Dying Indigenous Australian language gets its first dictionary
A Belgian professor has completed the first dictionary of the dying Indigenous Australian language of Umpithamu after 17 years of research – but not before its last two active speakers passed away.
Jean-Christophe Verstraete, a professor of linguistics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, worked closely with two sisters on a 500-page book and an audio app on which their voices were recorded for posterity.
The women were the last two active speakers of Umpithamu, one of five languages deriving from the Lama Lama people of Princess Charlotte Bay, on the eastern coast of Cape York peninsula in north-east Australia.
Verstraete said the women, for whom he gave eulogies at their funerals in 2009 and 2012, were convinced of the importance of the project but that they knew that they would most likely die before the dictionary could be completed.
Some members of the Lama Lama people still understand Umpithamu, including the two sisters’ children, but it is not used in daily conversation.
“They knew how important this was,” said Verstraete, who grew so close to the sisters that he called them amitha, meaning mother in Umpithamu. “The two women spoke it among themselves all the time and they would speak it to their children who always responded back in English.”
The Lama Lama people were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in the 1960s and forced to live on reserves, where many died without ever returning to their homelands.
The community have slowly moved back to their ancestral lands with the support of the Australian government.
Under the Cape York tenure resolution programme in Queensland, 3.7m hectares (9m acres) have been transferred to Aboriginal ownership over the past decade, including 18 existing national parks and 10 new parks, totalling 2.2m hectares (5.4m acres).
Verstraete said a combination of factors were likely to be behind the death of the language, including an Australian government policy that sought to actively discourage its use over many decades. Of about 250 different Indigenous Australian languages, there are only about a dozen in active use today.
“The dictionary is therefore a form of heritage,” Verstraete said. “There are 600 copies for the community. It is a way of passing on the language to the descendants.”
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A niece of one of the sisters, Elaine Liddy, who works as a cultural officer and Indigenous ranger for the Lama Lama people, said she had been moved by the publication of the book, entitled A Dictionary of Umpithamu, With Notes on Middle Paman.
“Myself, my siblings and the younger generations haven’t been taught our language. Our first language was English,” Liddy said. “This will help us hold on to our culture a lot more. It’s an emotional time though, because my late auntie is not here to see the book but I know she’s with us, standing beside us, guiding us.”
