they reveal an enormous amount about how Patrick Nudjulu understands his daily experience. A kind of red-flowering tree, for instance, is thawurr babarlthang — thawurr being the noun class for trees, wooden items, and long rigid objects. The string made from the inner bark of that tree is nhanjdji babarlthang. You use nhanjdji in front of a broad range of substances both manufactured, like the bark string, and natural: the wind, the sand, the sun. The tree’s edible seeds are mi babarlthang; all vegetable foods are prefaced by mi. And so on. Weapons go in the same class as lightning. Places go in the same class as times (Mati Ke, you might say, anticipated Einstein by several thousand years). Speech and language deserve a separate noun class of their own. This is how Mati Ke interprets the world.

Murrinh-Patha’s vocabulary is very different from Mati Ke’s, but the underlying syntax is similar. Its arithmetic stops at the number five. Yet without counting, a fluent speaker of Murrinh-Patha knows thirty-one different pronouns and thirty-five verb classes. The grammar and syntax of Mati Ke and Murrinh-Patha are just as elaborate, just as complex and intellectually demanding, as the grammar and syntax of any well-known European tongue. Being widely spoken does not make a language any better, more intelligent, or more perceptive than a language that has never spread beyond its birthplace. As the literary critic George Steiner once observed, “We have no sound basis on which to argue that extinct languages failed their speakers, that only the most comprehensive or those with the greatest wealth of grammatical means have endured. On the contrary: a number of dead languages are among the most obvious splendours of human intelligence.”

In Aboriginal culture, human life and the rest of the natural world are bound together by a system of totems — a child grows up in the knowledge that she belongs to the totem of the bush yam, say, or the female kangaroo. The language reflects and embodies this understanding. In Mati Ke, nhanjdji marri is the name for the cycad — an ancient plant whose tall, palmlike fronds are a familiar sight in the northern Australian bush. The cycad’s seeds, poisonous straight off the plant, can be made into a kind of flour after prolonged washing; those seeds, being eventually edible, are mi marri. But a defines the class for animals (and people, if you mean to insult them). So what are we to make of a marri? That’s the word, it turns out, for a kind of bush cockroach that inhabits dead cycad fronds. The class for higher beings — spirits and also people, if you’re referring to them with respect — is expressed by me. And me marri defines those people whose totems are the cycad and the bush cockroach. Aboriginal languages have fewer words in them than English does. But those words are held and balanced in an intricate web of relationships. Lose the vocabulary, and you lose the relationships too.

Back in town, in a windowless room of the local museum, a ginger-haired, Queensland-born electrician named Mark Crocombe works part time as coordinator of the Wadeye Aboriginal Languages Centre. He spends most of his time on Mati Ke and a few other local languages whose numbers are severely depleted. High above the bark paintings and black-and-white photographs on the museum’s walls, a gecko awaits mosquitoes. SLAYER AS GOD reads a piece of graffiti inscribed in neat capital letters outside the front door — TV shows like Buffy having permeated most of the human world. Once in a while, when his other jobs allow, Mark Crocombe leaves the office, fetches a camcorder from his house, puts it on the passenger seat of his beat-up minivan, and drives out to Kuy. His aim is to record Patrick speaking Mati Ke.

Thanks to their sporadic efforts, Mati Ke will experience a kind of afterlife: a partial, disembodied future. Elsewhere in Australia and in dozens of other countries, too, anthropologists, linguists, graduate students, tribal insiders, and well-meaning outsiders are hastening to record the voices of elders. Every captured story is a small victory over time. Through the electronic power of CD-ROMs or the slightly older magic of cassette tapes and the printed page, students in decades to come will be able to gain a limited knowledge of a vanished tongue. But a CD-ROM of an extinct language bears an uneasy resemblance to a stuffed dodo. A museum specimen, lovingly preserved, can give scientists all sorts of useful information except, perhaps, what is most essential: how the extinct bird behaved in the wild. Likewise, languages are social creations, constantly being tested and renewed in the mouths of their speakers. They require use, not just study. You can no more restore a vanished language from a scholarly monograph and a software program than you can restore a population of cheetahs from a vial of frozen sperm and a National Geographic film.

Hence the loneliness of Patrick Nudjulu: the gathering silence behind the old man’s eyes. Speaking to his wife, his children, and his grandchildren, he employs a language that does not come as naturally to him as breath. The grandchildren jostle around him on the verandah facing the milky sea. But occasionally he brushes them aside, looking out on the water and the powdery beach without saying a word.

The coastal outstation at Kuy was, from my perspective as a North American, the most remote place I would visit between the years 2000 and 2002. Likewise, Mati Ke and Murrinh-Patha were among the most distant languages from my own that I would hear: among the most foreign ways of exercising the mind. Living in Montreal, a city where English, French, and other languages are in daily contact — usually friendly, sometimes bitter — I had seen a good many statistics about language loss. But the statistics told little of the passions and arguments that arise from a language’s disappearance. And it was the emotions, not the numbers, that I cared about: the figures of speech, not the figures on a chart. I wasn’t sure I could imagine what it meant for men and women to feel the language of their childhood melting away. I wasn’t sure how much sense it made for them to fight back.

Eventually I embarked on a series of journeys, investigating the fate of linguistic diversity in places as discrepant as a village in the Canadian Arctic and an island off the Australian coast, a scrub farm in Oklahoma and a medieval city in Provence. In a few of these places, minority languages appear to be settling down into a comfortable oblivion; in others, the speakers of lesser-used languages are battling, not just to preserve a language but to strengthen and extend it. The tongues I heard are by no means a representative sample of the world’s endangered languages — working without the help of researchers, secretaries, or graduate students, I did not have the resources to explore countries like Papua New Guinea and Cameroon, where hundreds of small languages survive. Still, I believe that the challenges facing hundreds, even thousands of minority languages are mirrored in these pages.

In Oklahoma, for example, I spent some time among the few remaining speakers of the Yuchi language. Yuchi is what linguists call an isolate: it bears a clear relation to no other living tongue. I wanted to discover what knowledge and understanding may die with Yuchi if it does indeed disappear. In the south of France, I hoped to see whether Provençal — one of the great literary languages of Europe — has a future as well as a past. Meeting speakers of Yiddish in several places would allow me to investigate the fate of a diaspora language. In Wales, the country where my parents were born, I was keen to discover how a Celtic language has, against all odds, remained vibrant beside the homeland of English. And so on.

Wherever I traveled, I tried to listen to the actual speakers of languages under threat — the loyalists of minority cultures. How do people who know their language is endangered bear the weight of such knowledge? I wanted to see how far their defiance could stretch, and how easily resignation could take hold. I wanted to learn what steps can be taken to sustain and strengthen a threatened tongue. Above all, I wanted to test my own hunch that the looming extinction of so many languages marks a decisive moment in human history — a turning away from vocal diversity in favor of what optimists see as a global soul and others as a soulless monoculture. In the end, should anybody care that thousands of languages are at risk?

That’s the central question I will attempt to answer in this book. But I have a confession to make. I work as a journalist, poet, and editor; I am not a professional linguist. Indeed, my knowledge of the entire discipline of linguistics is patchy and often cursory. These pages do not touch on constructional homonymity and depth-first parsers; such matters lie beyond my frame of reference. My defense is one of analogy. You don’t have to be a theologian to talk of God; you don’t have to be a veterinarian to describe cats. Besides, this book is not just about threatened languages but about the people who speak them. I beg the forgiveness of linguists for trespassing on their territory and perpetrating whatever blunders have found a home in these pages — and I would gently remind them that their own voices are unlikely to be heard on the subject unless they speak out in terms that are lucid, intelligible, and free from jargon.

What will we lose if our abundance of languages shrinks to a fraction of what now survives? A speaker of English or Chinese might answer differently from a speaker of Mati Ke. The simplest response, perhaps, is this: we will lose languages that are astonishingly unlike any widespread tongue. Languages employ sounds and organize the mental world in ways that are natural to their speakers but can seem downright weird to other people. Nootka, one of the languages of Vancouver Island, is a case in point. As the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf once noted, to express the idea “He invites people to a feast” Nootka requires but a single word: tl’imshya’isita’itlma. Literally, “Boiling result eating those go to get somebody.” Not quite so literally, “He, or somebody, goes to get eaters of cooked food.” The Nootka would alter their speech — adding hissing noises or extra consonants for effect — when they were talking to or about children, fat people, short people, left-handed people, circumcised males, lame and hunchbacked people, greedy people (also ravens), and people with eye defects.

Or take Kabardian, also known as Circassian, which arises from that great hotbed of linguistic diversity, the Caucasus Mountains. It boasts forty-eight consonants — more than double the number in English — but two vowels at most. In linguistic circles, a few experts have doubted those vowels’ existence, suggesting that the language has no regular vowels. Can this be possible? To speak Ubykh, a language that originated in the same region, you’d need to get your tongue around eighty-one consonants. Abkhaz, which also belongs to the northwestern slopes of the Caucasus, had a special “hunting language” spoken by the local nobility on their journeys into the forests. The verbs would stay the same as in everyday Abkhaz. But to ensure good luck in finding and killing animals, hunters were forbidden to call objects by their workaday names. Therefore the hunting language contained an entirely distinct array of nouns, unknown to Abkhaz peasants and tradesmen.

Even more remarkable was an Australian language called Damin, spoken only by initiated men on three small islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria, due south of New Guinea. The daily language used by most of those men was called Lardil. After puberty, boys were circumcised (without anesthetic, of course) and taught Marlda Kangka — a sign language. For a year, it alone enabled them to communicate with anyone who had attended their circumcision. Marlda Kangka was more than just a basic code: its signs allowed a boy to convey information like “Last night I saw my mother’s brother and father fighting in the bush.” The most succulent food around the islands was the dugong, or sea cow. And Marlda Kangka had separate signs for “large young female dugong,” “small female dugong,” “old male dugong,” and so on.

Marlda Kangka was just the beginning. After a year or more, young men who were brave enough moved on to the second stage of initiation: penile subincision. (Don’t ask.) The reward for enduring the pain was a second auxiliary language, Damin. Unlike Marlda Kangka, it was spoken. But like Marlda Kangka — or Klingon or Elvish — Damin was a deliberate invention. Its sound system enforced a contrast with the parent language, Lardil. M, l, r, and a few other Lardil consonants were absent from Damin, yet Damin speakers employed eleven sounds not found in Lardil. Four of them were click consonants, otherwise used only in southern and eastern Africa. That’s not all. Damin also demanded a “bilabial ejective,” an “ingressive lateral fricative,” and a “duplicated bilabial trill” (very roughly, pr-pr, with a roll for each r) — consonants that are found nowhere else in the world. Damin had five types of “phonetic initiation” — five ways for the vocal organs to produce sound — more than any other known language.

Ken Hale, one of the few linguists to study Damin, called it an “intellectual tour de force,” for its structure was as amazing as its sound system. The language winnowed pronouns down to their essence. For any set of people including the speaker (that is, for the English terms “I,” “me,” “we,” and “us”), Damin speakers said n!aa — ! representing a nasal click. For anyone and everyone else (“you,” “they,” “them,” “he,” “she,” “him,” “her”), Damin speakers said n!uu. The language’s lexicon was small: just a couple of hundred basic words. But by ingeniously manipulating those words, initiated men could express almost anything they needed to say. Suppose a Damin speaker saw a sandpiper in flight. “Sandpiper” was not in Damin’s lexicon. But the watcher could evoke the bird by saying ngaajpu wiiwi-n wuujpu: literally, “person-burning creature.” The phrase harks back to a creation story in which Sandpiper starts a lethal fire — a familiar tale to all speakers of Damin. Likewise an ax was “honey-affecting wood”: a wooden object used to obtain wild honey. Because it imposed this rigorous, semi-abstract vocabulary on the familiar syntax of Lardil, Damin could be learned in a few days. Initiated men would speak it at ceremonial gatherings, but also while searching for food or just sitting around gossiping. Extreme suffering had brought a gift of sacred knowledge.

No ritual initiations have been carried out in the Gulf of Carpentaria for half a century. As a result, Marlda Kangka and Damin are extinct. Their parent language, Lardil, is endangered. Abkhaz continues to be spoken, although its hunting language does not. Nootka survives, barely, as does Kabardian. But the last fluent speaker of Ubykh died in 1992. Multiply this paragraph a few hundred times over. Such is the fate of our languages.

Mati Ke may never have had more than a thousand speakers. For millennia, that was enough. Then, under the accumulated pressures facing Aboriginal people in the late twentieth century, the language collapsed. A 1983 study found it had about thirty fluent speakers left. Now, all evidence suggests, there are three. And one of the three — an old-timer living in Wadeye — might be annoyed to find himself on the list. For Johnny Chula knows his language not as Mati Ke but as “Magati Ge.” Words have a different ring when he utters them. His dialect is heavier than Patrick’s — the terms are mostly the same, but they arrive with extra syllables, chunkier in the mouth. “Johnny’s the only speaker of Magati Ge,” Mark Crocombe told me. “But he’s too old now to work on the language.”

Most of the time, whether on the sandy paths of Kuy or in the streets of some burgeoning city, a language ends with a long sequence of whimpers. Even if the language has just one fluent speaker, that speaker will often keep in touch with some younger men or women who know how to produce a few sentences, or who remember a smattering of words, or who cherish some traditional songs. So it is with Patrick’s language. Near the pale waves of the Timor Sea, in lands where Mati Ke and its forerunners were probably spoken before the foundations of Sumer and Babylon were dug — and before the great myth of Babel first entered anyone’s mind — not all knowledge of the language will vanish with his generation; Wadeye has a few middle-aged people who can stumble a short distance along the trails of Mati Ke. If the old man speaks with extra care, they can understand some of what he says.

Aloysius Kungul, one of Patrick’s nephews, knows more than any of these other partial speakers. “Aloy, he’s learning,” Patrick insists. “He’s learning, bit by bit.” But the confidence soon dwindles from his voice. “It’s difficult. I talk to him real slow.” Aloysius is Mati Ke by inheritance: his totem animals are the masked plover, the mud crab, and the magpie goose, which distinguish the land around Kuy. Meeting him in Wadeye, I found him reluctant to say much about Mati Ke. It was his father’s language; therefore, in Aboriginal society, it became his language too. But his father did not pass it on. One day when Aloysius was approaching puberty, he overheard his father speaking Mati Ke. “What’s that language?” he asked. “It’s ours,” his father replied, offhand.

Flash forward a few decades: by Aloysius’s own account, “I can hear the language, but I don’t speak it, just a bit.” He pointed at his own head, where black hair drooped toward his eyes in unruly bangs. “I got it there. But it’s the speaking.” If he were to spend months with his uncle, the speaking would come. But Patrick lives at the outstation, and Aloysius in town. With every succeeding year, his chances of fluency recede.

Which leaves just one other speaker of Mati Ke: an old woman called Agatha Perdjert. “And she’s not real good at it,” in Mark Crocombe’s frank opinion, “because she left the Mati Ke country when she was fifteen.” More than half a century has elapsed since Agatha married a Murrinh-Patha man and moved to Wadeye.

The red dirt track between Kuy and Wadeye is rough even in the dry season; in the wet, it can become impassable. A whole section of road is liable to vanish beneath the spillover creek. But on occasion Patrick still makes it into town, riding high in someone else’s juddering machine down the straight road past the airstrip. In Wadeye, you might think, he could look up Agatha, so that they’d have a chance to revel in a language now almost unique to them. Maybe after all these years, Agatha has forgotten certain words. The salty billygoat plum that ripens in the rainless months, mi kulurduk in Murrinh-Patha: what do you call that fruit in Mati Ke? Maybe Patrick has lost a phrase in a particular song, or Agatha no longer recalls the name of a headland where she camped as a girl … Ah yes, the plum is mi bakulin, of course.

But this is a fantasy, nothing more. Agatha is Patrick’s sister. The culture by which they live prohibits a brother and sister from conversing after puberty. They will never forage for missing words, never share their memories of childhood; any such conversation would be taboo. They must not even pronounce each other’s names. When they die, the soul of a language will die with them.

Dreamers

LANGUAGES IN NORTHERN AUSTRALIA

CALLED BY THE NATIVES Kangooroo,” James Cook wrote in his journal in June 1770, his ship pierced by coral along the Great Barrier Reef, its marooned captain facing a new world. This undreamed-of creature, for example, which moved “by hopping or jumping 7 or 8 feet at each hop upon its hind legs only … Excepting the head and ears which I thought something like a Hare’s, it bears no sort of resemblance to any European animal I ever saw.” Once his men had finally repaired Endeavour and he’d removed it from the reef, Cook sailed back to London with news of an unknown continent where the fauna and flora seemed bizarre. As proof, he took a stuffed specimen of the hind-leg hopper — the first kangaroo to arrive in Europe, and the first word of any Australian language to make its way into English.

“Kangooroo!” said the penal colonists of Botany Bay, eighteen years later. But the Iora people among whom they landed had no idea what the British were talking about. To them the animal was a patagarang. Guugu Yimidhirr — the language Cook had heard far to the north, at what he called Cape Tribulation — was entirely different from the language the Iora spoke. Patagarang never made it into English, but the colonists went on asking the Iora and neighboring peoples about the remarkable animals, plants, and landscapes all around them. And in short order budgerigar, koala, kookaburra, dingo, boomerang, billabong, and a few dozen other Aboriginal terms were being mouthed by the intruders from the far side of the world.

When those first ships landed near what would become the metropolis of Sydney, the sailors confronted a people who found them peculiar beyond belief. Instead of using bark canoes, the oddly colored newcomers rode enormous vessels on which flat plant material seemed to hang between trees. Instead of carrying wooden spears, the newcomers had long sticks, as hard as stone, that could produce a terrifying noise. Instead of walking naked, they wore bright disguises, even on top of their heads. They also hid their manhood. Were they men at all? The bravest among the Iora began to poke at British breeches, hoping to find out. Finally an embarrassed lieutenant ordered one of his men to extricate his penis and display it to the people who had gathered on the beach. When the sailor complied, the people “made a great shout of admiration.” So the British version goes.

The Aboriginal people, it seems safe to say, were struck by what the British possessed. The British were struck by what the Aboriginals lacked. They had no clothes. They had no farms or domestic animals. They used no pottery. They had no permanent houses, no settled communities, no means of preserving food. They appeared to have no religion of any kind. And of course they had no guns; this was convenient, though hardly surprising. Their land was ripe for the taking. Without obvious possessions, they were ready to be dispossessed.

What the Aborigines did have, though, were languages. Estimates of their number have gone as high as six hundred; 270 seems the best current guess. Some of these languages were spoken by fewer than a thousand people. But each of them embodied an elaborate network of rules and laws. In many cases the intricacy of kinship systems matched the intricacy of grammar, so that even within a small society, an individual could not speak to some people at all and could address others only by using a special vocabulary. The Yolngu speakers of Arnhem Land, in the far north, lived by the Madayin — a concept that embraces codes, protections, controls, song cycles, trading highways, sacred sites, and much else. The Yolngu carried their laws and their religion in their minds. This does not mean their laws and religion were simple matters. Before the invention of alphabets and printing presses, human beings on every continent were capable of feats of memory that most people today find incomprehensible (the Iliad and the Odyssey, remember, were composed by illiterates). Each fully initiated Yolngu, intimate with the Madayin, possessed a library of unwritten knowledge.

No matter what language they spoke, the Aboriginal peoples had a high degree of social organization and a resolute attachment to a particular stretch of land. The land had been given to them, so they believed, by ancestral beings in the Dreamtime: the dawn of consciousness. The Dreamtime beings often lived in animal form — emus, frogs, opossums, and so on — but they performed recognizable human tasks like camping and fishing, making love and making war. Having arisen from a featureless land, they moved over it, creating its qualities as they went: a creek here, a rock formation there. Before they left the world, they bequeathed to its people the systems of clan and totem, the tools and weapons that would make up the fabric of Aboriginal life. They also bequeathed language: theirs were the words that came before all else, each name a living gift from the ancient past. Australia was not a new world, as Captain Cook imagined; it was an immensely old one.

The stories of the Dreaming cross physical and linguistic boundaries. A tale one clan begins to tell beside a seashore, another clan may finish far inland in a different language. The stories name and explain the landscape, so that patterns of wording and patterns of earth are inextricably linked. But the Dreamtime is not just something that happened once, long ago. It exists in a realm beyond ordinary time. Its beings defined the world. Perhaps they will appear again.

The good nature of the earliest encounters between Aborigines and whites did not last. Very soon it became clear to the indigenous Australians that these firearmed invaders had no intention of leaving. But the Aborigines made little effort to flee the guns, as some indigenous peoples did in the Americas. In Australia they stood their ground. If they tried to escape, they would have to enter someone else’s land without permission. They would be abandoning their own — the land that gave their lives meaning, expressed in words that had come down to them from the Dreaming.

Generations after the first shock of contact, much of the land has been transformed beyond recognition, and many of its words have been erased. Guugu Yimidhirr, the source of “kangaroo,” may still have a dozen or two speakers. But the languages that first told of koalas and kookaburras are no more. Indeed most of the languages belonging to land now occupied by Australia’s major cities — Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Canberra — have not been heard for decades. The latest edition of Ethnologue, a directory of the world’s languages, lists 417 as “nearly extinct.” Of these, 138 are in Australia: a third of the total.

Only in the Northern Territory, far from major cities, do a few of the ancestral languages flourish. Traveling in the region, I glimpsed some of the difficulties that face minority languages around the world.

A few miles away from Patrick Nudjulu’s house at Kuy, three adults and a dozen children were tramping across sand dunes in the harsh midday heat. “Just a short walk,” Gemma Tganbe had said when we got out of the bus — really a small truck, pulling behind it a flatbed platform with benches and wire-mesh sides. And it was a short walk through the bush, until we reached the beach. A filament of sand stretched out for miles between the bush and a line of mangrove trees that protruded from the thick dark mud. Beyond the mangroves lay the audible waters of the Timor Sea. Now and then a barefoot child would leave the dunes and dart into the mangroves, searching for crabs, provoking cry after cry from the nameless birds.

Nameless to me, that is. I imagine Gemma Tganbe and Francella Bunduck had a word for them in Murrinh-Patha. Gemma and Francella were teachers at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School in Wadeye, and today was not a holiday from learning: today was a Traditional Culture Day, a chance for students and teachers alike to leave the classroom and walk the land. This particular land, though, is not for everyone to see. Only those people who belong to it are expected: people of a single clan who share a totem creature, a language, a ritual dance. In some Aboriginal cultures, Dreamtime sites are felt to be so powerful that nobody is permitted to approach them. In many other places, outsiders are forbidden. I felt honored and surprised to be allowed here.

After the second mile the mangroves became fewer, the sea louder. Finally open water replaced the trees and the mud. On the landward edge of the beach stood a long row of red rocks, with the forest above. Gemma kept walking. So did the children, without complaint. They remained quiet when we stopped at a small bay where the sand and pebbles met a cluster of rocks, stained a rainbow of colors in long mineral swirls. Rock pools dotted the beach, the water in them warm from the sun.

Gemma began to talk. She had a story to tell, and she told it in her everyday language, Murrinh-Patha. It was the Magpie Goose Dreaming, a story that belonged to these rocks, this bay. When she stopped, the children moved forward to peer into a crevice of a long, honey-colored rock a few yards from the water’s edge — a rock as tall as a grown person. In English Gemma repeated the gist of the story: how, in the Dreamtime, ku kirrik flew across the water and laid her eggs here; how she stepped across a couple of beaches, leaving visible tracks; how she flew inland over the red rocks and laid more eggs in the bush; how she made one final flight, depositing her last eggs at a reef in another bay. The crevice near the shoreline was her first nesting place. A big grin on her face, Gemma pressed my arm and said, “Then she stopped. I think she was exhausted from all that laying.”

Dreamtime stories are for adults as well as children. The existence of special places like this one entails a responsibility: those who are linked to the magpie goose must look after the sites she left behind. The routes she took in the past are also paths — songlines — that Aboriginal people can take in the present. If they know the stories, that is. Without the stories, the land turns into real estate.

Children were climbing on other rocks, but not the Dreaming one. “The first laying was here,” Gemma said. “You see the eggs?” I peered into the petrified shadows. “Used to be a big cave here,” she added. “Now it’s smaller. Rocks have fallen and it’s changed.” I didn’t know if her “used to be” referred to five years or five thousand years. On an adjacent beach, children were examining X-shaped markings on a pair of flat, purple-red rocks. These were the scratched footprints of the Dreamtime goose. A boy jumped, fully clothed, into the deepest rock pool. Nobody told him to be careful.

Gemma pointed northeast across the sun-dappled bay. “See those two hills on the horizon?” she asked. “That’s where my mob’s from.” When Aboriginal people say “mob,” they don’t mean a rioting horde; they mean “people.” In the past Gemma’s mob spoke a language called Marri-Djabin, but now most of them live in town and use Murrinh-Patha. Marri-Djabin is not yet on the Ethnologue list of nearly extinct languages. Give it another decade or two.

It was a long, sweltering walk back to the spot in the bush where the bus had let us off. The boy’s T-shirt and black pants gradually dried, but moisture still glistened on the back of his neck. When at last we reached the shade, the group split into two circles, sitting on the ground, talking in low voices. Later in the afternoon, when the bus reappeared, some people caught a ride and went crabbing, others fishing. Nobody arrived home until well after dark.

Traditional culture. Yet there’s something profoundly untraditional about this scene — apart from the presence of an outsider like me. And I don’t mean the bus, for indigenous peoples all over the world are quick to adapt to useful technology. What’s untraditional is that when Gemma told the children the Magpie Goose Dreaming, she spoke to them in Murrinh-Patha (literally, “language-good”). But the rainbow-rock bay beyond the mangroves isn’t Murrinh-Patha country. It’s the country where Marri-Djabin meets Patrick’s language, Mati Ke; and the Magpie Goose Dreaming ought to be told in those tongues. The words that evoke the land ought to be the very words the ancestor spirit uttered when bringing the land to life. Yet in Mati Ke or Marri-Djabin the children would not have understood the story — and Gemma herself, being a partial speaker, might have found Marri-Djabin words slow and painful to come.

The location of a language, from an Aboriginal perspective, was decided in the Dreamtime. But the location of Wadeye — now the largest Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory — was selected by Father Richard Docherty, a missionary who founded the place in the 1930s and christened it Port Keats. He chose a spot above the all too aptly named Sandfly Creek. The missionaries ran Port Keats for forty years. Offering food, tobacco, medicine, iron tools, and Jesus, they pulled in people from separate areas and clans, expecting them to live in harmony while using the language of just one group: the Murrinh-Patha, whose creek and whose sandflies these are. As well as Mati Ke and Marri-Djabin, as many as five other traditional languages rang out through the settlement — I’m hedging my bets on the numbers, because in Australia even more than most other countries, the distinction between a “language” and a “dialect” is seldom clear. Murrinh-Patha became a lingua franca.

By the early 1970s the missionaries had grown old and unfashionable. After they packed their bags, Port Keats turned into Wadeye. In the dry season, an unpaved road connects the town with the rest of the Northern Territory; but in the wet, when the road is clogged by mud, soggy sand, and overflowing creeks, its two thousand people have no way out except by air. The recurrent isolation has helped keep Murrinh-Patha strong. For this is one of the very few traditional languages in Australia whose speakers have increased in number over the past generation. Lately it has spread beyond Wadeye to neighboring areas.

Simplicity is not a reason for the language’s success. Some of its complexities seem mind-numbing — unless you’re willing to take the plunge and call them mind-expanding. In its pronoun system, where English slices the world into singular and plural, Murrinh-Patha has four categories: singular, dual (with forms that vary for two males, two females, and two siblings), paucal (meaning three to about fifteen people, and again using different terms for males, females, and siblings), and plural (more than fifteen people). Each of these categories, moreover, has separate words for the first person (“we two males,” for example), the second person (“you two males”), and the third person (“those two males”). “How are you?” we say in English, no matter how many people we’re addressing and who they happen to be. Murrinh-Patha is a lot more precise. For “you,” it compels a choice among nhinhi, nankunitha, nankungitha, nanku, nankuneme, nankungime, and nanki.

To say those words properly, you’d need to move your lips and tongue into some unaccustomed positions. Along with most other Australian languages, Murrinh-Patha has a vowel system that is simpler than ours, and it lacks sibilants like s and z, as well as fricatives like f and v. But it uses several consonants that to an English speaker seem intuitively wrong: nh, dh, and rt, for example. Rt is one of four “retroflex consonants” that require you to turn the tip of the tongue back in the top of the mouth. One of the commonest sounds in Murrinh-Patha and many other Australian languages is ng — pronounced the way we do in “singer,” but often beginning a word. Strung together into sentences and conversations, what do these words sound like? In his landmark book The Languages of Australia, R.M.W. Dixon stated, “Australian languages generally have a euphonious sound, with a regular syllabic rhythm, something like Italian.”