Paid and presented by the International Science Council.
By Jillian Mundy.
On the continent now known as Australia, there were over 250 First Nations languages and 800 dialects spoken when the British invaded in 1788, but now only 40 languages are still spoken and just 12 are being learnt by children from birth.
“Of the approximately 7,000 documented languages globally, nearly half are considered endangered,” says Felicity Meakins, a linguist at the University of Queensland and Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
“Language loss could triple in the next 40 years,” she says in a recent Nature paper. “Without interventions to increase language transmission to younger generations, by the end of the century there could be a nearly five-fold increase in sleeping languages, with at least 1,500 languages ceasing to be spoken.”
First Nations communities in Australia are working with linguists like Meakins to document their languages by drawing together phrases and words still spoken in families, and analysing scarce historical journals and wordlists recorded by Europeans while the language was still being widely spoken.
However, archival records are not always completely reliable sources. Sometimes, miscommunications between European settlers and First Nations Australians led to inaccurate interpretations. But, with fewer and fewer speakers of Indigenous languages, unpicking these mistakes is becoming increasingly difficult