There are over seven thousand languages in the world.
Australia alone has around three hundred
distinct indigenous languages.
Of these there are only about twenty to twenty five languages
that are spoken actively by indigenous communities.
Linguists at the University of Melbourne
have been going into indigenous communities
to record and better understand these oral languages.
Indigenous languages are very very interesting
in lots of respects they show a lot of grammatical
structures and features that other languages don't share.
They give us great insight into the way their
speakers conceptualise the world around them,
the way they talk about things.
What's important to their culture and their world view.
Documenting languages which in Australia at least are
dying at a very rapid rate is crucial for understanding the
range of variability that you can get in language and
without that documentation we wouldn't know that.
One thing that we find in a lot of indigenous languages
is that they're quite unusual amongst languages of the
world in gramaticalising notions of kinship or the way
in which people are related to each other.
And kinship is very very important in indigenous culture.
There are indigenous languages that require their speakers
to be paying attention to the way in which
people are related to each other.
One of the languages Associate Professor Nordlinger
has been researching is Murrinh-patha which has almost
three thousand speakers in the Northern Territory.
This is a significant language for research as it's one of the
largest living breathing indigenous languages in Australia.
Almost every time you use a noun in Murrinh-patha
you also need to use the appropriate noun class marker
that goes along with it and what the noun class markers do
is group nouns into certain categories based on their meaning.
It's very interesting to look at the categories and the different
classes because often they reflect things that are culturally
important and if we look at the Murrinh-patha categories
we find that there's a noun class for human beings,
there's a noun class for other animates like animals and so on.
One for dangerous things which includes boomerangs,
also lightning, but we also have a noun class for spears
which would not be common in other languages of the world.
The University of Melbourne will host a new
Centre for Excellence for the Dynamics of Language which
will be housed in the School of Languages and Linguistics.
It's dedicated to unearthing new insights about language
and the way languages differ and evolve.
The centre's concerned with looking at the diversity of
language and we're interested in looking at to what extent
can languages diverge, how different can they be.
You could think of language as being the
essence of what it is to be a human.
So all human beings have language and no other species
has language anything like what human beings have.
You could almost think of each language like a different
window from which speakers look out at the world around them.
